Archive for August 10th, 2005

07:41 pm: Generic Update Once Again…
…Just before I start jetting off to Statto’s party and the trip to Lincoln with the Wallingford Choir (inc. Caroline & Jerry, of ‘Ruth’s favourite aunt and uncle’ fame…)

With any luck, I shall manage to kill the stupid Blue Dragon at some point in the next two turns, or I’ll have to try to do it from my mother’s slow PC and slower narrowband connection (although, actually, I probably need to give it a going over anyway, just to keep Zone Alarm happy…)

And thus the march of Geekdom continues.

Over here, I have to say, the March of Geekdom is being somewhat slowed down by minor teething troubles such as the Subtle But Important Difference Between my Regular and DOS Keyboards – the location of the hash/tilde key.

The DOS keyboard (which I didn’t nick from the Old College at all) is now plugged in by means of an ATX/PS2 adapter, and has the hash key just after 0, – and = on the top row of the main key block. This means the backspace is about the same size as a threpny bit, or just smaller than one new pee. My usual keyboard, which I’m now pretty used to, is fairly weird in that it has the hash key on the numerical-keyboard side of the right-shift key, leaving the backspace with lots and lots of space, weighing in at about one third of the length of the space bar.

Somehow, probably because of the slightly sloppy way in which I send my fingers belting over the keyboard, the bit of the backspace button I’m most likely to hit in the tab-side end (ie, the left one), which is fine & dandy until you type the wrong drive letter on the DOS box, attempt to correct it, and suddenly try to send the damn thing to s#a:, rather than a:, as you’d originally intended.

O well. Such teething troubles aside, it’s running OK (except for the bizzarre memory error, which Paul thinks is somewhere in the first 640k, whatever that means) and I’m actually getting rather better with DOS than I was when we jumped PC to Win2k, which is fine by me. My only real trouble comes from games which apear to count as abandonware, ‘cos no bugger’s still selling them, but which still have severe old-school copy protection on ’em… In ten years time, that’ll be no problem at all, because all you’ll have to do to crack an old game is poke about on the ‘net, get a keygen and start playing (assuming you can be bothered to wait 10 years, rather than just doing it right now). That doesn’t, however, work when you have to cite things like “the word 5, line 3, page 34” or, (much worse) whatever word is formed by aligning the Espruar and piggin’ Dethek runes on the stupid Pool of Radiance code wheel…

Still, there’s still a few things I can get going, I expect, so it’ll all come good in the end.

Presently, I’ going to have to work out what books I’m going to take with me for the next week or so. But that technically counts as “packing,” and can safely be put off until 20 minutes before we’re due to leave. (except for my camera, the charger, the USB cable, the webcam and the webcam drivers, all of which I need to get ready for Statto’s party. Hmm.)

*starts digging things out of the Satanic Wire Tangle*

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: ‘Did I say That?,’ Meat Loaf