The Quiet Road

Crappity crap crap fuckity fuck!

Well, I’m back from my interview at Trinity. Many thanks for the good luck wishes (in the comments to the last post) Zoe and Lucas… plus the others who emailed or texted. In the end, however, I fear I may have squandered all those positive vibes. Of course, it’s very easy to exaggerate one’s screw-ups in retrospect. And just because things didn’t go 100% perfectly doesn’t mean they were a disaster. All the same…

Q. So which philosophers are you currently interested in?
A. Er… [jim draws a complete blank… can’t even think of a single philosopher’s name, let alone one he’s currently interested in]… er… [the seconds tick by. For feck’s sake, there’s a copy of Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method in my bag not three feet from where I’m sitting! Yet can I think of a single name? No, I can’t.]… er… Nietzsche?

Or how about…
Q. So describe the basics of Freud’s theory of dreams…
A. Wellll… [once again jim draws a total blank. The words “symbolism” and “displacement” refuse to come to mind, as does the phrase “wish-fulfillment”. So instead there’s two minutes of incoherent nonsense as I try to describe Freud’s theories without recourse to those three terms].

Of course, the moment I stepped out of the interview, my brain kicked in… and as I walked down the flights of stairs and out of the building, I was muttering… Freud saw dreams as being of central importance to psychoanalysis. Initially he viewed dreams as a process of wish-fulfillment undertaken by the unconscious mind. However, because dreams often don’t appear that way, he hypothesized that dreams had both a manifest and a latent content. The manifest content — how the dream is recalled by the dreamer — is often a heavily-disguised or censored version of what the dream is really about. And what the dream is really about is the fulfillment of unsatisfied childhood desires. These desires — often shocking to the conscious mind — are rendered safe by two separate but connected processes; displacement (the association of disturbing emotions with apparently innocuous images) and symbolisation (almost always sexual in nature). Later in his life, however, after working with World War One veterans who had suffered from shellshock (what we’d now term Post-Traumatic Stress), Freud was forced to modify his theory of dreams. His ideas that dreams — almost invariably — referred back to childhood was incompatible with the clinical data he was gathering from the war veterans (whose recurrent nightmares of the trenches were clearly neither wish-fulfillment nor related to childhood events). This eventually led Freud to hypothesize the existence of ‘The Death Instinct’ or Thanatos.

Now, why the hell couldn’t I have said that in the interview? Why did I end up muttering it to startled passers-by instead? Goddamn it!

And what makes it all worse is the fact that the interview wasn’t exactly intimidating in any sense. The professor (Dr. RS) is very amiable, easy company. Formality was kept to a minimum and the whole experience was more like a chat than a classic interview. Albeit, a chat where one of the participants has inexplicably forgotten half his vocabularly and about 90% of what he’s read in the past 6 months.

Still, all I can do now is wait and hope that I’m recalling things as worse than they were. I’ll find out “within a month”. Fingers crossed and all.

Unless you actually know a bit about, and are interested in, the inner-workings of a Windows PC then this post will be dull and obscure at best. If, on the other hand, you’ve ever assembled a PC from bare components or have perhaps manually tweaked your registry and had a vague idea of what you were doing at the time, then this post may interest you and will — at the very least — offer the opportunity of a prize.

With regards to getting back to some kind of semi-regular blogging… hopefully that’ll happen soon. I’ve been away, and then I was busy, and even when I’ve been neither; I’ve really not felt like I’ve had much to say. I can’t guarantee any of that will change much, but here’s hoping.

A Prize!

I know. How exciting, eh? A prize! Here’s the run-down; I’ve got an unfathomable Windows problem that’s proved immune to three days of diagnostics and reinstalls. If you can offer a solution that actually works then you shall win either (a) A CD of your choice off amazon [within reason — Tg24, though a groovy choice, would probably be a bit of a cheeky request, even if you do save me the hassle and expense of having to buy a new computer]; OR (b) A double-CD of the finest music ever recorded as compiled by yours truly [a far superior prize I think you’ll agree].

All well and good. But what of the problem? Well, it’s a weird one and no mistake. A long story with more than one red-herring-shaped dead-end…

The problem

It all started a few days ago when I received an email from A. She’s the only person I know who actually uses PGP on a regular basis and as always her email had that familiar chunk of seemingly-random text that is her PGP signature. I don’t use PGP, but I did have it installed and I do have a PGP key (which is now atrociously out-of-date, filled with old email addresses I suspect). I’m a big fan of the idea of routine email encryption, but it’s such a faff and nobody else does it, so I tend not to bother with it.

