I’m in a really great mood, and so I thought I’d completely rip off Nathan’s latest dose of blogging to bring you an account of my fantastic spending spree at PC World. (No don’t worry, didn’t buy a computer there. And I wasn’t paying either!)
For PC1, bought circa 1999, we got another XP upgrade, 256MB of extra RAM, a Belkin wireless network card and a table to keep it all on. All for Natasha’s room, a proper little upgrade for the oldest networked PC.
Then, after being brought down to earth for a while to assemble the bloody table (we did it the wrong way round – twice) it was time to order PC4 from trust ol’ Dell. 3.2GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, 160GB hard drive and a lovely 19″ flat screen to sit on my dad’s desk. And finally, my wish to standardise a home network on XP SP2 will be complete. No more blue screen, no more crashing and burning Windows 9x, just pure XP bliss. And not a Mac in sight Pingu – we like our computers to come with monitors included. :-p
My good mood even extended to hunting down a bunch of obscure music for Tash. Including Steps. Proof that technology does not bring you taste.
– No maths teacher (he’s been off skiing) means no work has been done, instead we’ve listened to our supply teacher lament “you people, who think you’re so hip and cool, come to school and do nothing!” He has a point I suppose; I am hip and cool. :-p
– Science trip on Thursday was much more exciting than expected. Owls flying about, things exploding, electron microscopes. Oh, and I had to run madly through London to make it back after lunch. Mental note – Big Ben has a clock on it for a reason.
– The Kye Kye Hope Trust, a very worthy organisation whose website is being worked on by a girl at school, needs someone to link to it for Google Page Rank goodness. So here you go.
– Blair said: To say our NHS today is worse than it was in those Tory years, to see Michael Howard – who sat for 10 years in that cabinet as they cut it, starved it of resources, sneered at its values – to see him take the case of someone in pain and use it to run down and denigrate the whole of our NHS, should make any decent, right-thinking person turn away in disgust. I really like that quote. Labour’s made some bloody awful decisions, but the NHS is a success story and they deserve credit for it.
– Q Magazine described the new series of Doctor Who, scheduled to return on 26th March, as “must-see TV for everyone”. It’s almost here!
Just how big is the threat to our country, and does it justify the erosion of some basic civil liberties? I’m not convinced.
Continue Reading
I should have mentioned this yesterday, but in a welcome piece of good news from America, the Supreme Court has voted (only just!) to ban juvenile executions. One small step towards catching up with the rest of the world, perhaps?
Tomorrow I’m off on a Science trip, it’s not quite “How to pass your GCSE exam in 25 easy steps…” but almost. Meh, a day off school is a day off school.
Tonight’s TV viewing will consist of The Apprentice and Desperate Housewives as usual. Typical, you wait for a good show for ages and then two come along at once, on the same night!
From BBC News:
The government says it will allow judges, not politicians, to decide on house arrest orders for terror suspects.
[Claps]Well, it took the government a scarily long term to remember the basic principle of our entire legal system, but I’m glad they got there in the end. I’m still not very happy about the whole thing, whatever improvement on Belmarsh it may be.
They’ve also set themselves up a big problem – because at some point there is going to be a terrorist attack. It’s inevitable. And control orders, house arrests or ID cards will ‘fail’ because some people will always get through. A lot less than the number of people who kill on the roads each day, of course, and I don’t see any emergency powers coming in to deal with that.
And now for something completely different – PC4 is coming. Soon. We’re also going to be upgrading PC1 to Windows XP, which means a reformat obviously, which means last night I had to find a way of moving several thousand email messages from my dad’s long-defunct CompuServe CIS Mail system into Outlook Express. And for that I’d like to thank CS2Exchange Software. £14 for a wonderful bit of software – cheers!
Mmmm… this will give us a network of 4 PCs which means that with the TV there are 5 DVD players in the house, enough for each family member to watch a different DVD at once. Now that’s what I call an indulgent set-up 
Linda Moffitt on Colombia: “Such a sweet memory of the four of you meeting up in Colombia!” Dec 2, 07:42
