so my old laptop got a knock in the trip to portugal and is in for data recovery* at the moment.
*i.e. it's too old to cost effectively repair it, so grab what you can from the hard drive and sell it off for parts
the aluminium lining to this cloud is that i have been saving up for the past few months to buy a new laptop. immediately before we flew to portugal, i was engaged in my virgin eBay auction to purchase said new laptop. while the actual process of buying a laptop from eBay successfully was a bit of a drama**, i am now the owner of one of these:

which is a 15.2" Powerbook. i am very happy with it.
**i won the first auction, paid, got refunded, lost faith in the seller and bid on a second auction. first seller comes back to life and offers to re-sell, just as i win the second auction. refuse first seller and confirm second seller. transfer money to second seller and get refunded again. second seller requests funds are transferred to a suspected third party email address, which i do. second seller then goes incommunicado for a week. thinking i have run into a rogue seller, i slope back to bristol from my not-so-relaxing-after-all-holiday to find new laptop on my desk at work as requested. i smile and praise god.