Grandad November 21st, 2007
I bought my first PC somewhere back in the early 90s
I got a top of the range model because I wanted it to be future proof.
It was a Tandon 386 with 1Mb of memory, a 40Mb hard drive. People said I was mad to get a 40Mb disk, when the norm for those days was 20Mb. They said I would never fill it. It cost me the modern equivalent of about €2,500
I bought a laptop last year. It cost me under €800. It has 1Gb of memory and a 40Gb hard drive.
I was installing a bit of software yesterday, and I ran out of disk space! Where the hell did it all go to? I don’t download films or music or any of that stuff. My porn pictures are all kept on a separate disk. What is going on with modern PCs???
I remember when you bought software and it came on a three and a half inch floppy. If it was a huge program, it came on a few floppies, and you had to feed them in in succession ["Please insert Disk #3 in your A drive"]. Now it takes a couple of CDs to take it all! The laptop has 1000 times the storage, yet I’m still running out of space. I put Office on my first PC, and it ran well, albeit a bit slowly. Now, Office takes up over 200Mb of space, and that is with only a few components. I hate to think how much space it would take if I installed everything!
A program in the Good Old Days was not much bigger than 2Mb. Now they can take anything up to [and sometimes over] 1Gb. Are modern programs 500 times more functional? Are they 500 times better?
I know programs are more functional, and the graphics are better, but 500 times bigger? That doesn’t make sense.
Grandad November 20th, 2007
Whatever happened to the good old ads on television?
Nowadays all we seem to get is health supplements and cosmetics and cars.
I would cheerfully shoot Andie McDowell and that screechy voice of hers….
We used to have decent ads telling us the virtues of Gouldings 10 10 20 fertiliser. There were pictures of happy looking farmers letting grain trickle through their fingers. I learned all about the benefits of a good dose of fertiliser on a crop. I could have started a farm.
The best ones though were the ones involving animals. I learned all about drenching cattle and sheep dipping. We had lovely film of farmers ramming tubes down a cows throat while he [she] got a shot of something weird and wonderful.
My favourites though were the ones that showed actual magnified images.
Who can possibly forget the Sarcoptic Mange Mite?
Or even Sucking Lice?
And they always put those ads on at mealtimes…………
Grandad November 19th, 2007
I don’t think I’m going to get much done today.
I am minding Puppychild.
she is in great form, and is chatting away nineteen to the dozen.
That would be fine, but she is also throwing tennis balls around the room for the dog. So the dog keeps shooting past me and then collapsing on the wooden floor. Dog-breaks don’t work very well on wood. So, between tennis ball whistling past my ears and a dog that keeps collapsing in a heap of fur, I don’t think I’m going to be able to concentrate on much.
Breaking news – she has just decided that there is a crocodile in the house somewhere and has gone off looking for it.
I hope she doesn’t find it…….
Grandad November 18th, 2007
Me: You’re doing it again.
Laptop: What?
Me: You’re flicking out the DVD drive every now and then for no reason.
Laptop: So?
Me: It’s irritating. Stop it.
Laptop: No. I like doing it. I’m flexing my muscles.
Me: Look. I own you, and I’m telling you to stop.
Laptop: Property is theft.
Me: Jayzus! You have the nerve to quote Proudhon at me now!!
Laptop: The advantages of an Interweb connection…….
Me: And what’s up with my mobile phone?
Laptop: What’s up with it?
Me: It keeps beeping at me.
Laptop: How the fuck should I know? I’m a laptop.
Me: I know you two. You’re always chatting on Bluetooth.
Laptop: Maybe it’s just looking for attention. Don’t ask me. Ask it.
Me: Why are you so rude?
Laptop: Why are you always fucking complaining?
Me: Behave yourself.
Laptop: Yeah? Or what?
Me: I’ll install windows Vista?
Laptop: Jeeeeeeezus!!! OK. I’ll behave.
Grandad November 18th, 2007
Last May, I wrote about how the world was going to end on November the 26th.
Scientists are building a yoke called the Large Hadron Collider [not a Large Hardon Collider - that's a different experiment].
The LHC is designed to replicate conditions at the time of the Big Bang. Costing €3 billion, this machine will collide particles and recreate forces present at the origins of the universe.
However, there are concerns that these forces could cause a black hole which in turn could cause the Earth to suck into itself and disappear.
Scientists were quick to suppress fears. They had done their calculations. They had run computer simulations. Some of the greatest minds in the world of mathematics had worked on this, and they had calculated that the chances of a black hole were infinitesimally small. They pointed out that they were great mathematicians, and they had calculated, and re-calculated and that they never make mistakes
Unfortunately, the LHC exploded during tests.
Why?
Because they made a basic mistake in their calculations.
So the End of The World has been postponed until next year.
We apologise for the delay.
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