Nonetheless, it was late and I had some free time, so I downloaded the latest version of the PGP client purely out of curiousity. See what new bells and whistles they’d added. I ran the installer and that’s when the problems began. However, I caution any seeker of the prize that the whole PGP thing is almost certainly a red-herring. It just happened to be what I was doing when the actual fault occurred. See, although I can’t recall for sure, it’s very possible that Windows XP did a scheduled update just prior to all this.

Anyways, Windows just hung during the install for PGP. I could move the mouse cursor around the screen, but clicking things elicited no response. And the keyboard was also unresponsive. Even Ctrl-Alt-Del didn’t work. After waiting a very long time, I hit the reset button on the PC and it rebooted. I decided against trying to reinstall PGP and instead fired up a browser to check something online. I clicked through a couple of pages and suddenly the PC hung again. Exactly the same as before. No response from anything I did, though I could still move the cursor.

And this continued to happen. No matter what I did, after every boot the PC just hung after about 30 seconds. I was furious with PGP (almost certainly unjustifiably). Thankfully I could boot into Safe Mode, so I quickly backed-up all my data (I’ve not lost anything but time to this problem… yet) and spent a while using a different computer to google for solutions to this hypothetical “PGP install bug”. Nothing I did seemed to work and I eventually settled on a Windows reinstall as the least frustrating option.

I’d just backed up everything, so I fired up my Windows XP Original CD (all hologrammed and everything), repartitioned and reformatted my hard-drive and reinstalled Windows. At this point, a quick rundown of my PC:

CPU: AMD 64 3500+
MOBO: Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-9 (Chipset: nVidia NFORCE4 Ultra)
RAM: 2 x 1024MB PC3200
GRAPHICS: NVidia GeForce 6800
SOUND: Creative Soundblaster Audigy Platinum
PLUS: 250GB WD hard-drive, NEC CD/DVD burner, Dell 20” widescreen monitor

So yeah, I installed Windows XP Professional on the PC. I then installed a bunch of other stuff (avoiding PGP obviously) but very quickly the same problem occurred, and once again I could only use my PC for 30 or 40 seconds before it became unresponsive. Hell, that’s not even long enough to start up some Adobe software.

This confused me. It meant that clearly PGP had sod all to do with the problem (unless it can cast a malign influence from beyond a reformat). So I resinstalled Windows. Again. And this time in the full knowledge that it would only last a few minutes as I had no idea what stage in the process the problem arose. And this is what happened (note: Between each install I played a hand of Spider Solitaire to check that the system wasn’t hanging)…

Installed:
– Windows XP Professional (from original CD).
– Service Pack 2 (from backup DVD — used it plenty of times before, no reason to suspect it’s a problem).
– Motherboard Drivers (from OEM CD — been fine for years).
– Graphics Drivers (from backup DVD — recently downloaded from nVidia, fine for at least a month)
– Soundcard Drivers (from backup DVD — downloaded from Creative, fine for several months)

Then I activated Windows online which went without a hitch.

No problems so far. I could play Spider Solitaire, fire up Internet Explorer and read the news, and play the sample music in the preinstalled version of Media Player. All hunky-dory. Then however, I found the step that caused the problem…

I connected to Windows Update.

And it broke my computer. First a couple of ActiveX controls got installed, then Microsoft Installer 3.1, an Update for XP (KB898461) and the Windows Genuine Advantage Tool. They downloaded, installed, forced a reboot and suddenly my PC was hanging every 30 seconds once more.

One thing that occurs to me is that the Windows Genuine Advantage Tool might be misidentifying my copy of Windows as being dodgy (despite it being 100% legit). But surely it’d pop up a message letting me know and not just hang the computer within a minute of reboot. Also, I can boot into Safe Mode and it doesn’t hang. Surely if Windows was supposed to be crashing due to some anti-piracy measure gone wrong, then it wouldn’t let me boot into Safe Mode either, right?

So this time I’ve reinstalled Windows, plus SP2 and the various drivers, but have switched off Automatic Updates and am avoiding the Windows Update site / app. I’ve reinstalled Firefox and Thunderbird (plus a bunch of add-ins) and have also installed MS Office 2003 (though obviously haven’t run the updater on that either as it’s all tied into the same Microsoft Update system). All without a hitch.

