The Goblin is back!

THAT NAUGHTY GOBLIN has bitten my computer cable. So I've no power.

Actually no accident happened. The cable just wore itself out. Rather prematurely, in my opinion, but I know old age was the problem, as just before it went completely, you had to twiddle it so it was in one precise position to make power come through ~ like a mobile phone charger on its last legs...

So I'm waiting on a new goblin cure...

... meanwhile I've decided to pen a kiddybook. And I'm hacking through something in German by someone called H G Adler.

Must dash, as I'm on a public computer and I shall be terminated!

Broadband is back!

I HAVE A NEW SIM CARD firmly taped into the dongle from which a naughty goblin stole it (yes ~ when I was fast asleep. My life is nothing if not bizarre). I searched EVERYWHERE for the missing card and no sign. The only way it can have possibly left my house is by getting stuck to the sole of my boots and trodden out (highly unlikely; I checked the tread and it's not of SIM-card-grabbing proportions) or getting stuck on my bum, falling off in the loo and getting flushed away (my own pet theory). Or God took it to stop me wasting time on the internet (which is quite possible, in my opinion). Or a goblin sneaked in and stole it (my second favourite theory, though I actually believe in God more than goblins). So there we go.

NO BIG NEWS from when I last was "properly" online all those weeks ago ~ EXCEPT I have a horrible old wound on my leg, which is at least 6 weeks old and hurts and just will not heal. The fact that I "might" have accidentally picked at it constantly for the last fortnight after it started itching probably hasn't helped. It was oozing red gunge, so I thought I would "irrigate" it ~ ie wash it out with home-made saline (freshly boiled and cooled water + table salt). This only made the scab soft enough to partly fall off, and now it's oozing chocolate milkshake coloured gunge that reeks (mildly as running sores go, but still disgusting) ~ of rubbish bins. It's only about 1.5"/4cm diametre, tiny as necrotic ulcers go. But I'm worried it might turn into one.

I don't know what to do. I am fed up of being lectured and patronized by doctors about my druggie proclivities.

I covered it in toilet paper taped down with clean newspaper. Think about it, a newpaper fresh off the press is as untouched by human hands as anything else I can think of. 6 hours later I couldn't resist having a good look. Loads of gunge had seeped into the toilet paper ~ and it had dried enough to rip the edge off the scab. Ach!

Now it's covered losely in taped-on (clean) newspaper. Then again it is the 10p Daily Star ~ what's possibly clean about that?? This has stopped the scab getting constantly rubbed off when I walk, which was getting increasingly painful. But the newspaper doesn't stick to the wound. Which will hopefully heal now. Have I done the right thing?

Ach, I must go. Kippers under grill. Hope y'all are well, see yaz!

PS: perhaps I should have maggot therapy

Winter is here!

IT'S RAINING. IT IS MISERABLE. I am miserable.

So I went to Morrisons and bought cheapest brown bread, tomato soup, ground black pepper (to go on the ridiculously over-salty Value Soup), kippers, tea etc etc.

Winter hibernation here we come!

Also my goblin cure should hopefully be with me tomorrow, or the next day at latest. Then I'll have the luxury of home broadband back. Hurrah!

Goblin cure on way!

THE CURE FOR MY BROADBAND GOBLIN-ATTACK should be with me by the end of the week. That is, a new SIM to put in the mobile broadband dongle I was using before.
Then I should be able to stay in touch PROPERLY, as I was doing before this fiasco...
That naughty net-goblin lies vanquished and dead!

THE GOBLIN IS DEAD!
LONG LIVE THE GOBLIN!!

If we could talk to the animals...

... they might say something like this!

TALKING DOGS, CATS AND HAMSTER

...

BIRD TELLS CATS "YOU DON'T NEED TO CHASE US ANY MORE!"



NO BIG NEWS to report. Still working on me story. I've only done 3300 words, but I'm hoping no major goblins are in the text.

No broadband at home has helped me out in a big way. It's made me realize I've been wasting an opportunity to improve myself. To write great literature and change my life. I'm like the man who owns a Lambourghini and only uses it to drive to the corner shop for milk, sugar and a packet of fags!

Must dash ~ "darn" internet caff about to terminate me, as per usual!

Bonjour!

