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

I was tinkering about on this machine when Andy came round to pick up his 'phone. It was a nice afternoon, so I talked him into giving me a lift round to B&Q for a new toilet seat, followed by Maplin for a PC sound deadening kit. We got back here just over an hour later, and I realised I'd missed a visit from Douglas! I phoned to apologise, then rebuilt my toilet. Because I was keeping the padded lid on my old seat, I took the lid off this seat while both it and my hands were still clean. It's a smooth oval of pine; I think I'll use it as a chopping board.

I spent much of the late afternoon / early evening cleaning up and defragging this machine to allow me to move about 1GB of space between partitions; since I doubled the RAM I needed space to double my (fixed size) swapfile too. Once I'd done that, I upgraded my copy of Photo$hop.

Then, Doctor Who was on. DALEK!!!

It was a superb episode. Highly recommended.

I also watched "CSI: NY", also excellent. I've finally finished tidying up the PC, barring the mother of all defrags for my C: drive which I just compressed. I'm off to do that now.

Hi Peet
you might find that your new chopping board gets manky quite quickly... especially if you chop/cut with the grain. Wood is quite weak and if it is pine it might not stand up to the test of being used to chop and cut things with a sharp knife. As you know, wood has a grain and it can be like cutting into fibrous material which breaks up, causing dirt and grime to stick. The best chopping boards are made from end-pieces of hard wood glued together for this reason. Also you might end up getting varnish in with your onion!

I don't know why I'm up at 3.30am talking about chopping boards.

Richard

I can live with it just working for a short while... It's that, or just throw it out now.

It's the cheapest unvarnished "Pine effect" (i.e. blocks of pine glued together then compression moulded) so the moulding process gives it a higher density than it would have otherwise.

I expect to have more fun with the (used) seat... At the moment it's lying in the bottom of the bath awaiting a good wash; when I have a few quid to spare I plan to buy a bit of mirrored plastic big enough to cover the hole from behind, then hang the whole thing above the bathroom sink.