Back again, off again

Hmm - week away, where to start ?

The Crazies, including the Sleepypete, Cyberkitten, Craziequeen, Bionicdwarf, RCA and the HamsterKat went to Herefordshire last week under the pretence of visiting the Hay festival. We were holed up in a cottage near Clohengar. Well recommended that cottage, although with 6 of us the single loo was in high demand.

So - here's a few numbers from the stats junkie :

2.5 books read (was in the middle of one)
4 books bought (all written before I was born I believe)
5 cds bought (technically*)

*Yes - I went to Hay and bought more cd's than books. Maybe that's a sign of Modern Times. Or it could have been that 2 of the cds were for RCA and were part of a 4 for £10 deal.

Much music listened to
Lots of tasty dinners from Craziequeen and RCA
159 tracks added to the library (I bought a couple more things after coming back)
135 miles from me
450 megabytes of internet consumed (see gremlins below)
101 chavs spotted (at least !) in Hereford
6 movies watched
1 cathedral and 1 chapel visited
1.1 castles scouted (Hay castle only counts 0.1)
1 tour guide lusted over (BD and CK have pictures)
Too many biscuits bought (I had to bring some uneaten ones back)
And a bunch of technical gremlins taken out back and shot

Fun, relaxing week. Really don't want to go back to work tomorrow. Although that last could have something to do with me taking a trip down south for the day. I got my prep for that out the way before we broke up.

Bit more detail ?

I love helping people out (sometimes whether they like it or not, which can get me into trouble) and big aspect of that this week was the internet connection ... Since I changed to an Android phone (SonyEricsson X10i mini) I've been finding new stuff it can do. This last week's new thing was being able to provide an internet connection :

Take 1 Android phone (with slightly dodgy in-the-country 3g signal)
Connect to laptop
Apply software to both (Easytether Lite)
Laptop can now speak to internet
Peek in wifi networking setup, think wotdat ?
Create "Ad-hoc wifi network"
And share the phone connection across to the wifi network
Voila - several laptops seeing the internet through my phone.

There are limits to the Easytether Lite software, in that the free version doesn't support https or a few other things. So no logging into MSN Messenger or sites that need a certain level of authentication. For everything else, it worked perfectly. It's so useful that I'm seriously considering paying the £6 to upgrade my Lite copy to a bought copy. The massive advantage of this software is that it works without breaking into the phone to activate "Root" access. Translation - no warranty worries. I highly recommend Easytether.

I did find other wibblies (Windows issues) going with the sharing though, I may well add these to the Techie blog (linked in blogger profile*) at a later date because I'll be using GeekSpeak for it.
*(it was in the links list but I removed it because I'd not added anything to it for almost a year)

I could do with another holiday now to recover from the last.