9/02/2005 09:54:00 PM|||James O'Malley|||

I've been having a very "techie" week since I last updated, or more specifically, since I spent a slightly less "techie" day with Heather the other day. My point is, I've bought a hard disk and a new digital cameras.

Yes, lady readers, it's one of those updates. I'm going to talk about gadgets.

The hard disk was part of a grand plan of mine to finally join the elite club of Linux users- I'd stopped applying deodorant in preparation, and bought myself a Babylon 5 t-shirt. The 120gb Maxtor drive was going to have Fedora put on it, so I could do everything I currently can do, but in a more fiddly way. I'd also be able to sound like an elitist, rather than a cheapskate by telling people who don't care about how wonderful free open-source software is. Trouble is, I couldn't get the sodding thing to work. More specifically: Matt couldn't get the sodding thing to work. A trip to his house, via nearly hitting a cat in a big car, confirmed that the motor inside the hard disk that turns it around isn't infact doing its job. What I essentially had was a metal brick that I'd paid forty pounds for.

Having spent a big chunk of money on a useless piece of equipment, I thought I'd dig deeper into my savings and buy a digital camera. I justified it to my parents by saying it was for University. It's dead good- 5 megapixel, 3x optical zoom, links up to a telly, takes SD cards, so is vaguely compatible with my MP3 player and memory card reader and only cost £100! You can tell it's a good camera because it's made by the giants of the digital camera world Vivitar. And yes, it's a model that isn't even acknowledged on their official website!

You're thinking "this is all well and good, James, but where's the regular hilarious anecdote?".

I left Argos, digital camera in hand, and went into good old-Wilkinsons (who happen to be my employer) to buy some batteries. Whilst standing patiently in the queue, the fire alarm suddently went off! This never happens when I'm working!

After a good two minutes of carrying on as normal, only with some added occasional mutterings of "what's that noises", and rotating our heads about to see if we could see what was causing it, the supervisors/management eventually told everyone to evacuate.

It was dead good- all the staff stood where they'd been trained to, outside Argos, whilst all the customers looked on in bewilderment. The alarm kept going and going. The only problem was, it wasn't a very effective alarm- it didn't scare you into thinking "oh crap, there might be a fire", it was slightly more slapstic. I was half expecting to have won something for being the millionth customer, or the gunge tank to activate.

Fingers crossed, the alarm won't be fixed by tommorrow, when I'm due in work, so they'll have to send us all home. Or I suppose they could force us to work, whilst listening to something louder and worse than the music. Latest reports from the aforementioned Matt suggest that it still isn't working, despite having someone out to fix it, and they did indeed force the shelfmonkeys to work during it.

I can't wait for tommorrow!

|||112569726270039385|||An Alarming Situation!