Quite apart from the travel discomfort of having to sit sandwiched between other passengers on planes there is nothing more irksome these days for me than the fact that every airport in the country seems to be under some sort of construction now, I was in Philadelphia last week and had to travel through Detroit and Minneapolis, the latter was not too bad but Detroit was dull and Philly was godawful. I have heard that Philly is a blue collar town, from a colleague, can't say that I saw that, what I did see was that it was fairly rural. Maybe it was where I was but there were a  lot of brownstone buildings (brick for the rest of us) and real tudor styles (with black painted woodwork). The place was nice enough but I could see it being very cold in the winter.

I just bought a replacement desktop for autumnthing  and decided to pull out the old powerline USB network device and leverage the built in NIC on the computer however the unit I tried to upgrade to, didnt work - ungh!  Fortunately I have a bit of a toolkit of bits and pieces so the migration of the data out of the old machine was easy enough, except that it took time and the import was easy enough too however getting to that stage needed a network connection and neither of my powerline options wanted to work so I pulled a refurbished US Robotics wifi dongle. Vista correctly identified it, but despite trying to install the driver and the control widget using the standard method I had no success. Eventually I resorted to extracting the CAB files and success, Vista autoidentfied the device and auto installed the driver - amazing from that perspective but what a pain ! In addition the rather neat little keyboard that came with machine decided it did not want to play nicely and decided to behave in a pschedelic fashion, blinking al the little LED's successively - my attempts to get a warranty replacement have resulted in a response but a redirect to HP directly - so that will be interesting....

I also recently bought a Dell laptop and it basically sits in the same position all the time on my desk however two issues have come up with it, firstly it never remembers that my LCD is above the laptop and so I have to hunt around to find it's relative position to my main display every time I boot up. Secondly, the video card doesnt run the kind of resolution that I like, so I have had to futz with the fonts and icon sizes to get everything on the screens the way I want to. The page down key kept popping off the LT also so I got online and chatted with a service rep at Dell who told me that they would send me a replacement keyboard, Having had some horrible experiences with keyboards in the past, I asked if all the necessary instructions and tools would come with it - sure it will I was told, a couple of days later the keyboard arrived sans tools and sans instructions. Again, since I am not a noob I can read a manual and do have a toolkit and so I was able to download a service manual and pull out my screwdriver kit and pop the covers and replace the keyboard - I pity any novice consumer though - this is not work for the faint hearted.