Aquarionics

Wow. That was neat

This is a tragady. It may also be funny.

One of the reasons it took me quite so long to buy a laptop was because I don’t trust them. I trust, to some extent, every machine on this network, because I built it by myself out of the very-expensive-lego that is the PC hobbiests stock in trade. Zephyr was built by me, Boilingpoint is made out of old bits of Reef is made out of old bits of Atoll is made out of old bits of Maelstrom, the circle of life.

I have owned, in my lifetime, three laptops. The middle one is Nemo. It’s a 486, it has no battery, no network, no memory. It’s single use is if all my other machines are dead and I need to vent in text format.

The first one is called “Despair”, and this is its story.

The Prince is the only person to have kept his psudonym from the days when I was writing in Opendiary as Ithen and was scared silly of real people reading my diary. He is one of the vanishingly small number of people that I’ve kept in touch with since pretty much playschool. He’s a very good actor, a very good friend, and we both gloss over the fact that we’re both too disorganised to meet up more than once every nine to twelve months or so. I have sung duets on stage with him, screwed up dance routines with him, and watched him wade deep into “Dude, that’s a bad idea” territory by asking one of our close-knit group of dramatists if the reason she’s so on edge (At the last rehersal before exam performance) is because she’s on her period. Okay, on that last occasion I remained as far away from him as was physically possible in the suddenly-awfully-small drama room, but – despite my desires – I was still there.

I was on holiday from university, and was wandering up to London to window-shop on Tottenham Court Road when I ran into The Prince at The Fictional Railway Station. Somehow I found myself a couple of hours later sitting on a couch in another actor’s apartment, fixing his computer. Actually, trying to get a P133 running windows 95 at 640*480 in 256 colours to access the Information Superhighway via the man’s Virgin.net subscription.

Geeks quite often find themselves in this situation.

There is a canonical Head and Shoulders advert that ran for many, many, many years on UK Tv, where they wash half a mans head in normal shampoo and half in Head and Shoulders. The man whose flat I was in was at pains to point out that he didn’t have black hair anymore, and never had dandruff anyway.

In return for getting his damned machine onto the New World, he gave me a laptop. I played Solitare on it for an hour or so until the battery started to go, so I plugged it in.

There was a series of entertaining crackling noises, then nothing. The power supply never spoke again, and neither did Despair. It was named later on.

I tell this story because my Powerbook power supply did exactly the same thing this morning. Blew the fuse on the lead that goes into it. So I tried my co-worker’s one (Recharging from his power supply worked fine) and it blew the fuse on that too.

I now have less than one hour’s charge left on my powerbook, and no way to recharge it.

Looks like I’m going to the Apple Store tomorrow.

It’s been an interesting week.

For starters, LoneCat went on a diet. Now, for those of you who haven’t met my housemate, she is thin in a way that I could starve myself for a decade and never be. She is, in fact, the very last person on earth who needs to go on a diet. This is not some insane fashion-following properganda thing, though, this was a detox diet. She’s allergic to something in this house (probably me) and is gradually removing elements it could possibly be.

This means that after 24 and a half years of ignorance on the subject, I am now wise and educated in the ways of Quorn, and am firmly of the opinion that it is anti-food. It doesn’t exist, shouldn’t exist, and is wrong. It tastes of nothing at all, it is effectivly invisible food.

Anyway, having been sworn off meat, potatoes, pasta, bread and other interesting things in life (Well, for evening meals. Not being on the diet means I cheated and ate bacon sandwiches) she’s dropped off the diet a couple of days early, on the quite sensible grounds that she felt like she was about to be eaten by a giant kiwi fruit.

Last night we went to see Mr & Mrs Smith, which wasn’t bad and contained many guns.

Project Get My Life Back continues apace. The idea was to write entries on the bus and get this place ticking over again, but instead I’ve been watching CSI episodes and writing articles about DOM Scripting instead. You’ll probably get to see one at some point. Oh, and a chapter of ACDS, which is neat.

the very model of a modern labour minister : a tribute to charles clarke and his id cards

Warnink: Contains polticos in spandex

blink, flash, humour, id-cards, politics

beatallica.com

Saved from being sued by Sony by… Metallica.

beatles, blink, comedy, fun, mashup, mp3

Corporate Gibberish Generator

The metrics for development are more well-understood if they are not long-term.

blink, bullshit, corperate, humour

thoughts for less-experienced Fringe performers: a rant

we are not slime moulds

blink, theatre