The good thing about bad weeks is that they always end, and then more often then not the following week is an improvement. I had Monday off as the Handley-bug finally caught up with me, but now all three of us seem to be back up and fighting fit (well, nearly), and absolutely gagging for our Holiday.

Was down in London over the weekend for my Mum’s 60th birthday- isn’t it funny how certain numbers are meaningful almost entirely due to the fact we have ten digits on our hands? If we counted in binary, we’d probably decide 64 was a big birthday (which indeed it would be; the first one needing a new digit since 32). Mind you, who’d like turning 1000000? I guess the point is partly that 60 is retirement age for ladies.

One thing that was quite funny was a family friend was there who goes a long way back, and who’s daughter I used to play with (apparantly) when I was a sprog. “Oh yes, she’s 31 now”. “Thirty-one,” think I? “Goodness that’s old for a friend I knew when I was young”. Then I remember that I’m actually 31 too!

But is was lovely to see my mum and the rest of the family, and also lovely to see various people who I haven’t seen for – probably – decades, certainly a decade. Lots of my childhood friends are married with kids now, which freaked me out until it happened to me too…

On a completely different note, I now claim a readership of about 6. My Mum and one of my sisters admitted to reading this website, as did one of my ex-students. Add that to the chap at work who I caught out, and I course I read it.. H’mm, well, ok so that’s only 5 – but still 4 more than I’d put money on (and I concede the fairly loose definition of readership too). While we’re on the subject, this is also my first entry ever via a web interface, as opposed to manually running an SQL query to make an entry! (hey, it worked for me)

Final excitement – my Dlink died (or so I thought), so replaced it with a Buffalo (30 quid from ebuyer; can’t argue with that), only to discover it exhibiting exactly the same problem. Sigh. My diagnosis of the Dlink was that it had overheated and stuffed some memory, but it doesn’t seem very likely, somehow, that both would fail in exactly the new way (especially when one is new out the box). New diagnosis is that the NTL cable modem is stuffing up the routing table, although I haven’t thought too much about how this is happening (the paranoid part of me wonders if it’s deliberate because NTL don’t like you having more than one computer hanging off broadband). I’ve moved only a new subnet to see if this helps matters at all.