Smooth, rough, smooth, rough...

5th & 6th October

It's been a mixed couple of days, mostly relaxed as we wind down into winter mode, but with some frustrations as well as minor excitements.

To begin at the end, the minor excitements involve the steady arrival of the goodies we've ordered; the latest being the Mac Mini itself. That's part of the frustration, too, as the monitor has not yet appeared. Furthermore, I realised on inspecting the manual for the Mac that in order to pair my wireless keyboard and mouse to it, I need wired stuff to set it up. Since Bluetooth connections can misbehave even in the Macintosh world, it seemed like a good idea to order a basic Kensington keyboard, rather than just borrow one for the job.

After the Mini is installed, Sheila will continue to use the iBook for her own purposes, and she has a preference for using a trackball over a mouse or track pad. This gave me an excuse to order my favourite Kensington Orbit trackball as well.

The problem with the monitor is that we are going for one with a toughened glass face, since it will be swinging about on a cantilever arm, and these are ordered in specially by the supplier, Misco.

Whilst on the topic of the new toys, we are pleased with the Bluetooth speaker phone as an alternate to an earpiece. It lets both of us hear the conversation at the other end, it solves the problem that Sheila's left ear is a bit deaf, as is my right, and it's proving to be more stable than the Motorola earpiece.

More mundanely, like some other bloggers, we've switched our clothing round, putting away the shorts and t-shirts and getting out the long sleeved tops and guernseys. The puffa jackets will stay in their own compression sacks for a bit longer.

The other high spot (positives before negatives always) is that I've now passed 50,000 hits across the two blogs and the website combined, and my daily average has gone over a hundred hits again. As I've said before, this is small beer compared to many other blogs, but it's nice to know that the dedicated band out there reading these witterings isn't getting any smaller.

It's also a bit of a problem for Tim Tyler, who is the cause of the major frustration of this week. We were told today that the delivery for Sanity Again's shell has slipped back further, and it now seems unlikely that we shall see it before the beginning of November. Peter Mason at Braidbar is no more pleased than we are; obviously it affects his work planning and indeed his cash flow, since the stage payments are linked to the arrival of the shell. He hopes to pull back a couple of weeks during the build process so that the delivery of the boat for her shakedown cruise is now likely to be mid February rather than the end of January.

Tim is supposed to be ringing us to indicate what compensation he can offer for being a full month late. He hasn't done so yet, and it will be interesting to see if he does so before I do a Building Sanity Again post tomorrow. If he hasn't, its title is likely to be Tim Tyler lets us down and we shall see what that does to the Google results for his name!