However, I then downloaded and tried to install Windows Media Player 11. Because I did this using Firefox, it couldn’t force me through the usual Windows Genuine Advantage ActiveX process. Instead it runs through a separate Windows Genuine Advantage process at the beginning of the installation process. When it was doing this though, Windows again hung and became unresponsive. Thankfully this didn’t result in a crash after each reboot, but I’m obviously staying well clear of any attempt by Microsoft to “verify” my copy of Windows. It is a Genuine copy. I paid through the nose for it soon after it was released but it seems like every time I connect to an MS website they try to torpedo my PC.

All of which presents problems… I suspect that not regularly updating Windows and Office with security patches is a recipe for disaster. I’m really not sure what to do about that (and no, I can’t switch to Linux… too much of the software I use is Windows only). Plus I’ve always been a fan of Windows Media Player… an app often overshadowed by its rivals. Now I’ll have to find something else to do the job as any attempt to update or patch Media Player could bugger up my system. Same goes for Outlook.

I don’t know for certain that shoddy Microsoft code (maybe a recent update to the Windows Genuine Advantage Tool clashes with the drivers for the Creative Audigy Platinum or something?) is at the root of this problem. But it’s certainly the most likely culprit. As for how to claim the prize… just let me know what’s going on and how I can sort it out (start patching Windows again and not worry about my PC becoming unusable as a result and requiring a complete rebuild).

Any ideas? Or perhaps just a similar tale of woe?

I’m feeling a wee bit crappy. I’ve got a bastid head-cold (how many colds am I going to get this winter? Eh? Usually I get one a year, if that, around October time. I’ve already had two since Christmas. And I’m eating tons of fruit and drinking pure fruit smoothies like they’re going out of fashion. I’ve got vitamins coming out of my ears people! Not literally of course. That would be odd. And probably require medical treatment. But you get the picture). And the cold has arrived just in time for my birthday tomorrow (cash and high quality sensimilia to the usual address). Not that I had anything planned, but it’s still crappy timing.

I mention my birthday only because I just realised that this blog turned one-year-old last week (well, that and wanting the cash and high quality sensimilia). I’ve noticed most bloggers seem to mark the birthday of their blog in some way.

OK, now that’s done, onto that cheeky request…

… as some of you may know, I’m applying for a Masters commencing this autumn. An M.Phil to be exact… it may lead on to a Phd in Psychoanalysis in the future. Aaaaanyways… what with trying my hand in industry for a while, it’s almost a decade and a half since I was last in academia (and that university — UNL — has only gone and got amalgamated into London Metropolitan). I need an academic reference for my M.Phil application, and I suspect the best I’ll get from UNL / LMU is a rather impersonal letter from a lecturer who only half remembers me. Not that I’m unmemorable. Far from it, I hope. But it has been a long time and while I imagine I’ll get a recommendation that says good things about me, I want one that says remarkable things. So while I’ll get hold of the UNL one, I’m hoping to go one better.

And with that in mind, if any of my regular readers is an established academic who — having got a sense of who I am through my blog — is willing to say nice things about me in a letter, then I would be eternally grateful and will say very nice things about you at every opportunity. Even at the most inappropriate times. Also, I’ll buy the drinks if you decide you need to meet me prior to recommending me. My email address is jim ‘at’ numero57 ‘dot’ net.

Not just any book. A specific one.

See, about fifteen years ago I read a novel. I can’t remember the title or the author and I haven’t got an entirely clear memory of the plot. But I do recall thinking it was very good, and I’d like to track it down again. Any chance, dear reader, that you know which book I’m talking about? Here’s what I do remember.

It is set, partly, in North London (in and around Finsbury Park) where the protagonist spends some of the novel living in one of those hotels that face onto the park. The main character is a man who is the victim of an (apparently) random assault in a supermarket carpark. He is shot in the head by his assailant but miraculously survives only to discover that he has been blinded by the attack. For much of the novel he is troubled by an image he cannot resolve, that of something shiny and red rolling through darkness. It is only later that he realises it was just a tomato, tumbling out of the grocery bag he dropped when shot… the last image he saw, burnt into his memory, before he is blinded. The cover of the edition I read was a blurred image of this.

The plot becomes strange, however, as the protagonist becomes convinced that he is seeing things, despite his blindness and this is further complicated by the fact that he may not actually be completely blind at all.

