Relaxing Saturday

This morning I woke up early enough to join in the SatChatUK tweetup on Twitter. First time in a while I've managed that. Always sets me up well, because the regulars are a bunch of entrepreneurs and freelancers who always inspire me and tweet at the speed of light too.

By the time I'd finished trying to keep up with that on the phone, the battery was dead. I plugged it in to charge and grabbed the laptop. Three hours later that was dead too, as I'd written and posted an article of 800 words, run a video presentation and generally caught up with everything going down online.

After finishing up in the bathroom and cleaning the bath out, I headed for the kettle and a cuppa, before putting a load of laundry in and washing the dishes. I had hoped to get out in the garden but it had rained heavily overnight and into the morning so everything was dripping. Instead I settled for trying to sort out some of the eBay listings and other clutter in the conservatory.

That meant tidying up the piles of eBay listings, checking that everything was actually listed and that I could find everything easily once it sold. I had a couple of boxes out over the floor at one point looking for connector wires for things, and I also asked Mr C to help out too. The tidying spree resulted in the front room looking a whole pile better than it did 24 hours ago, at least.

Having finally returned the front room to a reasonable state and cleared some space in the conservatory, I called up one of the chiptune and SIDtune internet radio stations, where a Belgian contact does a regular broadcast. For the last few hours I have been feeding him information via Twitter while he broadcasts live. He forgot who I was at first, so it was funny to finally hear him put a name to a person, when he remembered where we had last seen each other. (It has to do with Belgian ice cream and computer geekends, as many of my contacts do!)

He's been having some problems with his ISP lately, so I went hunting for contact details for him while he carried on playing chiptunes live. He appears impressed that I was able to understand enough Flemish to translate his ISP's website to find the telephone number he needs to ring to complain. He doesn't know I speak German and didn't know that I have just recently spent long enough in Germany to still be thinking in that language. Flemish is similar enough to Dutch and German when written that I can read it even if I don't speak a word.

Meantime Mr C (and his sniffle) headed out to a gathering at the Centre for Computing History, where he planned to hand over a load of goodies he had received from the organisers of the geekend in Saarbrücken and catch up with regulars there. They were going to watch a showing of a documentary called 'From Bedrooms to Billions' which charts the rise of computer coding and gaming here in the UK. It was made as a result of a Kickstarter campaign, to which many Museum volunteers contributed, and some of the interviews were filmed at the Museum too. The guys who made it are also at the Museum tonight, having a meet and greet Q&A session. I'm not one for sitting in a darkened room watching DVDs, no matter how geeky, so I elected to stay home. The icing on the cake was when I discovered my Belgian contact was broadcasting again tonight.

He's now on his final beer , so after this one, the show will be done. I've also finished my bottle of wine and enjoyed a vegetarian supper. Mr C is not yet back, but is probably on his way home. Meantime my Belgian friend is becoming more and more annoyed with the bad interface between his old equipment and the bad ISP connection he is currently suffering. Retro gear users expect problems from their gear, given its 30-year average age, but not from the ISPs, which sometimes just don't seem up for the job.

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Image Credit » http://pixabay.com/en/cat-feline-sleeping-cat-red-cat-96659/ by LaSoni

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