Playlist

I have added a playlist with my choice of music on it. It does NOT start automatically, but you can have a listen yourself; the player is located just below my Facebook badge in the sidebar.

Open Office

Over the past 2 weeks, I've been trialling Open Office 3.0, and I'm not too impressed. It can only accommodate 256 columns in the spreadsheet function, although it suggests far more are possible. The search-and-replace function is disappointing, not being able to replace or search for formatting codes like a paragraph-mark or tabs. Macros are a disaster, as they cannot be linked to a keyboard shortcut.

Open Office comes as a free if huge download (about 120 MB), and is the free counterpart of Microsoft Office. I'm sorely tempted to shell out the money required to get the fully functional MS Office.

Tuesday 28 October

Awoke to a nice cover of * snow * this morning, which is only melting very slowly. Temperature is suitably low, +2C / 36F. No ferries today; although the wind is only force 5 to 7, the swell generated by the northerly wind would be too much for our boat to handle. Anyone desperate to come or go can use the ferry from Tarbert to Uig (Skye). Tarbert is the main town of Harris, and is 37 miles by road from Stornoway. Don't want to think what conditions would be like on the Clisham, where the A859 rises to 600 feet / 190 metres above sealevel. On Saturday, a bus had its windscreen smashed by flying debris out there.

Internet service to outlying districts has been disrupted by Saturday's high winds, which blew down or damaged several masts. Broadband (ADSL) is supplied by radiolink in areas where the telephone exchange is not geared up to ADSL. In one island, Berneray, the service gets disrupted at certain states of the tide, when the signal is reflected off the water...

Here are a few pictures from this morning's snow.