Richborough Power Station, the demise of a local landmark, laptop replacement and a general ramble.

OK I suppose it is an ugly concrete structure, but I suppose we have got used to it, plans are to demolish it in September or October.

The inner sanctum of engineers reckon this will be a tricky job, one of the cooling towers has to be demolished with explosives before the chimney. If you don’t get the demolition of these just right they tend to twist and go everywhere, careful arrangement of charges and det chord is critical.

At the time of writing the date for the demolition hasn’t been set.

I keep a sketch book like Turner did, unfortunately there the resemblance ends, but I have used a sketch to illustrate the post as I know aspiring art critics will all have a mental picture of the power station and immediately have modifications.

I was on the far end of the western undercliff promenade on Monday when my children spotted what looked like diamonds in the adjacent caves, so I sketched the power station while the climbed down and retrieved what transpires to a sea worn house brick, now a prized position.

I finally got to grips with the time I have been wasting blogging on my ancient laptop and decided that either I replaced it or stopped blogging. I opted for a replacement laptop, so this may be cause for celebration or regret.

The trouble with buying new technological items is that it is very difficult to try them out first. With laptops the snags that the various people I know have seem to be, too heavy, no camera card reader slot, irritating fan noise, overheating when resting on ones legs – probably due to all the vents being where the legs go, no usb3 socket, the operating system being Linex, short battery life. Built in mouse that is effected badly when you type, supplier problems when things go wrong, no webcam

Anyway I shopped around and bought the following laptop: Acer Aspire 5750 Laptop, Core i3 Sandybridge 2310M 2.10GHz, 4GB RAM, 320GB HDD, 15.6" LED, DVD±RW, Webcam, Windows 7 Home Premium

price £315.81 or £388.80 inc vat.

I bought it online from Ebuyer.com, I opted for Acer partly because I had tried an older model belonging to someone else and partly because they were very good when one of their products went wrong, and Ebuyer because they have sorted out problems in the past and I have bought from them in the past without problems.

OK I am not saying that this is the best deal around or anything like that, but so far, last 24 hours it is proving to be an excellent computer and doesn’t seem to have any obvious snags.