![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lprovenThe mopey POEM of the day!
Lovely little thing, isn't it? Don't worry, I'll be back to crap rock lyrics soon. I have several potentials lined up and waiting. Which probably means I'll forget them.
Spotted it yesterday as a Poem On The Underground while on my way to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
childeric's birthday party, which was an absolutely splendid bash. Virtually everyone there was an LJer and I'm not going to list them all, but it was good to finally meet miss_wonderly, everild and lady_strange. Finally, when everyone but me had left, nils appeared, hot from the Slime, and the drinking continued into the small hours. Well, I presume it did; my half-bottle of Wild Turkey mysteriously became empty and I woke on Simon's sofa at some godsforsaken hour of the morning. Nils has returned to the Slime "to look at drunk teenagers". :¬) My thanks to Dr Simon for his hospitality! Good party. Just what I needed.
My apologies towaistcoatmark for missing his party, on at the same time on the same evening. I really wasn't in the mood for meeting and talking to lots of new people - Simon's do was small and I knew I'd know most of the guests - and it was also a LOT closer and easier to get to!
A small enigma.d_floorlandmine tells me that drpete reckons he resembles the bastard lovechild of geoffcampbell. This is a scary thought in itself. But it leaves a major question unanswered, viz., who is the other parent? I think the only suitable candidate must surely be khaylock. To ensure a restful night's sleep, dear reader, I invite you to imagine the conception...
I was exceptionally mopey on Friday, as a large group of my friends were out partying with Simon at the Liquid Lab and Tenebræ. I couldn't be there, because of Stuff™. A quiet Friday night in alone was the absolute last thing I needed and it was really profoundly unpleasant. I kept picturing the festivities and wishing I was there. ++Unfun.
I rented American Pie 2, American Wedding and Bruce Almighty to distract myself, and hilarious though they were, it didn't help much. Nor did a reread of a favourite novel, Tom Sharpe's uproarious Riotous Assembly.
By the end of that little lot, I was up until 6am, so getting up early to head off to the Sproutlore event in Derby was a non-starter. However, the party was the perfect antidote and most enjoyable.
I was still drunk when I got home, which made turning around and going straight back out again to visitpeake and brisingamen to fix their computers was a slow and painful process. I hate the sensation of being up and awake as a hangover slowly slides over you.
While eating my lunch, I reshuffled the contents of my Creative Zen MP3 jukebox. When we got it (a very fine Yule gift fromkjersti's father Terje), I didn't have 20GB of MP3s, so I filled it with whatever I had - collections scrounged off mates and so on. This included a lot of utter rubbish - dance compilations, chart-hits albums, even some country and western. [Shudder]
I've binned the stuff I don't like the look of and replaced it with loads of Apoptygma Berzerk, Chumbawamba and other recent rips, including the gigabyte or so of stufftamaranth left on my PC after the Xmas rip-fest. Now there's all sorts of interesting new stuff and even with only a quick purge there's still nearly 4GB left. It's amazing how much 20GB is - yet now it's so little it's included in a consumer toy like this. Both my first home computer with a hard disk and my first work PC (an IBM XT-286) had twenty megabyte drives - a thousand times smaller.
Eventually I stumbled off to London Bridge, to discover that for no apparent reason, trains to Folkestone weren't going from there today. Oh no, they're going from Victoria instead. I arrived in Folkestone at half past 7, got off at the wrong station, walked to the house in the rain, was fed a very fine vegetable curry with tarka dhall and channa dhall, all homemade, fixed Paul's wireless keyboard and mouse, got him the latest version of Palm Desktop, "fixed" his old PC by the laying-on of hands and a quick power-cycle, got all his files off and onto the new one, plus a copy of the HP LaserJet 1100a all-in-one device drivers, configured the new one to network with the old ones, registered WinZip - and was back on the train an hour and a half later. A veritable whirlwind visit!
But there's a small tale of annoyance in there, too. The new machine only has 100base-T, while the old ones are on Thin Ethernet, as fitted bynolley and installed by me a couple of years back. I emailed Paul and told him he needed to get a 10base-T hub which MUST HAVE a BNC connector for Thin Ethernet. The wretched dealership he found, after reading a printout of the email, sold him a 100base-T switch with no BNC. Utterly useless.
Why do companies do this? Are the staff too stupid to understand plain English, carefully worded, unambigous and precise? Are the children that work there too fœtal to know what "Thin Ethernet" or a BNC connector are? Or would they prefer to lie to get the sale, knowing that the device they're selling will not do the job for which it's required?
Anyway, once Paul gets the hub he needs or his money back, it'll be back to coastal Kent to finish the job...
