Monday, July 13, 2009

(Nearly) Free Stuff

What a great title, this should attract a few visitors...

So I'm given a gift voucher at Amazon by a generous friend, and it lead me to looking around the Amazon website at their bargains and offers.

From one of Amazon's partners I found a memory upgrade for my Eee PC; I'd looked hard for this, and it seemed to be just what I wanted. Whilst there I also spied an HP inkjet all-in-one printer. These seemed reasonable in cost; just under 11 quid for the printer and 8 quid each for the two sticks of 2Gigs PC DDR6400 memory.

The problem was the RRP for the printer is 200 quid and the memory was available from ebuyer for 17 quid a stick. I knew there was something not wholly right with the printer pricing, but I never thought that the other price could be wrong too (I didn't check ebuyer until lunchtime today).

I had an email this morning telling me there had been a pricing mistake and they'd had to cancel the order. Such a shame they noticed it before shipping, eh? Now I've ordered the memory from ebuyer, and I've spent 50p per stick more for the OCZ rather than the Kingston. So that'll be here friday - I hope it has quite an impact on the computer speed.

Thursday, July 02, 2009

Discworld

So I get this job out in the wilds of Leicestershire... It's quite a hike from Nottingham, forty odd miles each way. But it's a job, and it's challenging, and it could almost be described as a 'career'.

And on top of that I get to spend an hour every morning and an hour every evening listening to some uplifting and inspirational audio. When we car share, it's normally Sir Terrence Wogan in the morning and Chris Evans in the evening. But when I make the journey by myself, I've discovered Audio Books. I started out listening to some of the Star Wars series, and A History of Britain by Simon Schama, but I've moved up in the world now.

I've reached the loft heights of Terry Pratchett's Discworld.

I've been listening to them in order, now reaching Moving Pictures. Pyramids was good - I seem to have lost my paper copy of that book and hence I'd not read it for many years. As ever, of course, Guards Guards! is my favourite Discworld novel. This may change when I reach Making Money, however, which was the last Pratchett paperback I bought, and I've only had chance to read half of it.

I think a thank-you is due to Mr Pratchett, and of course to Nigel Planer, who really does the books justice.