Hydrogen bombs, Vista, fried rat.......
As there's fireworks going off every night, last night
I let off one of my hydrogen bombs, as it's the only time you can get away
with it without some old scrote phoning the bomb squad. The neighbourhood
shook, car alarms went off and lots of people who thought they had bought
loud fireworks from their local paper shop felt their genitals shrivel as my
'mother of all bangs' laid them low. The rest of the bangs that night
sounded like Christmas crackers in comparison.
I've just bought a new PC. My old
one was starting to chug a bit. Is there some inbuilt timer in PC's that
knows when you've had it quite long enough and then sets the clock speed to
5 Mhz? I'm not doing anything any different, but find myself waiting ages
for things to happen. A P4 can run about 200 million instructions per second
so what the hell is going on in there? Is it working out the meaning of life
while I'm sitting there waiting for Word to load? My broadband's not much
better. Some days I'll be sitting waiting for a page to load wondering
whether my estimated life expectancy will be enough to allow me to see it.
One day they'll find a skeleton hunched in front of a PC, its crispy
decomposed eyeballs focussed on the little blue bar at the bottom of the
screen, which will still be only half way along its tortuous path. Another
victim of BT broadband they'll say.
Anyway, the new PC was setup. These days you get a choice of Vista or Vista
as an operating system. Vista is the name Microsoft have given to their
latest experimental operating system. They give it you before it's finished
and let you find all the bugs in it, which they hastliy update via your
broadband. This is partly why your new PC, that has 10 billion Gigaflops of
processing power spends half its life with the hard disk light on when
you're doing bugger all. Then you find the compatibility issues. I have
several expensive programs that just don't work. I have a nice big A3 HP
printer which isn't very old and a look on HP's site tells me 'no Vista
driver planned' and 'check out our other products'. Well that's just great,
I've got a printer the size of a house with 4 million spare cartridges (HP I
might add) and can't use it just because some fat American company can't be
arsed to write a few lines of code.
Regarding Vista, wouldn't it be interesting if car
manufacturers did this? Here's your new Mondeo, that'll be 15000 pounds
please. On the way home you notice that the engine stops when you play a CD
and a message appears on the dashboard 'your engine has
encountered a problem and needs to shut down' Luckily every few days,
Ford post you new parts to fit. When the car is about five years old and
ready to change you've finally built it into something that works. No other
industry could get away with this. You could get it home and decide to hitch
up your caravan (assuming you're a sad git) and you find that the tow-bar is
different. You go back to Ford and they inform you that you will have to
change your caravan as it's not compatible. Oh and while you're about it, it
won't park on standard drives so you'll have to change your house as well.
I've just noticed while typing this that my beautiful
new Microsoft black backlit keyboard doesn't actually have a pound sign. As
I spend half my life typing quotes that's going to be interesting.
A helpful spotty youth in PC World got me a UK
keyboard for my new PC. Vista's still crap though. I can't believe Autocad
2007 isn't compatible with Vista. I've got to run my old PC in a spare
corner whenever I want to look at an Autocad drawing. Ridiculous. If I had
the time and the balls, I'd wipe off Vista and stick XP on.
I happened to notice on my chicken-run camera that we
now have a rat that comes in every night and helps itself to the chicken's
food. Now I don't have a problem with rats, they have to make a living like
everything else but I don't want them crapping in the chicken's food and
making them ill so I put a humane trap out. Of course, the rat was clever
enough not to go in it, and seemed to enjoy going round it, on top of it and
everywhere but in it. So remembering my squirrel nuts, I once again turned
to electricity.
However this wasn't nice amusing squirrel-jumpy
electricity. This is nasty full-on electric-chair electricity.
The centre of the image shows the metal
chicken-feeder. It is now standing on a plastic box and has a wire attached
to it carrying a potential of 3500 Volts and capable of several Amps. The
orangey area in the centre is an arc drawn by Mr Rat as he tries to get in
the feeder and is promptly the unwitting participant in a fiery electric
circuit as 3500 Volts tries to get to earth. Mr Rat is no more, and my
chickens can eat their dinner without rat-poo garnish.
This only ran for one night, and then only in darkness
because I'd never forgive myself if I killed a bird or squirrel. Also it was
in a closed chicken-run so anything bigger than a rat couldn't have got in,
so the hedgehogs were safe.
