Today I did the unthinkable, and left the house without my iRiver iHP-120 (the only thing which makes the daily commute bearable.) I realised when J dropped me off at the station. The journey in was not too bad (slept most of the way) but on the way home I was sat next to a couple of posh old people who talked all the way to Redhill. Loudly. And the bloke behind me kept using his mobile. If I had the -120, with my Sony earbuds that cut out a lot of external noise, I could have either slept through all that or concentrated on my book. Instead I spent all the time being irritated.

When I reached Crawley, J and I went shopping for a TV. We ended up getting quite a good deal on a TV which is reaching the end of its product run and therefore getting reduced in price. it still came to about double what I intended to spend but we couldn’t resist it. J liked the sheer size of the 36-inch screen and I liked that fact that it was a 100Hz flatscreen with component video inputs and capable of progressive scan from the DVD.

The work Internet connection is now fully operational, but with a little surprise: finally the company have implemented blocking of undesirable sites. Someone discovered this when he couldn’t access his web-based NTL email, so we spent a bit of time guessing which sites would be blocked. Obviously all the web mail sites we could think of, like Gmail, Hotmail and Blueyonder web mail were on the list, so was E-bay and Friends Re-united. Fortunately we can still get the BBC, Amazon, Play.com, multimap, Blogger.com and Misticriver.net. Phew.