This wire here?

I spent most of Saturday hunting a neutral wire fault in the downstairs lighting circuit with my Dad. It was the reason the side lighting in our living room wasn't working and it turned out it was the "spare" wire we found when replacing the ceiling rose in the same room. At least is was helpfully wrapped in masking tape and labelled with what we thought the wire was at the time. I'm becoming resigned to the fact I'll never know quite as much as my Dad about how houses are built, plumbed and wired. I can only hope my skills with media-servers, networking and digital living will become more relevant over the next few years.

The wire hunting wasn't helped by my lower back giving me pain over the weekend. Standing up from sitting currently has me hunched like an old man while emitting various grunts and wheezes. I'm not sure what I've done to aggravate it except maybe a lot of intensive sitting at work. It's mostly fine when I'm walking although I think I might be unconsciously over-correcting which might be putting more strain on it that is good for it. I have started tackling the problem with ibuprofen (better living through chemistry!) and trying to keep mobile.

With that in mind we wandered into town on Sunday to visit DRM central to investigate replacements for Fliss' ailing MacBook Pro. Fliss has been pondering the difference between a new laptop or maybe a Windows gaming rig. After giving the local Genius a hard time with lots of questions ("the most informed customer I've had" apparently) we did eventually decide on going for a new Apple. We dropped a size of screen (from 17" to 15") as it does make it a lot more portable and only went for mid-range CPU (because really how much can you tax 4 2.53Ghz cores these days?). For Window's gaming we are going to set up boot camp although I have left Fliss to purchase the Windows PC. I'll also see if we can get an Ubuntu release on there so she can compare the two Mac's on the same hardware ;-)