So hot this morning that the nicest place to be was in the car with the air conditioning on. So we went up to Masterton to visit Dick Smith Electronics, Aratoi Gallery and the Farmers’ Market.

Bread stall at the Masterton Farmers' Market. It's not a big market, but we enjoy dropping in when we're up in Masterton on a Saturday morning.

It was spectacular morning. Not a cloud in the sky, no haze at all – clear as a bell to the tops of the Rimutaka Range on our left and across the rolling hill country we were driving through. Grass in the countryside has now turned golden brown, without the scorched look it will get in another few weeks. A nice contrast to green trees scattered around, and still-green cornfields. It really is a beautiful drive to have on our doorstep.

I bought a Memorex 320Gb USB-powered external hard drive at Dick Smiths. On special for $149 – very cheap. Can’t say much about it except that it goes – on the Asus eee anyway. It includes ‘one button’ backup software. Whether the software’s any good I won’t know until I try it on my Windows machine. I’ll use it as my main office backup and use my existing 125Gb Western Digital USB drive just for for photo and music backups. I also have a 3.5″ drive in a case, with a USB connection, but I’ll ditch that now. I lost confidence in it when it zapped some files, and it can be hard to make the drive visible on some computers. It was also large and clumsy and included a power brick, so it never got used as a portable drive between work and home.