"The bit that goes on the floor down there..."
"The hard drive?"
"Correct."
"Well, you certainly seem to know your stuff..."

As does this BBC reporter...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6705313.stm
(paragraph three)

Sounds like a very minimasist computer.

I'm running Folding@Home on my 4800 Athlon64 X2 and my 800Mhz Duron computers at the moment.
It's about 24 degrees outside and roughly 26 degrees in my room with the window open.
Global warming isn't caused by greenhouse gases, it's caused by CISC processors.
Which is a shame, as Folding@Home doesn't run on ARM computes.

I'll switch the big one off before it catches fire now.

Current Location: /home/adam
Current Mood: nerdy
Current Music: None currently

I am currently in a weird situation. I'm sure it's a fairly normal situation for a lot of people out there in the big wide world but bearing in mind my family's financial trends this is unusual.
We have managed to get too many cars. As well as computers, but that's another matter.
We don't actually have enough space on the driveway (the rather grandiosely named patch of concrete that covers most of the front garden (the rather grandiosely named patch of weeds)) for all three cars.
The problem kind of sneaked up on us and suddenly presented itself on Wednesday when my mother tried to make them all fit by rearranging them.
She failed of course, her geometric skills extend as far as garden designing, which she's good at, but not to large metal objects that cannot be pruned to fit or overlap each other as they grow.
This angular nightmare started off with the Mazda 323 breaking down or something (some kind of vapour came out of the front of it rather than the back of it) and being replaced by the Peugot 405. The Mazda was passed on to me to try and fix.
It sat there for a few years whilst I not fixed it and the Peugot got parked next to it. After a while my mother got sick of the cost of servicing the Peugot and decided to get something smaller. At the same time, my friend John had an old 1970s Ford Fiesta and wanted something bigger. So they swapped cars a few weeks ago.
The little green thing (it looks like a mint humbug you see) couldn't cope with being driven a few hundred miles a week or my mothers driving habits so she decided to get another small car.
We looked around the local garages and found a yellow Fiat. On close inspection it turned out to be a tarted up rust bucket but we tested it anyway. After finding that the handbrake did not hold the car still when you lent your hands on it we took it back and went to Derek Merson where we got the Peugot.
There was a strange little thing parked in the corner under a fig tree that turned out to be a Honda Logo, a car that was manufactured for only a few months before being outmoded. It's red and had power steering so my mother bought it later that day.
So we have three cars. The Ford was given to me to learn to drive in because the Mazda still doesn't work so now two of them are mine.
And my mother can't get her car on the driveway and I now have to choose which car to keep.
And all with a total household income of less than ten thousand a year.

Current Location: Bed, under a laptop
Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Empty Room - The Merton Parkas

NetPositive. A web browser with a sense of humour.
Error messages are given as haikus, for example:
"Error reduces
Your expensive computer
To a simple stone"
It's also fairly honest:
"Sorry that we're not more specific about what the error is."
Some more haikus:
"The dream is shattered
The web site cannot be found
Inside the spring rain."

"Ephemeral site
I am the Blue Screen Of Death
No one hears your screams"

and the most whimsical:
"Wind catches lily
Scatt'ring petals to the wind:
Your site is not found"

I recently got an AST Bravo 4/33s laptop which kept giving error messages concerning the floppy drive. So.. I opened it. OK, took all the visible screws out and pulled bits. It didn't work as well as I planned. There were numerous clips holding the halves of the case together. After I'd got them unclipped it still would not come open. There was something holding it together at one end near the PCMCIA slot. I didn't want to break it so I gave up there.
As I was putting it together again, I noticed cable sticking out of the hinges towards the motherboard. It is only an inch long. The gap between the case is two inches. That is, two inches is as closed as I can get it whilst holding the wire.
There must be some kind of magic used to make this thing. There is no way of plugging that in without having the case shut first.
It's ridiculous.

Current Location: Somerset
Current Mood: aggravated
Current Music: Hall Of Mirrors - Kraftwerk