Dr Laura James's writings

Holidays are great. I recently returned from this one.

One often spots display screens, particularly in railway stations, which have suffered from peculiar Microsoft faults and are displaying error windows on top of the information one is trying to read, or which have abandoned informing altogether and are showing just a blue screen of error codes. I was, therefore, perversely satisfied to spot this giant iPhone model with a "which WiFi network would you like?" popup window, illustrating that even OS X can fall prey to this kind of thing. Good thin clients must be the right solution here...

Our office coffee machine has had a bad week. It broke; wanting always to be rinsed, not being any happier after rinsing, and never making coffee. The repairman visited and told us off for abusing the machine. He fixed it up and left, and the coffee machine worked for about 40 minutes. Then the machine got taken away for repairs. In its place was our warning sign for when the machine is busy with other things and cannot make coffee; gradually, people added magnetic poetry. This morning the machine was back, complete with shiny new pump, and an admission from the workshop that they do not know what was wrong with it. It is still working. For now.

We spent last weekend relaxing on the Wirral and catching up with my parents. The Klimt exhibition at Tate Liverpool was impressive, although the high tech audio guides (iPod Touches) suffered a variety of failure modes on our visit, at the end of the penultimate day of the exhibition, so we had to make do without. Michael has put some pics up, of a walk at West Kirby Marine Lake and beach, attempts to find superlambananas (not as successful as we had hoped), a rather wet walk up Caldy Hill, and a tricycle we spotted at the M6 toll road services en route back to Cambridge.