I would never have thought of that

This article from the BBC discusses how technology may one day be able to replicate the systems that have evolved in geckos to allow them to walk up walls. Apart from reminding me how amazing the world is, it also amused me with the final sentence:

"people would probably suffer from muscle fatigue if they tried to stick to a wall for many hours"

Wow. Incredible. Thank goodness the science department at the BBC is here to tell me these things.

In other news, Katrina and I decided that we could take on slightly increased repayments, and so took the credit card out and bought a couple of new settees and some bits for the PC. I'm sure the settees are a good buy; the suite we've got was Amanda's cast offs when they bought their new suite, and it won't last long enough for us to save up to buy a new one outright. We decided to go for the mid-priced one that will hopefully last us the next five years rather than the really nice one that would have lasted longer but would have stretched the budget to the limit. PC stuff I think was worth getting: a new keyboard because the old one had several keys sticking also has the advantage of being a little quieter so Daniel's frantic typing on MSN won't drive us mad with the constant clacking of keys; the new graphics card looks smoother and when we tried it out on Sims 2 we didn't get the annoying flickering floors that we've had before; hopefully the more powerfully wireless router will mean fewer dropped connections on my N95 when the boys are playing games over the network, but we'll have to see. The only problem at the moment is the Netgear Storage Central which I've plugged in as per instructions but which the bundled software refuses to find. This hopefully isn't insurmountable but it's a pain to have to go through the whole uninstall/reinstall/take it to pieces and check the connections/do it all again with the firewall off/try it on each PC palaver that will take up my time when what I really want to do is just move all the media files that are filling up my hard drives onto one networked drive for everyone to access.

You'd think that even with my fairly limited experience I'd have learned that "Three simple steps" printed on the box actually means "A minimum of three steps if you have exactly the same conditions as we had in our labs; otherwise somewhere between three and forty-eight complicated steps with lots of backtracking". I just want to believe that it's going to be easy. And that humans can hang on walls for hours.