HI FOLKS. I've still got goblins in the broadband so I'm at the internet place round the corner. I tried logging into my neighbour's system, but could't crack their password... Oddly though there are two networks, BTOpenZone and BTHomeFon that will let me, after registration and a costly SMS payment, log in for the princely sum of £3 for an hour, £5 for a day or £39 for a month! So what is this? Broadband for those who can't be bothered to get it installed? I was on mobile broadband before, which worked perfectly until ... GOBLIN ATTACK!
I could also take the computer to the public library, which is wifi'd up, but I'm afraid of getting infections in the machine... is there any risk? If so, what is it..?

WELL IT'S A ROCKY ROAD to recovery of any kind, as I'm discovering. Every time I try, or even think I'm somewhere near level ground some PERSON will appear, ANOTHER PERSON ~ SOMEONE ELSE will come in and throw everything up in the air, like a mad psychiatrist shovellng cows' diarrhoea in his rose-beds.
All I want is to be left alone.
And to feel OK.
My biggest, biggest problem with methadone is how lousy I feel when I wake up in the morning. Unless I can save the entire dose all day and sleep with it next to me,ready to drink at 4am ~ so I can get up before eight with the level in me high ~ then I will wake feeling like a block of ice, unable to get warm (yet sweating heavily if I wrap up) and craving craving heroin out of my mind while the methadone takes its one hour twenty minutes to come on. (Yet another thing I hate about methadone, it takes so very long to kick in, even if you've been sipping it faithfully for years.) You'd think that by the time I feel OK again I AM OK, but that doesn't usually happen. My mind's in so many pieces by this time, it never goes back together all day.
The worst days on methadone are such empty stretches of blank despair the only constructive thing I can do is go back to bed, cursing my body for ever bothering to wake up and wishing I could have some slider switch installed on the back of my head so that when I'm depressed I can sleep for 23.5 hours out of 24. And when I'm not depressed sleep not at all (sleep, after all, is a big waste of time if you have anything to do). When I used to work proper hours I never had any time outside work for anything except jumping in the bath, eating and going back to work. The entire rest of my life was spent working or sleeping.
I didn't have particularly good mental health in this period.
If I had only discovered heroin many years ago, I'd have gone on it then. Back in the days when the only cure I had for depression was cakes and cocoa and lying in my Arabian Nights style bed with about 15 pillows and eight quilts watching telly. I also used to smoke one cigarette a day. Just the one. Which I'd ponce each evening off the mandy secretary downstairs...
Then along came heroin, a far more efficacious painkiller. And life seemed amazing for a while. The first two years of full-on heroin addiction were like Christmas every day. I got to use my drug of choice morning, noon and night.
Of course I had to beg on the street to get the money to score ~ but even that was a novelty. And I was young.
And didn't look like a bloated, puffy old alcoholic ~ which is how I looked at my worst.
Anyway I decided to throw that life in the trashcan of the past. Still everything is going badly. (Actually I don't expect things ever to go well...)
And I must run. Else the goblins in THIS computer will time me out!
See yers all soon :-)

Goblins in the broadband

AKH! THAT GOBLIN that has been chasing the hamster so vigorously has got in me broadband and is not letting me go online.

I'm still alive though.

Will post something more interesting tomorrow. Woulnd't dare here, the system's so slow...

WISHING A TELLYTUBBY WEEKEND TO ONE AND ALL..!

Lux Aurumque

WATCH THIS
It is amazing.

ERIC WHITACRE: LUX AURUMQUE
1,140,009 hits so far.
185 singers, performing at home alone. Conducted by Eric Whitacre and assembled together on computer.
The nearest thing to "music of the spheres" you might hear in this lifetime...

My keyboard test result:

77 WPM when I raced. But dropped my fag on the floor and had to pick it up before it set the house on fire. My ordinary typing speed is just over 60wpm. I didn't want to go full tilt because the reading would be false ~ I would never race like that in real life.

Got nothing else to post; too miserable.

Typing Test

HOW FAST CAN YOU TYPE?

Find out here:

http://www.lecturel.com/clavier/words-per-minute.php

I'll tell ya tomorrow how many WPM I scored...

I got put on the subject by this comment-conversation found by accident on Facebook.

http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=7338154084&topic=13311

Oui, oui... c'est le French keyboard!

I HQD q go on ,y nezly instqllled French keyboqrd; just for the fun of it qnd found it ,ore inconvenient by fqr thqn the Ger,qn; zhich is the sq,e qs the English but zith Y qnd Z szqpped round:///

Enough of this. Have a close look at the letter placings above and you'll see that QWERTY has gone out the window in favour of AZERTY(!) Numbers cannot be imputted without the shift key as the top row is partially devoted to accented characters: éèçà; the keys to the right of P when tapped before a vowel adds a circumflex: âêîôû; M sits where our semicolon usually resides and the @/' key is ù/% in French.

