The Econo-Inn (エコノイン京都) is a low budget hotel in the Rakuchu area of Kyoto.

The next version of my ASCOM driver for the Vixen Star Book is in development. I probably should have posted something sooner but I'll blame conversion of my website from iweb to Joomla for now.

The Umeda OS Hotel (梅田OSホテル) is convenient accommodation a short walk from JR Osaka railway station. The streets behind the hotel are full of eateries as is the underground mall that can be entered back towards JR Osaka.

You know how kids can often take their mum for granted and only realise how good it was after they move out of home? At 44 I've got a similar feeling now with my MBP in the shop for repairs.

After surviving a liberal dash of scotch and water and me putting up with the 2/@ key not working as the only apparent lasting damage, my poor laptop started abruptly shutting itself down and I knew that I would have to survive alone for a while.

I have this strange sensation during the day when I reach out to where it normally sits to check my email or surf the web only to find empty space. It's almost as bad as when my internet connection is not working and I think to myself that I might just read some email while I wait for the connection to come back. *doh*

I have just migrated from my old static web site to this Joomla based site which features a nice content management system.

I will continue to migrate further content from my old site over time.

My rescue mission was mostly successful with the exception of the 2 and @ keys which silently fail to work as well as the keyboard back lighting no longer operating. I am working around this by cut and pasting the characters when I need them but I expect that the novelty value of that will wear off fairly quickly.

After a long week of work, I was relaxing last night listening to music in iTunes and sipping the last of my Glenmorangie Quinta Ruban when disaster struck!