Miles and I are on the bed, blogging. His input, so far, has consisted mostly of grinning, and getting me to hold his paw.

It's been a long, tiresome day. I seem to have spent most of it driving.

SWMBO rang me, asking about network cards for her laptop. I said I'd find a good price for her. I did. $18 for a PCMCIA card thanks to Pricewatch - the best source of low prices on computer systems, components or peripherals.

However, on checking out the laptop, I discovered that the mains power socket had broken off, inside the computer. It'd been left on the floor with the mains cable in it, and that had no doubt been kicked or caught up in other cables in that room. Great. I don't have a soldering iron in the US.

I had lunch with a friend from the station, however, this was cut very short by a phone call to tell me the burglar alarm was going off at my house. Sooo... I had to drop my friend off at the station, drive home, check the animals were OK, then drive back to the station. I got a lot done at the station, and in the process, drank a lot of coffee.

I found that ICQ now has a non-download version of ICQ called ICQ2Go. It's a java applet, which means you can ICQ on any machine you're using. I found my friend Tim was online (in the UK) and we spent a long time chatting as I worked.

Whilst I was at the station, I finally met Rodney Franks' intern, a British lass called Kate. She was doing a show on her own this evening. Rodney and I got talking about my considering a career change to broadcasting, and he offered to teach me how to 'drive the board'. The board in question controls the broadcast in the . That includes CD players, MiniDisc players, microphones, satellite feeds, and a who bunch of other stuff. Even if I never change career, it'd be nice to learn about.

After 'work', I had to grab the laptop, drive down to Galileo (in the rush hour), pick up my friend Endre, drive him home, and look at fixing the laptop. Guess what? I'd left the broken piece back at my house. Sooooo off we go again, back up to Chez Max, where we then spent two hours, doing a 10 minute job.

It turned out that despite appearances, we couldn't solder the power socket on the motherboard from the top. It had to be soldered from underneath. Deep joy. So, we opened up the laptop case, and had to completely dismantle the whole laptop, down to removing the motherboard! This involved removing every single component of the laptop, and about 4.2 million screws

Endre and I are now experts at dismantling and reassembling laptops - the most notoriously unserviceable of computers. At the end of it, the darn thing worked, and we only had one screw left over!.