Très confusante!

And all I have to ask you after hacking your way through this is:

Comment ça va?

German Keyboard!

HAVING irritatedly spent the last month or so laboriously copying umlauts äöü, ÄÖÜ and ess-zed, the weird blobberous ß thing, by sucking them in and out of my mouse, I have finally added German and French keyboards to my machine.

The weird German quotation marks that look like double commas I have yet to find. I believe even the Germans have given up on these.

Mz biggest problem now is that I am tzping in a strange foreign accent, as on German kezboards Y and Z swap places!

Which is resulting in biyarrelz Polishßflavoured tzpos all over the place.

Several common punctuation marks appear nowhere to be found. Central European characters with cuckooßclock vowels appear in their places. Even the opening bracket is where the closing one should be...

This is going to take quite some getting used to...

ßs are now everzwhere, because essßyed is where mz old hzphen used to be...

... and what on earth has happened to mz beloved "swung dash" Iäve absolutelz no idea...

And all I can saz now is "auf Wiedersehen!"

LINK: international keyboard styles

google.fr, google.de, google.nl

IF I'M GOING for this uni course in French/German/Dutch translation in Mainz I'm going to have to refresh my rusty French (no study in 18 years) on top of my German. I did study some Dutch when I was enamoured with the idea of moving to Amsterdam and completed half a Linguaphone course, which means in theory I would have had a vocabulary of about 700 words... but THAT was 18 years ago too!

So I decided the thing to do is give up entirely googling anything in English and migrate exclusively to their French, German and Dutch portals. I have just been reading up on blue roses and la situation linquistique en suisse (Switzerland) on French Wikipedia.

Looking back I can see I have been extremely lazy in my attitude. But I also see that my attitude has been nothing unusual for an English-speaker. In many parts of the world it is quite ordinary to have to read books, conduct business and look up information in one's second, third or even fourth languages. I think if I can pick up this attitude, instead of grumbling to myself that this is "like looking at a beautiful view through a dirty window" (which is pretty much what it's like having to read a text in an idiom where not every word is familiar and a few are downright incomprehensible) and remind myself that I'm killing four birds with three stones (or whatever I'm doing: what is the metaphor? I'm killing two birds with one stone three times then.)... If I can do this then maybe I will qualify to get on that course, maybe I'll actually get on it, maybe I'll go and do it and graduate with flying colours and everything will change for the good.

I can but try (!!)

Countless Free Games!

I DON'T KNOW whether it's my mobile phone having the breakdown now, but I downloaded a game for £4.99 yesterday ~ it was called deBlob and you go around blobbing into them and painting buildings various colours. I soon got tired of it. So I had a look down the list of 62 other games available. No Jet Set Willy (see yesterday), and nothing really caught my eye. But I found one called Anno I liked the look of. By now my credit was about £2.30 because I'd also sent my Dad a video message that cost me nearly £2. So I downloaded the £4.99 game anyhow ~ and it loaded up. After this I got into a loading frenzy and am now the proud possessor of Sim City Metropolis, Earthworm Jim, Edge, McVenture, The Sims 3, Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Monopoly World, Trivial Pursuit 2010 and Sonic Unleashed ... that's about £60 worth of games on "paper" (as if phones would use oldfashioned paper these days!!)... but it cost me nothing.

But how did all this happen? Did the phone make a mistake and give me the entire lot free? Are they on 24 hours' approval? Will my next 6 topups get instantly drained as cyber-bailiffs home in to collect the debt?

Do you think the FBI will arrest me when I dare step foot on American soil? Can anybody explain anything about this?

Interestingly it's two of the games I thought would be least interesting that rivetted me most: Edge ~ a cube-rolling vaguely Tetris-like situation that reminds me of the old Adventure Game on BBC2 ("gronda-gronda your royal highness!" said the Chinese lady to the teapot... then the plucky adventurers did indeed brave cyber-squared spreading out to the edge of the universe, and if they lost, fell off into the infinite dark... and good old Monopoly, which I play against my telephone, and am currently winning hands-down!

And how was your day??!?

Edge: phone game review



Monopoly Here And Now World Edition:




Sorry my blog has got about as boring as smelling an old man pissing in a lavatory. I'm sorry, really. I feel so depressed otherwise... what do you want to hear about? How I'm miserable, not sleeping and sporadically drinking too much..?

