The washing machine in my (rented) flat is becoming unusable. I've been suspecting for ages that it isn't rinsing entirely properly, but last night I had to run two and a bit washes on the same load to get it to do anything even remotely resembling a rinse. I fear a call to the landlord is in order, and that probably means I'll have to be at home at some point to take delivery of a new washing machine.

My broadband connection has been out since some time on Monday evening. I suspect that this is related to NTL's recent letter saying they were going to upgrade my bandwidth by over a factor of two and I didn't have to do anything, although the unbelievably slow phone drone I spoke to this morning outright refused to answer a complicated question like ‘have you upgraded me yet’, preferring instead to take over half an hour to schedule an engineer appointment. Which won't be until Saturday; until then I'm reduced to carrying a floppy disk between work and home containing any data I want to have available on my home machine.

Annoyingly, I had an NTL engineer come round last week, and I did ask him – while he was around anyway – whether my rather old cable modem would be able to cope with the upgraded service. He phoned a friend and said yes. I fear he is not going to be a millionaire.