2016 — 3 February: Wednesday

Mr (surprisingly) Noisy has just beeped round on his garden waste collection duties. It's not even 07:30 yet.

The keeper...

... of the Great Cthulhu (in Frankenstein's laboratory across the village) reports his severe disenchantment1 with Windows 10 now that he's installed it. I shall inspect his deity tomorrow; last time I saw it the fluid cooling system was in place but the Divine Spark had yet to be applied. I provided a couple of votive offerings (including a 500GB spinning rust drive for it to house its brain temporarily) but left before the next thunderstorm. It has now undergone an SSD transplant.

This morning's walk comes first, of course. And breakfast even before that.

Uncle ERNIE tells me...

... he's prepared to stump up £25 towards the cost of yesterday's lunch, but there's nothing for dear Mama, so there goes her last-ever chance of becoming a millionaire. Now all I have to do is work out where next to house her (much-diminished) pile of dosh when it comes home to roost, as it were. Still — unless I hear anything further from the elves who toil at glacial pace2 in the depths of the Dept. of Work and Pensions — I believe that truly is the last of dear Mama's estate to concern me.

I did hear...

... much more speedily from the Israeli company (Compulab) that is preparing to roll-out their very tasty little Mint-capable PC, so there's one possibility. I'm sure the old dear would approve of my buying a new toy. After all, she always had such a high (yet strangely baseless) opinion of the (f)utility of computing, computers, and everything her younger son did in that space. Not so, my father. Here's the inscription he wrote on the inside cover of my birthday present in October 1973 — a copy of RA Cuningham-Green's "Computers in Context":

Computers in Context

Wonder what shipping costs are like from Israel?

Mr Postie...

... dropped this off about ten seconds after I got back from the walk:

Client 9

Documentaries from 'dogwoof' are generally pretty interesting and the chap who made this one — Alex Gibney — previously brought us the out-bloody-rageous story of "Enron". They may indeed have been "the smartest guys in the room", but were utterly despicable when it came to honesty and/or ethics.

  

Footnotes

1  Funnily enough, his news fails to shock me.
2  They have still yet to respond to my October 2015 letter in which I assured them that, no, I was not running a care-home!