Any ideas anyone?

I figured I’d herald my return from the darkness with a bright new template. All white and simplified. It’s modelled on certain parts of the US deep south. I’ve tested the template in the latest versions of the main PC Browsers. Now, I don’t care what browser you use. I’m fairly agnostic about the whole thing these days. I personally use Firefox, but both Internet Explorer and Opera are perfectly decent pieces of software that do the job. That is… assuming you’re using the latest version.

You see, while I’m fairly agnostic about which browser a person chooses, I have little time for those who insist upon using a four-year-old version. Web technology is simply changing too fast, and I can no longer be arsed expending the time and effort ensuring that my website looks good in Internet Explorer 5.5. If someone wishes to pay me lots of money for that kind of ridiculous code hacking, then all well and good, but I can think of better things to be doing with my spare time (watching paint dry for instance).

Anyway, you can find the latest version of each browser here…

• Mozilla Firefox (Version 2 at time of writing)
• Microsoft Internet Explorer (Version 7 at time of writing)
• Opera (Version 9.1 at time of writing)

If you like Firefox, then for god’s sake upgrade to version 2… it’s a painless process and makes you that little bit more friendly to website creators. If you’re a fan of Internet Explorer, then the decision to upgrade to version 7 is a no-brainer. It’s about a gazillion times more secure (according to the latest independently verified tests), has a bunch of new stuff (new, unless you’ve used Firefox or Opera) and is without a doubt the best browser Microsoft have yet to foist upon us. As for Opera… the new version dispenses with the annoying in-browser adverts / sponsorship and has lots of other neat bits and pieces that you’ll be amazed you ever lived without.

If you’re on the Mac, however, then I can’t help you. Nor do I have much sympathy for you. “Oooooh, but Jim, the website doesn’t look right on my absurdly bulbous orange screen”. “Really? Well that’s ‘cos you have a bloody stupid computer. And a crap haircut too.” Seriously though folks; if there’s any glaring problems with the template or just comments / suggestions about it, then don’t be shy.

Windows Vista?

Whaddya think? I really want to install it (and it’s just a download from Microsoft) but I’m not sure if I should.

Pros: It’s new. It’s shiny. Did I mention that it’s new?

Cons: It might well be crap. It costs money. It doesn’t really do anything I can’t make XP do if I could be arsed.

But it is new. And it’s shiny. And that’s an awful temptation when it comes to computer operating systems. It’s less of a temptation with, say, vintage wines… so it’s not a universal recommendation by any means, but new generally means better when it comes to software (and yes, we can all name the myriad exceptions to that rule, but does anyone really want to go back to Windows 3.1 or Mac OS 2?). Hmmm… well, I’m resisting the temptation so far. I’ve rationalised it thusly; why not wait until the first time Vista can do something XP can’t (which will probably be when Alan Wake is released in a couple of months time).

But of course… then it won’t be so new anymore, and it’ll probably look a bit less shiny too… who knows… perhaps I’ll download it tomorrow…

Just a wee bit of blog administrivia. Some of the older posts on this site are generating quite absurd quantities of comment spam. I’m talking about several hundred pieces of spam per day per post. In order to save myself the bother of scanning through them all to find the occasional first-time commentator requiring approval I’ve decided to close the comments facility on any post that hasn’t received a comment for a couple of months.

In the unlikely event, dear reader, that you wish to comment on one of these posts, then simply post the comment on a more recent post with an explanatory sentence about where it should go. I’ll then shift the comment to that item and re-open the comment facility.

There’ll be one or two exceptions… the posts that generate most of my google traffic will retain the comment facility where possible.

Bastid spammers!

For those awaiting my review of The Beatles LOVE, let me assure you that it is on the way. See, I’d been writing for a while before I realised – after about a thousand words – that I’d not yet mentioned the new album, and had instead spent a thousand words telling you just how much I like The Beatles. Which isn’t really news. And can be done in a lot less than a thousand words. So I’m going to have another go at it sometime soon. Until then you’ll have to put up with some other stuff. I’m almost finished a controversial rant about multiculturalism. So that’ll be fun.

This morning a heavy thump from the letterbox heralded the arrival of The Blog Digest 2007. It’s a hefty tome being flogged for a reasonable price, and according to the back cover it “is the ultimate anthology of blog writing from the last twelve months. From searing topical commentary to hilarious musings on modern life…” Hmmmm… I have real trouble recommending a book that describes itself as “hilarious”. It’s not a word that should ever be self-applied. You may as well tattoo “tries too hard” on your forehead and be done with it. Metaphorically.

