Acer Aspire One

Well, I did it. I’ve made my mind up and purchased a Netbook. And as you can tell from the title, I plumped for an Acer Aspire One – Windows XP, 120GB hard drive, 1GB memory. It’s excellent and the battery and keyboard are better than I expected¹.

Only downsides found so far – no disks are provided, so there’s no way of restoring Windows  in the case of a drive failure, and there’s an annoying occasional flicker when using it off batteries².  But these are minor issues.

I bought it from Tesco – via Quidco and with my Clubcard to get maximum returns. And, like the picture, I bought the white one. I’ve also ordered a cheap mouse from Play.com and a nice leather case from Proporta.

1. in fact, I’m typing this blog entry on the Acer [↩]
2. it’s a known problem caused by the power drain [↩]

Ah, barely into October and I’m discussing Christmas already. Well, if Tesco can set up an entire aisle of Christmas snacks then, yes, I can.

We went shopping tonight and because of the aforementioned aisle we’ve started our Christmas shop. Organised, yes, and damn useful. Every week we buy a couple of items we’d normally buy for Christmas – snacks, food items to go towards the Christmas meal, drinks, Christmas tree decorations, advent calendar, etc. And by trickle buying it we hardly notice it in the budget. Oh, and you avoid the last minute rush later on with a sense of self-satisfaction¹.

Having said all that, I can’t see the point of the Mince Pies which go out of date in November. Or the Cheese Footballs (a Christmas essential) that only last until the end of December. Some things have to be bought later.

But we did come back with some After Eights and an individual Christmas Pudding (my wife doesn’t like them).

1. And smugness [↩]

According to a news article on the BBC website, Tesco are to change the wording of the “10 items or less” to make things clearer. Instead, it will now state “Up to 10 items”.

Now, is it me or is that actually even MORE confusing? Does that mean you shouldn’t use it if you have 10 items? Or does it mean up to and including 10? At least with 10 items or less this wasn’t an issue.

No, the sign is being changed because of those ever-increasing pedants who have complained about the linguistic correctness of the original.

So, something that made sense and was totally clear is now being changes for something that now isn’t quite as clear.

Well done Tesco.