while I'm waiting for the flickr scraper to do its job

[waider]

One of the things I did this weekend that I've been meaning to do for a long time is to replace the single-socket power outlet in the kitchen with a dual-socket so that I can stop hanging the kettle and the coffee maker off one of those nasty cube-ish expanders. Previous attempts to unplug the cube were hampered somewhat by its not wanting to come out of the socket, and I assumed some cruft or other had caused it to get jammed. So today I popped the relevant circuit breaker (discovering, in the process, that the annotation on the circuit board that reads, "...& one socket in front room" actually means "both sockets bracketing the fireplace, one of which your webserver is plugged into") and went at the kitchen socket with a screwdriver.

And discovered, in the process, that the previously-mentioned incident in which certain older people of my acquaintance fried both my toaster and a PCMCIA card which happened to be my LAN's link to the Intarweb had, in the process, welded the cube expander's Neutral pin to the socket. I am now even more in awe of the raw destructive power of said incident.

Anyway, the socket replacement is accomplished. I briefly thought I'd screwed the pooch when I switched on the kettle and no light came on. Silly me, the kettle doesn't have a flippin' light. I'd imagined one, apparently.