Satellites contain us, traffic lights control us

I should have known it was going to be one of those days when the guy who came to service our burglar alarm took loads longer than expected and I didn't get into work until about 10:15. That's okay, I still have time to get a nice big cup of coffee and check on a couple of things before my 11am meeting. Check in with a colleague about some information I had left on his desk the other day (and also about the compilation I made him the other day... he especially loved the Scott Walker). Saunter back over to my desk with a couple of minutes to spare, and promptly tip my still-nearly-full coffee over my desk.

Arse.

Not to worry. I have 2 laptops on my desk (click here to see a photo), and it seems to have missed both. I'm also clumsy like this on a regular basis, so I keep a big roll of industrial tissue paper at my desk, and do a bit of mopping up before heading off to my meeting, where I am bought a replacement coffee (excellent!).

An hour or so later, I get back to my desk and find that one of my laptops has crashed and won't load - the coffee appears to have been soaked up through the bottom into all the hard drives and the battery.

So. To cut an already-too-long anecdote short, I have spent much of the day faffing around trying to work out how my company will get my laptop fixed for me (basically I had to ring a call centre in India, who rang a guy in the Nottingham office, who rang me to get me to come and give him my laptop. I nip into the car and pop to town to go and give him my laptop. He then rings me later to tell me that I needed to ring India to get my Lotus Notes -email- ID file sent to my boss for security reasons, so my boss could send it to someone sitting near me (my boss is based somewhere else), so I could put it on a USB key and take it over to him tomorrow so he could build me a temporary laptop to use in the 6 weeks it is likely to take my company to decide it is cheaper to give me a new laptop than to repair the old one - we make the bloody things, after all).

Sigh.

On the plus side, when I popped into town to hand over my deceased laptop, I was running early, so was able to visit Selectadisc and open my 2005 CD buying account:

Thirteen Senses "The Invitation" - being widely tipped as "the next big thing" and sound very widescreen... lots of lush sounding piano with a singer sounding vaguely like the guy from Mercury Rev. You'll probably know the song "Thru the Glass" - I was surprised to discover that I did, for some reason.

Damien Rice "O" - I caved in. I like this kind of stuff, and was only thinking how I ought to give this a go when I was listening to Nick Drake and some Devendra Banhart last night. I instantly hated the annoying tv advert for this album (I hate record companies telling me how brilliant their own product is. It's always "the fantastic album", isn't it?) and have been avoiding buying the it ever since. Lord Bargain has been singing its praises but I have managed to avoid it. Well, now I guess I'll see. - I'll probably find that by now I know half the songs through some kind of process of osmosis.

On the subject of music, I've also booked up some more gigs for this year (R.E.M. are already lined up for July and I'm all poised to get some U2 action as well)

The Dears @ The Rescue Rooms on Feb 6th
Athlete @ Rock City on March 9th

Hurray !