I'm supposed to be this drunk - it was written in my genes.

[hirez]

I think I sort-of wish I was surprised by the way that casual disfunctionality has crept up on me. This time we discover the mysterious Canadian branch of the 'family' lived/s in Regina, called itself 'Reed' and wanted nothing to do with the H-R bits. Unsurprising, bit of a shame, shouldn't care but do. Blast.

Meanwhile, mater wants a computer of her own. A laptop, please. This will mean networking the parental abode. Ho hum. So, cheap laptops? Dare I hand her a box with weenix on it? Ye gods...

Oh and, in full 'ravens leaving the tower' horror, Humblebee's up and sold to developers for £400k. Price is back living with his parents and it's the end of the world. I know you can't ever go back, but would whichever set of fuckers who're at it this week kindly stop ripping out the fabric of my past and selling the bits off to the highest bidder? It's like the bastards have been rolling up the carpet behind me as I stride forward, but now they've caught right up and are prodding me with sticks because the bit I'm standing on right now has been bought by some corporate pension fund.

(He said, listening to the complete 1982 Festive Fifty - Wild Swans, Josef K, The Farmer's Boys, (Shambeko say) Wah and New Order (Of course). I've got my eighties right here and they'll have to pry it from my teeth.)

I should be used to it; Parallel Cheltenham theory explains this sort of thing. However, I think I preferred the polite fiction of a random and messy universe unravelling in a cloud of entropy when the power of my own memory failed to hold it together, rather than discovering that there are Operatives from some odd kind of cosmological Pickfords standing about going 'Are you finished with that, pal? It's got to go in this box bound for Kowloon before close of play is all...'

(Bloody hell 'In shreds' is good. Why haven't I listened to this properly before?)

Continuing the eighties theme, I now have a Hameg HM-203. Mad bloody business.

There's a lot of other stuff, but I'm not even prepared to start thinking about it yet. I think I need to shoot things, blow something up or write off another car. The teenage JH-R welcomes careless drivers and mind-buggering substances. Yowsa.

Comments

[sheepthief.livejournal.com]

Humblebee's up and sold to developers for £400k

=:-o

(Bloody hell 'In shreds' is good. Why haven't I listened to this properly before?)

=:-O

[glitchdrei.livejournal.com]

I keep finding out more and more unexpected things about my family too.

The more I find out, the more I realise that actually, I am probably the sanest one out of the lot. Which frightens me more than you can imagine.

[lproven.livejournal.com]

Oy veh.

[reddragdiva]

I was shocked and pleased that my birth family is actually full of record nerds and punk rockers. It's quite a revelation to discover at the age of 35 that one has actual cool family members.

[glitchdrei.livejournal.com]

I wish mine was. They're all just weird.

[reddragdiva]

Perhaps at the age of 35 you will discover your real family are aliens from another planet with unusually good record collections.

[glitchdrei.livejournal.com]

More than likely.

[reddragdiva]

Heh. Would she like a Pentium 133 for eighty quid? Runs Debian Sarge flawlessly! Can just about play MP3s!

[lproven.livejournal.com]

You are not only a cruel and unusual man, you're a mercenary one to boot.

If you were not doing it to a fellow bofh and if you stood >SQR(FA)chance of it succeeding, I'd salute you.

As for ma famille... Today, I removed my mother's CD of Tradional Scotch* bagpipes music and put on 1 of my birthday presents instead. Paranoid from my complete Black Sabbath LP-replica CD boxed set.

Finished with my woman 'cos she couldn't help me with my mind
People think I am crazy 'cos I am frowning all the time
All day long I think of things but nothing seems to satisfy
Think I'll lose my mind if I don't find something to pacify

... I sang happily as I bopped around the kitchen making myself a fry-up for breakfast.

"Those lyrics are certainly appropriate for you," she observed. "But I hope you don't listen to rubbish like that. All that stuff about suicide and so on. Honestly. I mean... When did you become alternative, anyway? I'm sure you didn't get it from anyone else in the family."

