Warning, a mostly technical and probably highly boring post (but there are a couple of pictures at the end)

nd… it’s not working.  The last of the computer parts arrived yesterday, so we (ok, mostly MrPloppy, with me looking over his shoulder going “ooh, what’s that wire for?” and occasionally actually being useful when my smaller hands could fit into tight corners his couldn’t reach) spent the afternoon putting it together.  And the build went really well – no major hiccups, no bruises to fingers or egos, everything just worked.  By last night we’d even got as far as installing Windows, which seemed to be working fine… until MrPloppy discovered it had installed to the wrong drive.
See, one of the shiny new things about this computer is that as well as a HUGE hard drive (1 Terrabyte!!!  It feels like only yesterday that a Gigabyte seemed excessively big, and suddenly a whole order of magnitude bigger is just standard) it’s got a solid state drive (SSD), which is kind of like a hard drive, except instead of having a rotating disk like a normal hard drive it’s solid state (yeah, you might have been clued in to that by the name) – in other words, it works kind of like a giant version of a USB stick.  And the big reason for having an SSD is that because they don’t have to spin up, they load data much faster than a traditional drive, so the idea is you put your operating system and all your main software on there and everything works so much faster.  Then you can use your hard drive for just storage and the less important software.
Except we’d got it wrong, and Windows was on the hard drive.  And what should have been a simple operation of reformatting the disks and starting again has taken most of the day, and it’s still not working properly.  We’ve got Windows installed on the SSD where it should be now, but for some weird reason it’s not always recognising the drive properly, and every so often it’s randomly deciding it wants to boot from the hard drive instead, but there’s nothing there for it to boot from, so it has a little sulk and refuses to work.  So there has been much tearing of hair and gnashing of teeth, and mucking around with the BIOS, and opening up the case to switch various ports around (lest you think I know what I’m talking about here, it’s MrPloppy who’s been doing all this, while I sit there giving helpful(-ish) suggestions and occasionally unplugging and plugging things in those aforementioned tight corners).
So, I have a shiny new computer sitting on my desk, which looks very nice but doesn’t actually work.  Which is very frustrating!  So instead of writing this post from my nice new computer as I’d hoped, I’m back on the old laptop 🙁  Oh well, at least I’ve got all my bookmarks on here still…

We did take a break from swearing at the computer for a while, at least – it’s been a gorgeous day, so we went for a walk through the park to a cafe for hot chocolates.  I even managed to release a few books along the way, something I haven’t done for ages.
The park was beautiful in that bare late-winter sort of way:

And we came across an unexpected sight – a bunch of knights practising their sword fighting:
Very strange!