Infected by HP?

All this talk by people getting the Harry Potter book, reading it, etc. is starting to make me want to read it. Kind of silly, in a way.

I wonder whether the torrent(s?) floating around is really the book? Has anyone read both?

Our DSL router is doing yo-yo impressions

So my new computer is up and running since the monitor arrived yesterday (interestingly, perhaps, the two monitors and The Sims 2 arrived in three separate deliveries — I imagine all the HPDH books really messed up the Post Office's schedule yesterday).

However, the Internet connection has been going down at irregular intervals of around 15 minutes since last afternoon, and when I left the computer on overnight, apparently not much happened after I went to bed: it went down and didn't come back up by itself.

Since the telephone was also affected (connections sometimes cut off during the middle of talking with Stella), I suspect the router.

It hasn't acted like this before, and I'm wondering whether Azureus is the culprit, which has been downloading ISOs of Slackware, Knoppix, and Debian yesterday afternoon. (After rebooting at one point for unrelated reasons, the Internet did seem a bit more stable until I restarted Azureus, which would support that connection.)

Still, shouldn't a DSL router be able to handle a couple of hundred connections, 7 Mbps throughput, and port forwarding of one TCP and one UDP port to a connected computer? Hm.

(no subject)

What did they do to Acrobat Adobe Reader?

They used to have a little icon at the bottom of the screen that would let you view two pages side-by-side, but I can't find it now. And several of the controls that used to be at the bottom are now at the top.

Why do people have to keep changing UIs after users have got used to the old one.

How non-U I am

At some point not too long ago (couple of years, perhaps), I had come across pudding as a generic term for something you eat after the main course of a meal, even if it's not specifically what I'd call pudding.

I'd also heard that it was one of the U/non-U shibboleths but assumed that it was on the non-U side, so when I looked it up in Wikipedia just now and got pointed towards the entry on dessert, I was surprised to read that The word dessert is most commonly used for this course in U.S., Canada, Australia, and Ireland, while sweet, pudding or afters would be more typical terms in the UK and some other Commonwealth countries. According to Debrett's, pudding is the proper term, dessert is only to be used if the course consists of fruit, and sweet is colloquial. This, of course, reflects the upper-class/upper-middle-class usage. More commonly, the words simply form a class shibboleth; pudding being the upper-class and upper-middle-class word to use for sweet food served after the main course, sweet, afters and dessert being considered non-U. However, dessert is considered slightly better than the other two, owing to many young people, whose parents say pudding, acquiring the word from American media.

Whodathunkit. The word I'd always heard was dessert. But then, I never did think I was upper-class.

On the other hand, I don't call the evening meal tea, which I thought was also one of those U/non-U shibboleth things (though the Wikipedia article on the meal doesn't mention that). In fact, I've never heard the evening meal called tea before; I've only read about its use, but haven't come across it myself, as far as I can remember. Instead, we called the evening meal supper, at least if it was (as was often the case) not a cooked meal but something along the lines of sandwiches.