Went for a wander round the Prenzlauer Berg district last night — found a marvellous bar called Zum schmutzigen Hobby — reminds me of a sex mad, campier version of the George and Dragon in Shoreditch. The wallpaper in the toilets is made entirely of hardcore porn, there’s a cock “Wall of Fame” in the bar and round the back is the Vicky Pollard lounge, complete with immense poster of the girl herself. I think it’s my new favourite place Also popped into a fetish bar that was playing DVDs of Dave Gilmour in concert (Sometimes Germans scare me) and a poppy bar called Villis. Only in Berlin would you find C&A sandwiched between fetish bars. Froze my arse off a bit but it was a nice walk Playing a video froze Windows 7. Which then failed to boot again. In safe mode as well. And the diagnostics failed to boot either, all of them producing a BSOD. File system corruption really shouldn’t do this to an operating system. Bah. Spent Monday evening and yesterday morning recreating a windows partition from scratch, those nice people at Vodafone don’t support the pay as you go broadband dongle under OSX, fuckers. I now have Firefox 2 PC, IE6 PC, Firefox 3 PC and Mac, IE7 PC, Firefox 3.1 beta 2 PC and IE8 PC (as well as Safari and the latest nightly of Webkit) all installed on this laptop in various VMs. Using Eclipse and Photoshop on a Mac is more time consuming than on a PC, however, no accelerator keys, which is annoying. To crop an image on a PC, hold down alt and type i then p. To crop an image on a Mac, faff about with mouses and menus. Anyone telling you Macs are faster to use doesn’t know how to use a computer properly. No idea when I’m getting broadband in the flat yet. Slightly irritating as although I can expense the cost of the BB modem, it’s €5 a day and I claim my expenses in arrears, grr. Back at the weekend, brief hugs for everyone, will be getting TJs old bed thrown out too. Should be XXLing if funds allow. First time in ages, yay! My ear still can’t hear properly after last week’s flight. Hoping flying back will fix it. Might have to get earplugs for the journey if this happens a lot. My “how to speak German” guide should be waiting for me at the flat in London when I get back. Yay!