Disconnected

Today the world watched at 11:03 GMT+1 as the first publicly funded British astronaut Tim Peake and two cosmonauts launched into space in the Soyuz to join the International Space Station.

Coincidentally it was two years ago to this day that I met Canadian astronaut Commander Chris Hadfield at a book signing in London for his biography 'An astronaut's guide to life of Earth'.

I was transfixed to my iPhone live feed from ESA as the rocket launched and felt privileged to witness such an historic moment. I'm looking forward to watching the full BBC Stargazing live coverage on iPlayer as I literally only caught the 3-4 minutes around the launch.

What astonishes me the most about modern technology is not our capability as a human race to send people into space through advanced aeronautics and the wonders of science but the total utter incompetence of Windows to keep my computer working. Go figure...

While remotely working from home this morning, then out and about between appointments this afternoon, my HP work laptop kept flashing up 'windows critical updates'. It decided to resist staying connected to wifi and VPN for longer than a couple of minutes at a time and persisted in freezing up at regular intervals.

In the end most of my work was done offline with emails sent from my iPhone. Thank god for Apple's reliability. Now where's my iPlayer for that launch programme...