I am being driven nuts by my ignorance and incompetence. Most of yesterday's oppressive November day ... one of those when you can feel the edge of the hot air pushing into the flat from outside as if a new wall had been placed inside the flat .. most of it has been frittered away in front of the computer. I listened to Mark Kermode's movie review programme on BBC Radio Five. It was no less witty, intelligent and brilliant than usual. I do enjoy it.
I read British newspapers on the web, including a highly personal appreciation of the poetry of Mick Imlah by Alan Hollinghurst in The Guardian then watched the results come in from the Victoria election. One does despair of the Australian Labor Party.
Just as the critical results were beginning to be confirmed, though, the damn Internet dropped out. I tried everything I could think of to restore the signal (still working on the lap top in the dining room). I re-booted, uninstalled and re-installed software, used a variety of system restore points, tried to re-calibrate the router, lost Mozilla Firefox at one point only to be told that the connection (sort of re-established) would mean the 8 MB exe file required to re-load my preferred browser would take a full day to download. After losing six hours of my life for no clear benefit I gave up and went to bed at about three o'clock on Sunday morning. When I rose to prepare to drive to Windsor to have brunch with spike's friends Sarah, Derren and their three-month-old son, Harry, there was still no signal.
Some hours later we drove home from Windsor. This thought came to me as I drove back through the rain. What if the router cannot send a strong enough through a breeze block partition, the dishwasher in the kitchen, the oven opposite and the wall separating the lounge room from our work room where the computer sits. When we got into the flat I asked Spike to loft the router off the floor and put it on the partition ledge. Bingo.
Dummkopf
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