Separation
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
-- W.S. Merwin (b. 1927)
Lovely little thing, isn't it? Don't worry, I'll be back to crap rock lyrics soon. I have several potentials lined up and waiting. Which probably means I'll forget them.
Spotted it yesterday as a Poem On The Underground while on my way to
childeric's birthday party, which was an absolutely splendid bash. Virtually everyone there was an LJer and I'm not going to list them all, but it was good to finally meet miss_wonderly, everild and lady_strange. Finally, when everyone but me had left, nils appeared, hot from the Slime, and the drinking continued into the small hours. Well, I presume it did; my half-bottle of Wild Turkey mysteriously became empty and I woke on Simon's sofa at some godsforsaken hour of the morning. Nils has returned to the Slime "to look at drunk teenagers". :¬) My thanks to Dr Simon for his hospitality! Good party. Just what I needed.My apologies to
waistcoatmark for missing his party, on at the same time on the same evening. I really wasn't in the mood for meeting and talking to lots of new people - Simon's do was small and I knew I'd know most of the guests - and it was also a LOT closer and easier to get to!A small enigma.
d_floorlandmine tells me that drpete reckons he resembles the bastard lovechild of geoffcampbell. This is a scary thought in itself. But it leaves a major question unanswered, viz., who is the other parent? I think the only suitable candidate must surely be khaylock. To ensure a restful night's sleep, dear reader, I invite you to imagine the conception...I was exceptionally mopey on Friday, as a large group of my friends were out partying with Simon at the Liquid Lab and Tenebræ. I couldn't be there, because of Stuff™. A quiet Friday night in alone was the absolute last thing I needed and it was really profoundly unpleasant. I kept picturing the festivities and wishing I was there. ++Unfun.
I rented American Pie 2, American Wedding and Bruce Almighty to distract myself, and hilarious though they were, it didn't help much. Nor did a reread of a favourite novel, Tom Sharpe's uproarious Riotous Assembly.
By the end of that little lot, I was up until 6am, so getting up early to head off to the Sproutlore event in Derby was a non-starter. However, the party was the perfect antidote and most enjoyable.
I was still drunk when I got home, which made turning around and going straight back out again to visit
peake and brisingamen to fix their computers was a slow and painful process. I hate the sensation of being up and awake as a hangover slowly slides over you. While eating my lunch, I reshuffled the contents of my Creative Zen MP3 jukebox. When we got it (a very fine Yule gift from
kjersti's father Terje), I didn't have 20GB of MP3s, so I filled it with whatever I had - collections scrounged off mates and so on. This included a lot of utter rubbish - dance compilations, chart-hits albums, even some country and western. [Shudder]I've binned the stuff I don't like the look of and replaced it with loads of Apoptygma Berzerk, Chumbawamba and other recent rips, including the gigabyte or so of stuff
tamaranth left on my PC after the Xmas rip-fest. Now there's all sorts of interesting new stuff and even with only a quick purge there's still nearly 4GB left. It's amazing how much 20GB is - yet now it's so little it's included in a consumer toy like this. Both my first home computer with a hard disk and my first work PC (an IBM XT-286) had twenty megabyte drives - a thousand times smaller.Eventually I stumbled off to London Bridge, to discover that for no apparent reason, trains to Folkestone weren't going from there today. Oh no, they're going from Victoria instead. I arrived in Folkestone at half past 7, got off at the wrong station, walked to the house in the rain, was fed a very fine vegetable curry with tarka dhall and channa dhall, all homemade, fixed Paul's wireless keyboard and mouse, got him the latest version of Palm Desktop, "fixed" his old PC by the laying-on of hands and a quick power-cycle, got all his files off and onto the new one, plus a copy of the HP LaserJet 1100a all-in-one device drivers, configured the new one to network with the old ones, registered WinZip - and was back on the train an hour and a half later. A veritable whirlwind visit!
But there's a small tale of annoyance in there, too. The new machine only has 100base-T, while the old ones are on Thin Ethernet, as fitted by
nolley and installed by me a couple of years back. I emailed Paul and told him he needed to get a 10base-T hub which MUST HAVE a BNC connector for Thin Ethernet. The wretched dealership he found, after reading a printout of the email, sold him a 100base-T switch with no BNC. Utterly useless.Why do companies do this? Are the staff too stupid to understand plain English, carefully worded, unambigous and precise? Are the children that work there too fœtal to know what "Thin Ethernet" or a BNC connector are? Or would they prefer to lie to get the sale, knowing that the device they're selling will not do the job for which it's required?
Anyway, once Paul gets the hub he needs or his money back, it'll be back to coastal Kent to finish the job...
