More gripes

Moan(s) of the day

Fresh from my victory with lastminute.com, Moan of the day was going to be about my experience with laptop computers and with the electrical chain (Darty) from whom I so unwisely bought them. But that can wait a day or two.

Before moving on, has anyone encountered the problem that is bugging me right now, which is entering text online (reader feedback, blog comments etc) and finding that the text stops adding at the end, and inserts itself in the middle of previous sentences ?

Come to think of it, it's not just online. I had the problem yesterday when using Microsoft word offline.

This laptop was recently upgraded from 256 to 512MB, so lack of physical RAM should not be the problem. The hard drive was defragged this morning, but the problem still there.

It should not be a virus if McAfee is doing its job. I also occasionally run free checks for tracking software with Lava etc, but the definitions are now way out of date.

Any ideas as to what could be causing the problem ? Overheating ?

Change of subject: Andrew Marr is one of my favourite TV journalists. Don't you just love that engaging, mischievous, gently ribbing style of his? He's taken potshots today at a number of things in his Telegraph column, including one of my own bêtes noirs, namely those cattle markets that we call airports.

I submitted the following, perhaps too quickly, grammatical errors and all :

"My pet hate is being moved from the so-called final departure lounge to a final departure corridor, without seats, and usually without ventilation, where one stands jammed together for half an hour or more watching the incoming flight arrive and slowly disorge its passengers.

Ryanair did this to us at Marseille recently, en route to Madrid, despite ours being the last flight out that evening, leaving behind us a deserted departure lounge.

One of us was also given a so-called priority boarding pass, as a reward for carrying hand baggage only, for which others had to pay - some £3 as I recall- but the value of which is somewhat questionable or even negated when a bus arrives to take one to the aircraft, onto which everyone swarms aboard, with or without those passes.

Do airline and airport executives ever join with hoi polloi to experience the sheer misery of what they have inflicted upon us in the name of cost-effective crowd control ?"