At lunchtime I went to World of Computers and picked up a scanner, which I've been meaning to buy one of for some time and which I ordered at the weekend. When I got it home this evening I found that its USB cable was about four feet too short to reach from the only free surface in the study to the computer I needed to connect it to, so I'll have to go back and get an extension cable tomorrow.

Also this evening I managed, thanks to helpful advice from Ian, to debug the mysterious software crashes I'd recently been seeing on my main home machine. That caused me great relief and a sense of triumph for about five minutes. Unfortunately, the next thing that happened was that an incredibly loud, sharp and nearby crack of thunder and flash of lightning made me jump out of my seat, and when I settled down again I discovered that the machine whose software I'd just fixed had turned itself off and wouldn't turn on again. It just sits there with its power light glowing at half brightness, and does nothing else no matter how often I press the On button. For good measure, the same lightning strike also fried something in NTL's cable network or possibly my cable modem, because the latter is blinking some very unhappy-looking lights at me and not providing me with network connectivity. I'm having to type this from the Gallery.

So, that's two counts of nearly getting something working in one day. I'd probably better not go near another computer until tomorrow.