[Sigh]

---

* Hint: check geographical origins of my surname.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Yes, quite possibly. Though this'll mean a trip to the people's republic of CorFackinEllGeezerApplesAnPearsGorBlessYerGuv, won't it.

You in much next week?

[reddragdiva]

I'm off work this week :-D

Hmm, I'll have to polish one up ... haven't checked their condition since the move.

IBM Thinkpad 560x, model 2640-700. Laptop is 80 quid (which is Mate's Rates as eBay standard for the Thinkpad 560X is £80-120), a secondhand battery (70-90 mins life) is 20 quid extra, a new battery (2-3 hrs life) will be 30 quid extra, if they work (haven't taken them out the box yet). I have one happy customer, tamaranth, who won at NaNoWriMo on it. It's very nice for typing on and is extremely small. redcountess uses hers all the time for everything. Oh, and it's a Pentium MMX 233MHz, not 133 MHz. Walks Win2k as well as Debian. 96MB, can be taken up to 160MB, though getting hold of the DIMM is a bit of work.

[lproven.livejournal.com]

Mater here - literall here - wanted a pooter too.

I gave her an old laptop of mine. She never mastered it. So a couple of years ago, I bought - BOUGHT, mark you, with MONEY of MY OWN - her a newer PC and screen and printer and all that bollocks.

I think she's turned it on about 6 times. Ever. She has no clue. Utterly helpless.

FFS, find an old Mac and give that to your mother. Life is too short to teach mothers Windows. Forget Linux, none of us are immortal and you don't actually want her to hate you, do you?

Give her a Mac. If she insists on a lappie, make it an old iBook. The colour ones. They're cheap. Even if you have to teach yourself MacOS, you *will* thank me.

Forget OS X. Yes I know it's weenix, forget it anyway. Classic is easier and more robust and has things like SimpleFinder and Launcher and you will be very very glad.

Trust me on this.

All the rest: er. Bibble?

[hirez.livejournal.com]

An old Mac? I like my mum. :p

They've got no space to put another machine, so it's got to be a craptop. I suppose an ibook's a possibility, but it'll have to come in at less than the ton to stand a chance. Ma can already drive Winders, since the PO sent her on a course for it before they retired. She refuses to use Pa's machine because, well, it's his. We have our own PCs here for exactly the same reason. A shared computer is not usually the sign of a happy or equal relationship.

[lproven.livejournal.com]

#1. You are a fool, sir, and have No Taste.

#2. Argh. Ick. Eeeurgh.

Well, in that case, my current recommendation is W2K (tho' XP's nicer on notebooks) with a firewall, AVG, SpyBot, Firefox as browser, Thunderbird for email, GAIM for chat, OpenOffice for productivity, IrfanView for image handling, QuickTime + RealAlternative (possibly) + Media Player Classic + VLC for video. All free except Windows, all pretty much sploit-free and fairly low-maintenance.

But you'll have difficulty doing a machine that'll run that lot well for under a ton.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

Presumably wireless networking - so let the pod with the rabbit's ears deal with the routy-firewall spodness.

A decent mail client reduces most of the exposure for the rest of stuff - Thunderbird rather than Eudora (why is Thunderbird open source ? Surely it should be commercial, with a dodgy hacker knock-off of it called "Old Purple Tin" that has an uglier UI, but gets you there just as quickly).

W2K rather than XP - less fond of disappearing up its own backside and easier to muck out over the phone if it does so.

[lproven.livejournal.com]

Yup, I'll give you all that.

Except 2K. Whereas you're not wrong, on a laptop, XP's hibernate/resume is much quicker - approaching an order of magnitude for me - its display support is better, its bootup is quicker, and I suspect its power management is better too. XP really scores on laptops. On desktops, I'm now sticking with W2K. I miss firewire networking, though.

[neilh.livejournal.com]

I got some family in that very place. Flat country, by what I remember, unremarkable.

[inulro.livejournal.com]

You too???

For those of you not in the know, I grew up there.
Left two weeks after my 18th birthday, mind.