My hostess and I are currently minding her piano-teacher’s younger two boys while the teacher is on a course and her husband has taken the oldest boy sailing.

The boys we’re minding are happily playing with plastic spiders so I started on the sub-task of trying to sort the older boy’s PC. (It’s in a bad way and beyond my waning powers.) I pulled out my new laptop to look something up and then cursed because I hadn’t asked the piano teacher for her wireless network password.

It turns out that my cursing was premature and un-necessary. The new laptop is two weeks old and has never been to this house before. However, my Pismo laptop and jPhone have been. Also, before I erased Pismo’s hard disk last week, I synchronised it with my dotmac account and then synchronised the new laptop with dotmac so it could learn all my calendars, contacts, etc.

In the process, it also picked up all the passwords I had locked up in my ‘keychain’: this set included the wireless network password and so I’m able to bore you with online inanities as they happen!

I’ve now been summoned to go cycling up and down the boys’ drive…