When I buy something expensive, I always forget to account for the auxiliary purchases that invariably follow it.

As of last week I have a shiny new iMac. Unfortunately, it's currently forced to sit on a small and rather wobbly ornamental coffee table that came with the house, so I need to buy a proper desk for it as a matter of moderate urgency. Also the mouse is already starting to annoy me, so another trackball for my collection seems in order. And I'm going to need another 4-way mains adapter in short order as well. I ought to try harder to anticipate this kind of thing and factor it into the total cost of ownership.

In other news, hmm, well. Over the weekend I looked up the pictures from the Huygens probe landing on Titan. It seemed very exciting; there's a certain thrill to seeing the first real pictures taken on an alien world with a real camera (there was with the Mars rovers too), particularly when it's a world I almost feel I know already thanks to novels like Imperial Earth. But when I actually saw the pictures, they were a terrible disappointment somehow; they just looked like a flat plain with rocks on it, and I'm sure anyone could have knocked up something similar in the Gimp if they'd wanted to. The Mars pictures gave much more of a feel of really being on a different planet; perhaps this is just a function of their higher resolution and better colour depth.

Also I was particularly depressed to find this morning that when I googled for ‘Titan’, the first link I got back was ‘The Titan Corporation: Homeland Security and War on Terrorism’, and Cassini-Huygens was only the fourth hit. Sigh.