However, it’s edited by Justin of Chicken Yoghurt which is a significant point in its favour. Also, a brief flick through has revealed plenty of stuff from people on my blogroll, including Merrick, so it’s certainly got that going for it. However, there’s also a couple of submissions from this very blog which may well put off the more discerning reader. I can only assure you that a thick black marker pen will – in very little time – rectify this. I believe many retailers are including just such a pen in the price of the book. Shop around.

It was quite horrifying reading those couple of pieces as it happens. As I always seem to be saying… context is everything. When you arrive at this blog, dear reader, you quickly get a feel for what’s going on… it’s all very loose and casual; sometimes I talk about matters of life and death… sometimes wordplay is as important as what’s being said… sometimes it’s not obvious which is which. I rant, I vent neuroses and once in a while I say something worth listening to. And – if my stats are accurate, for about a hundred people – it works. What little sense exists here comes through an understanding of the context. Leastways, I think.

The discomfort I felt reading my work in The Blog Digest is precisely what prevents me posting on The Sharpener for instance, much as I’d like to expand my audience a little. Viewed in the right context, my blog-writing-style allows me to occasionally get across something worth reading. When placed into the context of semi-mainstream journalism though…? Well, let’s just say I’m not sure it works.

That said, there’s a hell of a lot of good writing to be found within the book, and it’s well worth checking out. As I say, half my blogroll is in there… so clearly it’s writing I recommend.

I spoke too soon. Within hours of proclaiming myself back online, my swanky new graphics card gave up the ghost. I’m now using a very old (borrowed… thanks K) card until a replacement swanky one is dispatched by the shop. I understand, of course, that ATi can’t individually test every card that comes off the assembly line for several days to see if there’s any flaws in the chip (which will be revealed only after the GPU heats up and cools down a few times through regular use). That doesn’t stop it being a right royal pain in the arse when you get sent a dud though.

Anyways, during my extended absence from the internet (that word is only one and a half letters away from ‘internment’, y’know) I generated a lengthy backlog of emails which I’ve now pretty much caught up with. If you’re reading this and are expecting a reply to an email, could you please resend it as you wouldn’t believe the amount of spam I received, and I was getting pretty damn cavalier with the delete button at a few points there.

But among the emails I received were several containing links to interesting stuff. And some of those are worth sharing.

First up is this piece on Wolves and Dogs (via Gyrus). The notion of a “mutual domestication” process between man and dogs/wolves isn’t new. It’s covered quite well, for instance, in Colin Tudge’s essential So Shall We Reap (and when I say “essential”, that’s not just hyperbole… I mean “please go and buy the book now and read it”. Seriously. Go and do it). But Jason Godesky’s article takes the idea to some surprising places. It’s well-researched and coherent. Some of the conclusions he draws are perhaps a bit further out than I’d be willing to go, but interesting stuff nonetheless.

Next, something silly… the Notepad Secret Trick video. For those without Windows XP to try this on, I can assure you that it’s completely accurate. If you save a file in Notepad containing the words “Bush hid the facts”, it will be scrambled into an unreadable character set when you reopen it. Just imagine trying to explain the online video demonstrating this little oddity to someone living 150 years ago. If nothing else, technology has made the word a far weirder place.

And for that, I salute it.

Mahalia sent me this wonderful News In Brief item from consistently funny, The Onion. I’m not sure there’s been a single issue of The Onion that hasn’t had at least one thing in it that made me laugh. And I’ve been reading it for almost a decade. Outstanding stuff.

From R.A., YouTube (of course) have the promo-video for Spearhead‘s “I Know I’m Not Alone” (the single from the sublime Yell Fire! album). The song itself is a wee bit Michael Franti goes U2, and perhaps not entirely typical of Spearhead, but still a groovy tune. I mention this primarily as Spearhead are touring Europe again during the first half of December (full dates) including Saturday the 2nd in Dublin! Yay!

By the way, I’ve spent most of this week listening to “LOVE” by The Beatles. A full review of which should hopefully appear here sometime very soon. As a sneak preview… the review will essentially be the two words, “bloody awesome”, expanded into several hundred.

Anyways, I hope all is groovy with you, dear reader. And let’s hope I’m back up and running for more than a few days this time.

