Last night Tim and I were taken out for dinner by Phil and Darryl from the Sonic Arts Network as a thank you for doing their Resonance FM show without much complaint and indeed without much broadcasting flair for the last year or so. They began by thrashing us at babyfoot, which gave the subsequent mouthfuls of retsina something of a bitter taste, until someone pointed out that it's actually meant to taste like that. They sell retsina by the kilo, you know. I love that. I hope that in the kitchens they have a big set of scales where they weigh the stuff out.

This morning I discovered that my ethernet hub had died. The upshot of this was that my flatmate could not access the internet, so, like a good landlord, I went to the local computer shop and asked them for a cheap ethernet hub. A gormless twonk in a blue shirt who was busy stacking printer cartridges into wobbly piles attempted to come to my aid. “A… uh… ethernet hub?” “Yes, that's right.” “Like one of these?” He pointed at an Ethernet PCI card, presumably because it had the word “ethernet” on the side. “No, I need a hub. To connect things together.” “What, like, a wireless thing?” “No, just a normal hub.” “No, I don't think we have that.” “Are you sure?” He wasn't sure, he wasn't sure of anything. He was unsure of the day of the week. He went to ask someone who knew what day of the week it was, and returned, slowly. “No, we don't have a cheap one, no.” “So you don't have a cheap one, but you don't have an expensive one, either, do you?” “Um… no. Hang on.” He went away again, and came back carrying something the size of a microwave oven. “We've got this?” “Oh, never mind,” I said, before schlepping down to PC World, where I probably should have gone in the first place.