In other news the weather has got really cold overnight, but is set to perk up on Saturday and then curiously get worse again towards the end of next week.

I've decided to give up the Portuguese lessons, it's a waste of money and time, albeit they're cheap.

No news on the flat in Saude, as to whether our bid is accepted. Meanwhile we're booked on Saturday to see three flats in the Moema district. In all fairness we ought to see what we can get for our money there, it's a nicer district but it doesn't have easy access to the Metro. I'm guessing we won't get much there, but Lu did say she saw a gorgeous flat there 3+ years ago for a good price (she just can't remember where).

My boss has very kindly suggested I could use his office to give computer maintenance classes to English speaking "gringos", and that I can use the site and newsletter to advertise. He was so impressed by my ability to whirl through all his computers and give them a health check, as well as recommendations on software to use, he thinks this could be turned into a half day course for the computer illiterate. I guess it's a possibility. I'm trying to think what a course like this could be filled up with, and it depends on interest of course.

I was still stumped by his home PC though (running XP). In modern terms it's a little slow, 800 MHz, but has 512Mb RAM and a 30Gb Quantum Fireball hard disk. Yet hard disk activity feels slow... it was taking several minutes just to analyse the disk for defragmentation. It was full of spyware, but this is cleaned off and I ran an initial virus check. I'm thinking a reinstall of XP is in order, but any ideas are welcome and I'll ask the question at hardware.