Last but not least...
The Adventure Game ... hammy acting, not-too-bad-for-1986 special effects and... well ~
Just see for yourselves:






DON'T MISS EASTENDERS' 25th anniversary live episode tonight, BBC1, 8pm if you're in the UK ~ outlanders might be able to view later on BBC America/other carriers... we get to find out WHO KILLED ARCHIE MITCHELL!!

Here's a vid from the soap's hayday, when Den and Angie used to regularly pull in 18 million plus viewers... that's equivalent to a 90,000,000 rating in the US of A. Not bad for a shoestring soap, eh?



No! Apparently BBC America have ceased airing Eastenders... but in 2004 The Dish Network picked it up. (Airing episodes 5 years behind...!) So if you're a lucky viewer, you'll know what I'm talking about sometime come 2015..!

Oh what a cute furry entertainer!

Techno Confusion

I AM VERY CONFUSED INDEED. After spending much of the night (well, 20 minutes) watching feature films on my mobile phone (on youtube ~ you can get full-length films there, you just have to look) and burning up 25 megabytes (is this a lot?) I know a 100,000 word wordprocessed document is very approximately 1 megabyte, but the visual medium is a grossly inferior storytelling form, using many times more data to tell the same tale in vastly abridged form, and though the imagery is of course crystal clear, the ambiguity factor is often higher. (How many times have you watched a film and thought What was THAT about? ~ but felt too shamed to ask anybody. (Or you were on your own.) Also I ran foul of the telephone's antipornography "measures" ~ so raymitheminx.com was barred to me. Raymi is a bored 20something teenager who takes pictures of herself eating noodles! Food porn perhaps, but nothing more!! And I still haven't a clue how to post up a photo I actually took onto my blog. Can't I post to Flickr from a public PC? I just don't know what function to go into to put the pictures online. I remember when my hamsters went on youtube, the internet cafe guy had to do everything, clicking back and forth in the cobwebby confines of the computer's sub-basement. I would be too scared to venture there alone... Anyway I've got to go, else I will be terminated for lack of time.

My old wordprocessor!

HERE is a blast from the past ~ the only picture I could find online of the Sharp Fontwriter all-in-one wordprocessor I used to use. Which is still in storage at a friend's house... but utterly old and incompatible ~} though it does, apparently, convert wordprocessing files into ASCII, which can (somehow, and I've no idea how) be transferred to computer via oldfashioned disk.
I bought it on special offer for £350 from a shop on Tottenham Court Road some time in 1996...
How I loved that machine!



Illusrated: top left Sharp Fontwriter ~ like mine this was the poshest machine in the range with full screen. Bottom right: an older model by Brother ~ basically a typewriter with 4 or 5 line screen and disk drive...






ROSETTA STONE JAPANESE
"And now while I'm setting up Rosetta Stone here's a video clip of a dog I'm looking after for ten days"... and what a friendly performer the trotterdonkey fuzzy doggie is... it's worth watching 1 min 15 seconds in just to see it...
(Don't bother with the rest of it, unless you're seriously considering learning Japanese.)

Cray X-MP

ALL THIS TALK OF COMPUTERS has reminded me...

Back in "my day" (haha!) the Cray X-MP was the most powerful supercomputer in the world. NASA, as well as other branches of the US government had them, as did CERN, the particle research centre in central Europe.

I can't go into all the spec, because it worked in megahertz rather than gigahertz... and the term terrabytes (TB = 1000GB) was unheard of...

But basically, it is considerably less powerful than today's standard laptop!!

(Not just) computer fatigue...

HERE THERE... I am all over the place... Here, there, everywhere... this/that... counselling... retail parks... group therapy (late ~ haha so turned away, pretended not to look glad)... Looking at computers yet again... found one I really liked... (again)... another one I "really liked" turned out not to have the inbuilt DVD-writer the write-up suggested it did... so back to weighing up portability vs practicality ~ again! (If you're going to have a computer that takes external DVDs, it might as well be truly light and small ~ but not TOO small ~ that would be impracticle for the opposite reason!
Well I'm at the library and about to be chucked out because they're closing (story of my life!) so I have to run. If when I ever do finally settle on a machine I'll let you know. But as I keep saying I refuse to fall in love with technology!

Into Town/Bailiff news

I WENT INTO TOWN yesterday, rode the tube for the first time in ages. Once I changed Central Line and sat opposite two Pakistanis, a Somali and a Korean-looking girl and a miserable British business type I felt like I really was in the metropolis.

