h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I was promised that I would get the computer case I bought some six weeks ago delivered this lunchtime. By 4:15 it still hadn't arrived, so I went round to the shop and stayed there till 5pm, whereupon I got Amit to drive me round to Maplin and buy me a case, then drive it back to my house. It's not the colour I paid for, but at this point, frankly, I really don't care. It's the right size, and that's all that matters.

I've built pretty much all of the machine into it tonight. (Athlon 2400+, 512MB DRAM, 20GB HDD) I need to connect the front panel buttons and lights, then power everything up and test it. I'll leave that till tomorrow. It'll probably end up as a Linux box, since I just need a legal set of "Office" applications to put in the COGS office.

I watched "Charlie's Angels" while I built it, then watched the rerun of "The Bill" on ITV3. About ten minutes into it, the picture vanished and I got a "This channel is scrambled" message accompanied by intermittent deafening "chirp"s from my headphones. I powered my PVR down, waited two minutes then powered it up again. It wouldn't power up.

I fired up the DVB tuner in my main PC (luckily, I reinstalled it at the last big upgrade! ) and watched the rest of The Bill, having only missed about five minutes in total. (Bloody typical - I tuned back in and ten seconds or so later they went to an ad break. )

Fundamentally, the Humax is dead, but should still be under its 2-year warranty. Just.

The real downside of this is the programmes I still have on the HDD. Doug will be particularly disappointed that Doctor Who and the Dalek are still on there; I was waiting till this Saturday's episode before burning both onto one DVD. I also missed the first ten minutes of the "Goebels" documentary I was going to tape for him, or rather, I forgot that I hadn't configured the recorder, and it ran out of space on drive C about five minutes into it, and it took me a further five minutes to point the recordings onto drive D:... If it's repeated, I'll get it all.

I need to find some proof of purchase; paperwork is unlikely to surface unless I put it in the Humax box, so I'm searching for my original confirmation email.

Oh, and I almost forgot... I'm trying out Google's "Web Accellerator". I trust them; they might read my private data, but only to serve up ads that I ignore anyway... So far, it claims that, since about lunchtime, it claims to have saved me "8.7 minutes". That's pretty insignificant, but then again I've been spending my time on hootoo and Mustardland today; perhaps if I do some more "conventional" surfing it'll be wore useful.

(wore = more )