Wouldn’t you know it? I’m only gone for a few weeks and yet I manage to miss the most fertile month for blogging all year. The muslim veils farrago… the Madonna adoption thing… the Iraq U-Turn (except it’s not really a U-Turn, it’s a “reassessment”, honest)… the Macca divorce… the Enron guy getting 24 years… the US elections and Rumsfeld getting sacked… climate change hitting the front pages. Politics, celebrity, war, big business; there’s even been some peak oil stuff worthy of a rant. My, how the chattering classes are chattering.

Thankfully we’re far from all that noise here on the quiet road, dear reader. It’s a virtual backwater out here. Hell, I can even write about the Israel / Palestine situation and raise nary a murmur of disapprobation, let alone the online equivalent of an outbreak of mindless violence that it would generate anywhere else on the web. Perhaps it’s the irregularity of posting or perhaps it’s the denseness of the prose. It’s hard to say. Speaking of which, may I quickly remind you that there’s a new Pynchon novel out next week. The author has provided a synopsis…

Spanning the period between the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, “Against the Day” moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska event, Mexico during the revolution, Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all. With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred. The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx. As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it’s their lives that pursue them. Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they’re doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur. If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction. Let the reader decide, let the reader beware; Good luck – Thomas Pynchon.

If you’re not tingling with anticipation, you bloody well should be!

You may or may not be interested to know that I’ve resurrected my novel (The Stockhausen Manuscript) which ground to a halt a couple of months back. I’m certainly not promising anything, but this one might actually get finished. Mind you, even if I do finish it, there’s no guarantee I’ll let anyone actually read the thing.

But look, I know what you’ve really come here for. And it’s not to read me droning on about my half-written psychedelic thriller. It’s to find out what I think about stuff like the muslim veils farrago… the Madonna adoption thing… the Iraq U-Turn (except it’s not really a U-Turn, it’s a “reassessment”, honest)… the Macca divorce… the Enron guy getting 24 years… the US elections and Rumsfeld getting sacked… climate change hitting the front pages, and maybe a bit of peak oil rantiness. All of which I’ll try to cover over the next couple of weeks by way of catching up with the rest of the blogosphere.

An absence explained

Incidentally, if you’re wondering where I’ve been for all this time, the answer is “right here, but without a computer”. You see, my PC’s power supply unit (PSU) decided to die. But it didn’t want to face the recycling yard alone, so it took a few other things with it. I was in the middle of responding to an email from the groovy Tom Fourwinds who runs megalithomania (he’s just published a new book incidentally… Monu-Mental About Prehistoric Dublin) when three things occurred simultaneously. There was a loud bang, the screen went blank, and a tiny wisp of acrid smoke rose from behind my desk. It took a couple of days to replace the blackened chunk of ex-PSU at which point I realised that wasn’t the only thing wrong. A closer look at the inside of my computer revealed scary-looking char-marks on several other components including the circuit boards on all three hard-drives. Yes, even the one I’d named “backup”. It was at this point that I repeated the word “fuck” very loudly about seven or eight times. I hadn’t backed up onto shiny silver disc for a good three or four months.

Anyways, I’ve had to replace the hard-drives and the graphics card and the RAM though – bizarrely – not the motherboard or CPU. Those of you who know a bit about how PCs are put together will understand how weird that is. And I’ve lost all the writing I’ve done for the past four months or so. Although it wasn’t the most productive period of my life it’s still a serious pisser. But at least I’m back up and running and I’ll try to resume semi-regular blogging. Hopefully I’ll have caught up with the email backlog before the end of the week too. Laters y’all.

So I’m thinking… having spent an hour on various websites, I can spend fourteen days staying in three-and-four-star hotels in Milan, Genoa and Pisa… including flights and trains it’ll come to about 900 euro. Figure half that again for spending money (good cheap restaurants but a couple of expensive ones too) and I’ll have change from a thousand english pounds.

Yes I know, that’s still a huge quantity of money to spend on two weeks eating nice food in Italy and watching the Tuscan moon rise above the gently lapping mediterranean. But really… when it comes down to it… what the hell else should I do with my money if not that? When I’m lying on my death-bed, what thousand-pound memory will outstrip my two week gastronomic tour of northwestern Italy?

But it’s the flight that’s bothering me. And travelling overland from Ireland to Italy turns my fortnight of lazing in the sun into something else entirely. Hmmm… we shall see.