OCCUPIED COUNTRY

In the Bleak Midwinter....

I've treated myself to one of these. An Acer Aspire Netbook. £150 for a 120Gb hard disk, 512Mb RAM and a Linux OS. Out of the box and onto my wireless network within minutes. It comes with a media player, OpenOffice for MS compatible word processor, spreadsheet, presentation graphics etc., photo editor/viewer, games and...well pretty much all you need for surfing on the go. I got it from ASDA a one week deal apparently, they normally retail at £230ish. So a good deal.

It will be ideal on holiday. I can use it to backup my photographs or even dump them into some online storage. I use Carbonite at the moment so that is an option. I've been wary of losing pics ever since I realised that all my snaps of Peter Green from about five years ago had disappeared along with quite a few others, probably the victim of a disk crash or, more likely an accidental loss due to a reload of an OS. I've been a lot more careful since but even so, when I'm holiday I'm always conscious of the fact that the only copy of my photographs is on the camera.

We're off to Barcelona in March and the hotel has free wi-fi so this little bundle of fun should keep me entertained when the sightseeing, eating and drinking is over.

---

Looks like the Artic weather is on its way, the snow flakes are beginning to float by my window. (16:15 Sunday 1st Feb). The forecast for next week is snow and ice brrrr. I'm just glad that the car I've got now has a decent heater so the journey to work (which will presumably take longer because of the snow) should at least be comfortable.

Later

Just back from the pub and the streets have a good 2 inches that appears to be freezing. We were hoping to be snowed in in the pub but there you go.

The day after.

I woke up this morning to a good 3 to 4 inches. Off to work with no problem until I found myself behind three buses all on the same route, all with the same route number. Result? Well congestion, and lots of it. It took ages before the vast queue of traffic could, bit by bit, overtake it. What got me was that two of them were from the same bus company – competing with each other to pick up the non-existent passengers.

---

All day I sat looking out of the window at swirling snow. At times it looked like we were in some huge snow globe. Most of the time the flakes appeared to be heading upwards. I feared that driving home could be a problem but with this being the soft, southern side of Manchester, none of it stuck. It wasn't until I got back to the frozen north that the roads became perilous.

It's now 9-o-clock on Monday evening and it's been snowing for a good five hours. Tomorrow will be fun.


Scouthead


Dovestones


Hilton Hotel (Beetham Tower) Central Manchester


Manchester Beer Festival. Random stranger.


Hilton Hotel (Beetham Tower) Central Manchester.

That's all folks!