Just Get Yourself High

Maybe it's time for a bit of chat about JOTE.
JOTE? Indeed!
Some of you will know immediately of what I talk, but for those who don't, I shall explain.
Jewel
Of
The
East
AKA - our lovely town, Downham Market.

A bit of background. I've mentioned Facebook on here a few times already. Well the whole JOTE thing spawned from that.
On Facebook, there are groups that people make up on every single subject that you care to mention. Often these are humorous and pretty informal. JOTE was started as an affectionate look at Downham Market and the group has grown..... and grown. Currently, there are about 325 members of the group and this grows at the rate of 1 or 2 every couple of days. I read today that Facebook has 100,000 people join up every day. Pretty amazing that, isn't it.
Anyway, I discovered JOTE fairly early on in it's life and joined up. It was started by a top bloke called Lee Cooper. Fairly soon, we got nattering on and realised that we have quite a bit in common and the same (warped) sense of humour. Unbelievably though in my ten years of living in Downham and using the same watering hole (from here on in to be known as our Spiritual Home) we have never met. This was soon put right a few weeks ago.
So myself and Mr C have become good buddies and I don't think a weekend has gone by, of late, where we haven't shared at least one pint!
But there are other key members too, to name but some, there are the Soehnle brothers. Three great guys, who I knew of before and had a passing nod, but never sat down and chatted with, again since put right. Hayley gets a mention here too as she is a regular at our Annual General Meetings (these seem to occur monthly!). There are quite a few others who should get a mention, but maybe another time, as this is beginning to sound like a who's who of regular drinkers in Downham.

So moving on. I'm typing this on a newly revitalised laptop! Last Sunday morning, H mentioned that she thought that she's broken it. I had a look and the hard drive was making a strange clicking sound and it wouldn't boot up. Ooops.
A bit of diagnostics by me and I declared that it was bust! After a little searching on t'interweb, I found out that this was a not uncommon fault on the first batch of Macbooks. Considering that this is the very first problem that I've had with either Mac, I'm still pretty damn satisfied with Apple products.
Fortunately, it was the laptop though. We have a general move towards keeping all of our stuff on the main machine (that I back up fairly often). So I didn't have to go through a recovery process. All photos and music was on the main machine, and all documents are stored to a web-based area, so nothing to worry about.
I quickly sourced a supplier and chose a 160GB new hard drive (twice as big as the original). It arrived within 4 days and last Friday, I fitted it and was able to reinstall all of the applications we originally had on here. No problems, no issues, nothing lost. Smug? Well, maybe a little.