Beige update

For anyone concerned about my vitamin intake on the beige diet, I have been studying my charts and have bought some B1 supplements. I may take the odd smallish dose of extra Vitamin C, but otherwise I'm in no danger of scurvy!

Also just came across this great site for analysing the nutrient content of specific foods:

http://www.nutritiondata.com/

I just hugged a call centre worker

I called 3 to see what it would take to escape the shackles of my $49/per month contract for 4GB I never use (I only signed up for 1GB). I figured that I had reached the point where it might be cheaper to pay out the rest of the contract and sign on at a lower rate.

And lo and behold, the nice people on the phone switched me over to the $29/month (2 GB) plan immediately. Instant $20/month saving. I must have passed some important threshold, for I've certainly tried to do this before. *And* they had funky hold music without any annoying voices lying about the significance of my communication to their organisation.

I still have a deeply shoddy connection at home :-( I can't see what's chewing up bandwidth or CPU or RAM. My temp files are under control. I don't need to defrag. I've upgraded my modem software to the latest (which seemed to help a bit). I have deep suspicions about the timing of the latest batch of Windows updates; there's a possibility that they're responsible in some way.

Any ideas, collective brain?

Productivity Hazards

I have the new poster for Contact - Swancon 2009 up on my office wall. It's just the lo-res proof version, printed on the office colour laser and thus a bit too far into the pink, but Oh My Lord it's a thing of beauty and terribly distracting.

Open mouth, change feet

I dedicate this post to emma_in_oz. I tried.

I am damp after a 20 minute wait for a bus, squeezed on a peak hour train. I'm feeling tired and headachy after a big day, vaguely nauseous after my Monday-morning coffee, and thinking seriously about my bladder. I'm clutching enough stuff to put a bag lady to shame, and my feet hurt. At eye level I suddenly notice a belly. A pregnant woman, standing on a crowded train right in front of me?

( Read more... )

Silk and steel

Fresh from another excellent episode of Top Gear I feel the urge to report that after its latest surgery the Catmobile's engine runs with renewed strength and fluid beauty. Go injector service!

Pity about the uneven ride I suspect is probably due to the crumbly tyres. I'm gentle on my brakes so I've plenty of tread, but I'm pretty sure that the little crackly bits on the oldest and cheapest are indicative of something bad*. Mind you, I've been planning to replace at least one of them for... er... a year? All four tyres are different ages too.

(*) You can tell I'm a professional technical writer, eh?