Lessons from a life on the road 3 - don't touch Windows Vista with bargepole, at least not yet

Looks nice and has lots of good features but crashes and freezes constantly, at least in my experience. Problems arise in particular when you have several Internet Explorer windows open - this tends to make it difficult to use paid-for public wifi services which use small windows for time counters, inputting credit card details and so on. Exactly what you don't want when you're on the road without the back-up of an IT department and you have limited time to get stuff done because you're running on batteries.

I think I'll go back to one of my older XP-based laptops until Vista gets sorted out - hopefully at the first big revamp.

Lessons from a life on the road 1 - carry a second pair of driving glasses

Lost my driving glasses in the course of a weekend of mad dashing around cramming two Verdicts at opposite ends of the country into two days. I think I'm legal without them (to the extent that I understand my prescription, I think I'm only slightly short-sighted) so I didn't notice precisely when they went missing, but as I started my drive home from the northwest on Sunday evening, I decided I'd better play safe and get a new pair before going much further.

Stopped overnight at Bradford and then went to the local branch of Specsavers who really excelled themselves by fitting me in without a proper appointment and giving me a full eye exam and two nice pairs of specs for eighty quid in about two and a half hours.

Thinking about it, I'm surprised that more countries don't follow the example of Spain and, I believe, Switzerland, in requiring drivers who need spectacles to carry a second pair.