Category: Life

Well, I did it. I’ve made my mind up and purchased a Netbook. And as you can tell from the title, I plumped for an Acer Aspire One – Windows XP, 120GB hard drive, 1GB memory. It’s excellent and the battery and keyboard are better than I expected (in fact, I’m typing this blog entry on the Acer).

Only downsides found so far – no disks are provided, so there’s no way of restoring Windows  in the case of a drive failure, and there’s an annoying occasional flicker when using it off batteries (it’s a known problem caused by the power drain). But these are minor issues.

I bought it from Tesco – via Quidco and with my Clubcard to get maximum returns. And, like the picture, I bought the white one. I’ve also ordered a cheap mouse from Play.com and a nice leather case from Proporta.

An apt description of my drive to work. Thankfully it was early and traffic was light. I took my time and drove carefully. The snow outside is a lot, lot worse than at the beginning of the week and it’s continuing to come down.

Unfortunately, it was all let down by selfish drivers. On icy roads the last thing you want is for other drivers to not indicate properly, causing you to have to brake unnecessarily. Or to tail-gate you.

You’d also expect other drivers to take the weather into account with regard to how they react to other drivers on the road. So, when I was coming down a hill about to take a tight turn onto a junction, you’d expect other drivers to expect that manoeuvre to potentially go a bit, erm, wrong. Which it did. My back end slid out and I did a nice wide arc towards the junction. So why in the name of blither did the person coming up that road towards the junction not hold back? Why did he drive right up to the junction, right in my way? Thankfully I gained control and missed him. But even my mid-slide gesture for him to get out of the way was met with blank looks. Unbelievable.

Anyway, at work in one piece. The snow has now stopped and it’s beginning to thaw already. Apparently warm rain is due.

And during all of this, the Vodafone and Orange mobile networks have been flaky (probably due to the number of texts and phone calls). O2 appeared fine, however.

Growing up I loved fish finger sandwiches. Hmmm. In fact, if I was given a plate of fish fingers, chips and beans most of it would end up between slices of bread.

After mentioning this last weekend my wife bought some fish fingers so that I could indulge once again. This was something I was looking forward to.

Some fresh white bread and some Birds Eye fish fingers were assembled. The fish fingers can be grilled or oven cooked… odd, I remember them always being fried. Anyway, I grilled them which didn’t go too well. They stuck to the grill pan and burnt a little. None-the-less I had some cooked fish fingers and some buttered bread.

It’s such a shame then that the result was disappointment.

What have Birds Eye done?The fish fingers were tasteless.

This is probably done to the drive these days to force food into being healthier. Gone is the salt and probably anything else that could be – if eaten in enough quantities – bad for you. Also gone is the taste.

Maybe the cooking method is another reason – even Wikipedia refers to them being fried.

Maybe it’s the fish. I’m sure it used to be Cod (hardly the most taste-packed of fish in the first place) but now it’s Alaska Pollock, described as “mild in flavour”.

Whatever reason, it makes you realise why they’re not as popular these days and kids prefer burgers instead. It’s such a shame (spaghetti hoops in tomato sauce went much the same way).