I went up Tottenham Court Road, where you can stroll for five minutes passing nothing but electronics shops on both sides. The prices weren't as bargainacious as I remember (Argos, a shop that stocks almost everything and you pick from a colour catalogue and collect from local stores where I buy nearly everything in the toasters/kettles/lighting/non-computer electronics league, still beat most of them ~ but Argos only started stocking computers last year) and I tested about 280,000 laptops. I also closed their lids to get a proper idea of how big or small they were, and gently lifted them up ~ which made the Indian assistant in one shop nearly have a coronary. She got straight on her phone. I am sure she took me for a would-be shoplifter. Anyway I found a machine I wanted. But I refuse to fall in love with anything electronic. I suppose at least electronics though they do break down and dislike getting wet are more reliable than most human beings, so at least that is something...

I saw my Mum and Branzie (my stepfather). We had high tea near De Beers' diamond shop (extremely unimpressive display, considering they MINE the things ~ can't they affort proper bulletproof windows? Endless pavé-set sparkly-covered gold and platinum in every window ~ nothing so big as even one single carat to be seen anywhere!

I felt so exhausted I had to go home early. I'm sure they thought it was drugs. No ~ THAT is one of the illnesses everybody thinks is nonexistent but I had for years BEFORE the drug addiction!

Today I went to the council offices. No wonder I couldn't find them before ~ nobody knew where they were even when they were right round the corner, and they were MILES away. Though I DID like the suburban shopping centre ~ bigger than Reading's shops ~ just round the corner. Anyway, the lady I saw rolled her eyes when she saw me trundling up with documents sprouting from every orifice, made SOME sort of sense of them and got me an appointment on Monday with the bod who actually presses "APPROVE" on the computer that pays. THEN, so she says, the thugs can be kept at bay.

And my solicitor telephoned this morning, saying she is faxing everybody left right and centre. She hasn't faxed the prime minister or the queen, but she appears to have faxed everybody else...

Too much information

YES, TOO MUCH. For anyone who wants to give advice ~ what I want a computer for is to wordprocess (obviously), surf the web on mobile broadband (obviously) ~ and to be able to handle photos, audio files (e.g. a voice recording of me blabbering on) and video recordings in high quality from camera/camcorder/whatever. All I want to do is store this stuff safely on CDs or DVDs (or Blurays ~ as if!) or in the case of photos ~ as print-outs or on memory sticks.

But from what I can discern, "Windows 7 Home Premium" will do all this. There's a Wordpad facility that has been called Word Lite (and I don't need advanced wordprocessing features ~ my stuff is simple paragraphs, one after the other. No columns or tables or varying type faces or sizes) what I do need is a British English dictionary. I get slightly peeved at being told that to "honour a traveller's cheque" ought to be "honOring a traveLer's cheCK"..!

Photos/etc go through Windows media centre. Is all this right?

I looked at those beautific Apple book things. Ya know ~ the ultraskinny laptops. They are said to be the size and thickness of a copy of Tatler magazine (and no other!) ~ do you like the way I made it look ultra-widescreen? They're not really that glamorous... Before I knew anything about the competition, this is what I thought I wanted... But they only have 2gb RAM ~ which is OK but not huge ~ and no DVD/CD drive, though the ones without them are configured to take a portable plug-in DVD. And Macs cost £700! That's more than $1000US. I have found numerous "ultra portable laptops" (ie not ridiulously tiny but very light) ones that can beat this at 2/3 the price so sorry Apple ~ not good enough.

I looked at everything: desktop, all-in-one, laptop, notebook, powerbook, Blackberry (well they do surf the web, though I wouldn't have a hope in hell of inputting on those minuscule keys...), Apple Tablet or whatever it's called (no!). I can't live with a massive desktop ~ it has to be portable because unless you own your own home and have a laptop safe, when is a laptop ever safe? At least they can be placed inconspicuously or hidden more easily than a giant bells-and-whistles home PC. Some of the huge desktops were lovely and if I actually had a proper home I might even consider one. In about 20 years' time...).

If anybody has any more sensible advice (and all the advice I got was sensible) I would very much like to hear it. Remember I want to do wordprocessing, internet and media.

I know on which fronts I am willing to make sacrifices for cost or practicality, but I won't say them here, because I'm interested to hear others' viewpoints...

I hope this technotrauma comes to an end soon as it is doing my head in. Whoever thought chosing something that is meant to be your technological best friend could ever be so thorny? Yukk!



My head is full of noise... I have to go!