Tools

[robinturner]

As one of my students wrote, "happiness is having all your tools with you". I've just noticed how much of my mood is affected by the ups and downs of my technical life. Getting things to work, especially if they used to be broken, is a great source of satisfaction. So far this week, I have fixed a network printer problem, mended the shower head, and finally got ICQ working so I can send SMS messages to my wife's mobile phone (something I'd been trying to do with various bits of software and web services for about a month). I also managed to get other people to fix things: the fan on our cooker, which had never worked (which means that I had to scrape globs of hardened grease of the walls with my fingernails) and the TV, which died a couple of days ago. The TV is still being repaired, but the good news is that they may also be able to fix my dodgy DVD player, so I may be able to watch Crouching tiger without blackouts n the most important fight scenes. Yay.