Snow again

The whole of the UK has had an amber alert for moderately heavy snowfall today and over the weekend, so I took the tube in to work. It started snowing very gently as I got in, and has been snowing lightly but persistently all morning, and settling to some extent. Still not very deep, but if this keeps up there may be a few inches by the end of the day. Our playground at work is surfaced with astroturf, a very good insulator, so the snow hasn't melted at all, and the kids had a big snowball fight during the morning break.

So my weekend plans have gone from "get some exercise" to "sloth and warmth" - I've got several unplayed DVDs and lots of writing to do so hopefully I won't get bored...

later We've just been told that the school will be closing when the least lesson ends at 3.30, no after-school activities, and staff to push off ASAP once the kids are gone. I'm really heartbroken...

and later left work at 3.45, got home a little after 4 - about as good as I ever get with public transport. Now to veg out for the next little while...

iBook reborn

I just treated my old iBook G4 to its third keyboard - like the first one (previous owner one autopope of this parish, who tends to write a lot) the letters were worn away sufficiently to annoy me, since I'm not a touch typist. Only it took Charlie a year or so and me six or seven.

I'm gloating slightly about this because I got the replacement keyboard rather cheaply. I'd been watching it on eBay for a week and saw there was only one bid (the starting price of 99p plus P&P), I entered £15 - and got it for £1.04 plus P&P. Somehow I suspect the first bidder wasn't very serious about wanting it, since he can have only bid a quid...

Installation went pretty well and all of the keys work, which is a good start. But given that it took me a month to find one that wasn't listed at £40 or more I suspect that the next time I want to replace it I may need to replace the computer too, which is a silly reason to replace something that still works well.

later And the vendor has just refunded most of the £8 postage since it was a lot cheaper than he expected, so I've ended up getting this for about £3! I've done this a couple of times when I've got postage badly wrong, but never that big a change. I can only assume that he got the iBook very cheaply, or made a good profit on the other bits - I noticed the Airport Extreme WiFi card he was also selling was at £40 well before the end of the auction, so that's probably the answer.