7904/20845
Because I stepped on a laptop at the weekend I had to go to Northampton. Funny how the world works out. I hope Joey from Bread will make a film about how different my life is as a result of that. He can call it "Stepped on Laptop" and then show the two different time streams that result from having stepped on it and having not stepped on it. On the not stepped on one I would have stayed at home and probably done very little, but on the stepped on one I drove to Northampton. And back.
My life will have changed as a result as will the lives of the people I interacted with in Northampton and all future events will now be slightly soiled by this action. All Joey from Bread has to do is put in a lot of people drinking Grolsch and we have a fabulous movie.
It turned out that the repair to the screen would be over £700 and so I elected to use the broken laptop as a desktop and buy a new laptop for being out and about in the world with. As expected it's nice to have a new laptop (even with all the fiddliness of remembering passwords and trying to get stuff set up properly on it). In an effort to get rid of junk from my house I also took in four old laptops for recycling. All of these machines would once have been as exciting to me as this new one, but now, just rubbish. The ones from maybe 15 and 17 years ago were unbelievably huge and heavy. My new one ridiculously light (and breakable, but I still didn't take out Apple Care- I might though).
I thought I couldn't come to Northampton without sampling some of their culture, so I had a coffee at a nice little cafe called Starbucks (presumably run by a Battlestar Gallactica fan) and then drove home again. I listened to some of the Olympics on the radio just to see if I could get into it. It was a BMX competition, which I am not sure they had in the original Olympics - what next Spacehopper competitions?- but I am all for change. I don't know if this is really a sport that translates to radio though. People trying to describe bike stunts in real time, when there's a new one every three seconds doesn't really paint a picture, especially when the listener has only the most basic knowledge of a sport. Maybe it's true to an extent of all sport, but I think BMX might be stretching the medium too far. I sensed that the commentators weren't entirely on top of the sport either (and why should they be?). I also got to listen to men shooting at something and then one of them winning by hitting the most things. It surely can't be long until self-playing snooker is recognised by the Olympics.
