8 July 2009 (Wednesday) - Standardisation ?

The last letter I sent into the chokey was a tad faint in parts. I thought about waiting and sending the letter once I could get a replacement ink cartridge, but then I thought that if the ink was a bit sparse, trying to work out the words might give him something to do.

To Staples to get a replacement ink cartridge. And what a caper that was. There are dozens, if not hundreds of different sorts of ink cartridge. All different enough to make them utterly unique. What’s that all about? Surely it would make sense to have some sort of standardisation whereby all printers use the same?

And the price of cartridges… I paid twenty five quid for a black ink cartridge. It’s actually cheaper to buy a new printer (they come with ink cartridges) than it is to replace both black & colour cartridges.

And then to work – where a colleague was trying to find someone with a charger which would fit her mobile phone. They too all use different chargers. There was an article on the news the other day about there being a move to standardise mobile phone chargers. That would make sense.

And then I loaded up the car for the weekend. Perhaps a tad premature, but now it’s loaded it’s one less thing to do tomorrow. We take pretty much the same stuff camping every time we go. Sometimes I have to fight and struggle to get it all into the car. Other times (like today) it all fitted into the car easily with plenty of space to spare.

I’ve seen all sorts of weather forecasts for the weekend’s kite festival. Basically they all seem to agree that Friday and Monday will be OK. They just differ on how much rain to expect on Saturday and Sunday. Perhaps I’ll drive down via Middle Farm to get some extra supplies. It’s amazing how much beer one can get through when there’s not much else going on.

“My Boy ^TM ” is looking forward to having the house to himself. Perhaps he’ll teach the fish to do more tricks…