I've been laid low with a cold for the last 36 hours or so, and it has to be said that I do take colds rather badly. Felt fit as a cello (like a fiddle, only fatter) when I got into work yesterday, but by the end of the day was streaming out of all facial orifices bar my ears. Boo.

Never mind. I was kindly allowed to take the day off work to recuperate, and the day has been spent feeling comprehensively sorry for myself, listening to Radio 4, soaking my way through a superhuman-sized box of Kleenex Balsam (because I'm worth it), and being on the web whenever my eyes cleared sufficiently to allow me to squint at the screen.



You see that unassuming icon second from the left? That means I have access to a wireless network. And not just any old wireless network, oh no. The young lady and I are now fully paid-up members of the 21st century, boasting, as our house does, 512k broadband access. It's astonishing. I realise I sound like one of those poor saps for whom the iPod is a new discovery ("All my music? But it's tiny"), but it just revolutionises the way you use the web.

For starters, we can both be on at the same time, though as Jenny's AirPort Extreme card isn't being delivered until tomorrow, she is currently tethered to our ADSL modem/router by an Ethernet cable. Phone calls can come through, access doesn't have to drop after 2 hours, and it's blindingly fast compared to 56k dial-up. Plus, I had internet access in my sickbed today.

Now that I appear to have shrugged off the worst of the cold, though, I'm off to make a half-heated attempt to catch up on the work I missed today. Jenny is thinking kindly of her bed, I think. Well the poor little mite does have to get up at 5:50am.