It must be Monday

A mere three hours into the working week and already so many things have gone wrong:

• The taxman wants £5k more than I think I owe him
• Sage crashed on me this morning meaning one set of company accounts is now totally screwed up
• Another week has passed without a [long overdue] payment from one particular customer who obviously won't mind when their server goes offline very soon now ;-)
• An unusual power supply that I desperately need, purchased on eBay last week under the impression that it was shipping from within the UK on 24 hour service, turns out to be coming from China in 2-4 weeks
• The new Eagles album that we've only been waiting 28 years for is, basically, pants
• My 80Gb iPod is full up and I need a bigger one :-(
• The Dell laptop that cost me £1400 less than two months ago has gone wrong for the second time. What a bloody waste of money that thing is turning out to be

Still, never mind eh? As they say, things can only get better and given several of my 'issues' are purely financial, they're not really worth worrying about. It's a funny thing though - money problems are by far the easiest to solve (find some...) but invariably the most distractive (destructive?) and irritating of all. My philosophy so far as cash is concerned comes courtesy of Sid James circa 1958 - "if you've got it, spend it and if you ain't got it, get it." Guess I'd better knuckle down and do the 'get' part again for a while, for the piggy bank is looking decidedly hungry at the moment.

Oh yes, and if you were one of the many who tried and more importantly remain amongst the few still running Vista (hawk... spit...) as your OS of choice you'll find, sooner or later, your DVD drive will cease to function. It's happened, without fail, on at least one machine at every single client site that's got it. It's an easy fix -- http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929461, but boy what a PITA. Service Pack 1 is due soon and hopefully that'll make things a bit more stable but I'll betcha it's still going to remain an already outdated, buggy, slow, insecure piece of bloatware. How I long for the halcyon days of Windows 2000 running against Netware servers... things just seemed to work then! I've been unfortunate enough to work on about 20 machines now running various incarnations of said retail packaged software shit and the only time I've seen one come *close* to XP performance has been on a Core2Duo running at 2.4Ghz with 4Gb of RAM, a 10k SCSI hard disk and 1Gb USB memory stick for ReadyBoost. Crap. Unmitigated, total, complete crap.

So, one of those days when I feel I either need to get back on the SSRI's or off the wagon then and given I'm all out of citalopram or fluoxetine, I guess I'll be having a pint later on. Cheers!