Yellow

Today has been sunny and dry. It's not that it's been horrible all week or anything, but it hasn't been exciting. After breakfast we went for a bike ride, a nice 43 km averaging 21.4 km/h. After my pinch puncture a fortnight ago I raised the pressure in my tyres which should in theory make future punctures less likely - but on the atrocious local roads doesn't half make for a hard ride and sore hands, bum and feet when you get home.

After a light lunch it was time to sort out the house insurance for the next 12 months. Even though I stayed with the same provider and the same policy details I got a reduction of £50 (~16%) by taking out the policy on-line as a new customer... so much for rewarding customer loyalty!

I then tinkered with my backups. I backup my desktop, my better-half's desktop and the server every hour. Which means if I accidentally delete something it's easy to get it back again. It's a very efficient technology that automatically deals with duplicates in a simplistic way meaning that I only need a fraction of the storage space you'd think it would take. However it's not smart enough to deal with large-scale reorganisation of the file system - and you very quickly run out of disk space on the backup system. I've been fighting with it all week and in the end I gave up and purged the recent backups and started again from scratch. It's not an ideal solution, but I do have another off-line copy of my pictures, and the backups are now working again.

As the sun was starting to set I went out into the garden to treat the quince tree with fungicide to try and keep the quince blight under control. It's suffered rather badly for the last two years and this year I'm starting early with the chemicals in the hope that I can stop it before it becomes a real nuisance. I took a few pictures round the garden - the gage is in bloom, but settled on this daff as it's quite cheery and with a desaturated back ground it looks bright and bold.

It will shortly be time for pizza and BBC4's foreign detective series. The new one is Italian, but not as good as Montelbano, or at least it hasn't grown on me yet.