Spoilt for choice

Our house is in a mess, with renovation of bathrooms going on. We are doing this not by choice but by compulsion. 

The reason: the water pipes running inside the walls have to be changed because they have corroded over the past 20 years since the building was built and water is dripping into the storey below.

The pipes then were GI (galvanised iron) pipes. They are now being replaced with PVC (polyvinyl chloride) pipes. 

We were told that the entire bathroom would have to be broken down and rebuilt with new tiles and fixtures/fittings/accessories.

Actually, only one wall and the floor would have to be broken to replace the pipes. 

But then it would have looked really bad to have just one wall and floor with new tiles and others with 20-year-old ones. 

We had no choice but to go for a complete renovation, though even after 20 years, neither the wall/floor tiles nor the bathroom fixtures were in such a condition that they had to be replaced.

Felt quite bad at the thought of the bathrooms being broken down. We had no choice.

After the new pipes were laid, the time came for us to buy the tiles and bathroom fixtures. 

It's the first time in our life that my wife and I were visiting a showroom to shop for such things!

When the flat was built, unlike some of our neighbours, we went along with the choice of the builder since they were good.

At the showroom, we were spoilt for choice. 

The washroom fixtures/fittings were of various sizes and shapes in all sorts of designs. The tiles were more difficult to choose because there were too many combinations of colours and designs. 

We realised it was pointless to spend too much time looking at everything. We quickly narrowed down the entire range to a few that served the basic functional purpose of those fixtures and fittings, which came within our budget and which looked good.

The whole exercise must have taken at most 30 or 45 minutes. 

We were surprised when the showroom executive told us that some customers took three or four days to make their choices!

I don't think we would have made any better choices if we had spent three or four days!

What about you? Have you been in such situations? Do you make such choices quickly, or do you take a very long time?

Microsoft's Notepad finally gets autosave feature

We always run into a situation when we have some small bit of information that we have to jot down somewhere. Gone are the days when we used to carry a pen and a scrapbook or a pocket diary.

In this age of electronic devices, there are plenty of notetaking apps. Microsoft has Sticky Notes and One Note, which come with the Windows operating system. Google has Keep, and there are others like Notion and Evernote. 

All these are popular because they have an autosave feature, and the file is stored in our account in the cloud, enabling us to access it anytime, anywhere.

Besides Sticky Notes and One Note, an app that comes along with Windows is the good old Notepad. It's so basic that very few people use it.

But since it's one of those very early Microsoft Windows apps (from the pre-cloud era), it's always on the top of my mind, and instinctively, I open it when I have something quickly to jot down. 

But I have never been happy with it because when I close the app, it asks me to save it, and I have to give a name for it. 

Additionally, it's on the device; I can't access it on the go unless I save it in a folder that is backed up to my account. 

Notepad is best when we have to paste some text as "plain text", especially when we have to copy and paste the text from one interface onto another.

Anyway, finally, after more than two decades, Microsoft has paid some attention to Notepad. A few days ago, I was pleasantly surprised when I saw a notification regarding the autosave feature. No need to give even a file name. No need to save it in a folder. 

Open Notepad. Key in anything. Close it. Next time, when you open it, you can resume from where you left off.

Besides this, there is a feature to open new tabs. If you close an individual tab, then Notepad will ask if you want to save the changes. If we say "yes", then it gets saved to a folder.

But still, it's saved only on the device and not in the account. Yet, it's a very good user-friendly update that Notepad has got.