It's 2006 already.  It hardly seems any time since we were all worrying about the disasters that awaited us when almost everything stopped working because of the Y2K problem, but we survived that and now we are half way through the decade without a name (no, you can't call it the "noughties").

My new year resolution is to find the time to post here a bit more often, even if I am very busy.  Whether you view that as a good or a bad thing is another matter entirely.

Enjoy.

This week I am mainly...being grumpy.

I hate it when things go wrong and I can't do anything about it (as opposed to work - where I hate it when things go wrong and I can't avoid doing something about it).

My LCD monitor stopped working.  That is to say that it started worked for a few seconds and then stopping.  This is incredibly frustrating - there's all this information in my PC, but I can't actually get at it.  To be honest, I was thinking of buying a new monitor anyway (the display has been dodgy for quite a long time, but not so bad that I couldn't use it), but I'd have liked to have had a few days warning that it needed replacing.  For one thing, I could have done some comparison shopping on the Internets.

So I had to buy a new (bigger, better) screen.  Having had such a bad experience with Topcon, I decided that it had to be a bigger name, and in the end I went for Philips.  The display is fine, but I stupidly went for the one with built-in speakers - big mistake (unless you miss the tinny sound of medium wave on a transistor radio).  How can they make a good quality screen and then put such cheap speakers on it?  Rubbish.

Plus, my Broadband Router doesn't work.  Well, all the lights come on, but it won't connect to the Internet, which I feel is probably a bit of a drawback (though on the bright side, it means that no-one else can steal my bandwidth).

So I'm even more grumpy than usual. 

About ten days ago, my son was given three small goldfish (is goldfish a generic term or do they all have different names?). 

A few days later the first one died.  OK, these things happen.

So we bought two more goldfish (these ones really looked like goldfish and were bigger).  Then the second one started behaving very oddly, perked up when we put it in a separate bowl (this was intended as a temporary measure in the expectation that it was going to expire shortly), and then died shortly after being put back with the others.

Then the third fish died.  Then the fourth fish died.  Whoops.

I am beginning to suspect that there's something fundamentally wrong, but I don't know the first thing about looking after fish (that's probably obvious, I guess) so I don't know what it might be.  Is it too cold?  Not enough food?  Too much food?  Not enough oxygen (we've got hundreds of those small blue oxygen balls, so it can't be that).  Bird Flu?   

Now we have to contend with the fact that (allegedly) fish get lonely if they are on their own, but based on our past record I'm not sure we should be buying any more, and I fear that this one will be dead within a matter of days anyway.  So I'm not sure what to do for the best.

Any advice (or goldfish recipes) welcome.