Tuesday 12 May 2009

Well, I got home from yesterday's 13 hour trip, turned my computer on and there was a bang and a flash of white from the power supply. So ... this week will be a bit more complicated than I had envisaged.  Or so I thought until the wonderful proprietor of Mercury Computers up the road fitted a new PSU while I waited, checked everything was fine, and I was back home within the hour. It's a bit louder than the old one, but I'm not complaining - I think I was very lucky that nothing else got fried. But I guess this why I stubbornly work on PCs, rather than Macs like every other musician I know.  When they inevitably go wrong, there's bound to be some guy in a backstreet who can fix it for fifty quid, rather than having to rely on the nearest outpost of the Apple Megacorp.

I think I'm trying to read too many books at once at the moment. I've just started George Emmerson's immensely readable Social History of Scottish Dance, just finished Stuart Sutherland's Irrationality, I've been dipping into Clare Nelson's PhD thesis about creating a notion of Britishness, I'm nearly done with Scott McCloud's dazzling Understanding Comics, and I've just got the end of volume 3 of the exquisitely wonderful The Complete Peanuts by Charles Schulz: I'm only at the end of 1956 and am probably now irretrievably hooked. I should clear a bookshelf for the entire collection really ...