Panicking

Squad strength standing at four - Aleen, Ayu, Nurul and Fafa - we're now resident in Maison KL, experiencing the usual problems with phone-lines and getting connected. Fafa particularly bemoans the situation, telling us that three days without Facebook means she'll die. We're now taking steps to access a broadband service, with Hamzah's inestimable assistance, this being the reason I'm able to post this at this ungodly hour.

I'm still recovering from an unpleasant moment undergone at the Starbucks at Times Square the other day. We'd let the kids loose on the indoor theme park and gone to the afore-mentioned coffee house to avail ourselves of their free wifi. I got out the old laptop and fired it up, only to find it didn't fire at all (or, rather, boot up, as I think the jargon goes) despite four attempts to achieve this fairly mundane state of affairs. This strongly suggested to me that there was a major problem with the hard disk thingee, and I spent the next few hours considering life without all the vital data on said disk, which I haven't, I'm afraid to say, regularly backed up.

When we got back in the evening I tried the laptop again and it did the business effortlessly, to my enormous relief. What had gone wrong, I have no idea, and the relief compensated for the anguish of those few hours of uncertainty. And I promise to be a good boy in future and do all the necessary backing-up, having been let off the hook this time.

How on earth and when in history did I ever get to be so utterly dependent on this machine?