Kent

My PC was quite noisy, so when it came time to upgrade, I made sure I got a quiet case. And, lo, the PC was a lot quieter. It was, for instance, no longer possible to hear the thing when the door of the room was closed.

I soon became used to this reduced noise level. And began to become irritated by the fan noises. I had, after all, invested in a quiet PC case. My PC was not quiet. Justice had not be served.

So, I got a silent power supply, and a fanless heatsink. Both of them arrived, and I installed them today. They are both silent.

Now all I can hear is the the throbbing beat frequency of two 7200rpm hard drives, running at just slightly different speeds. It was probably making that noise before, only I couldn't hear it.

I'm now trying to work out how to isolate and silence the drives.

I fear I am going mad.

Riches and wealth, they're not all they're cracked up to be. I mean, I got this sad tale in my email just this afternoon:

">From Doris Matins
Abidjan, Ivory Coast


My Dear one,

Permit me to inform you of my desire of going into business relationship with you. I got your name and contact from the Ivoirian chamber of commerce. I prayed over it and selected your name among other names due to its esteeming nature and the recommendations given to me as a reputable and trust worthy person that I can do business with and by the recommendation , I must not hesitate to confide in you for this simple and sincere business .

I am Doris Matins the only daughter of late Mr. and Mrs. Matins Koca. My father was a very wealthy cocoa merchant in Abidjan , the economic capital of Ivory coast, my father was poisoned to death by his business associates on one of their outings on a business trip .

My mother died when I was a baby and since then my father took me so special. Before the death of my father on october 2006 in a private hospital here in Abidjan he secretly called me on his bed side and told me that he has the sum of Ten million,five hundred thousand United State Dollars. USD ($10,500,000.00) left in fixed / suspense account in one of the prime bank here in Abidjan ,that he used my name as his only daughter for the next of Kin in depositing of the fund. He
also explained to me that it was because of this wealth that he was poisoned by his business ssociates.
That I should seek for a foreign partner in a country of my choice where i will transfer this money and use it for investment purpose such as real estate management or hotel management .

Dear, I am honourably seeking your assistance in the following ways:

(1) To provide a bank account into which this money would be transferred to .
(2) To serve as a guardian of this fund since I am only 20years.

(3) To make arrangement for me to come over to your country to further my education and to secure a resident permit in your country.

Moreover, Dear, i am willing to offer you 15% of the total sum as compensation for your effort/ input after the successful transfer of this fund into your nominated account overseas and 3% for any future expenses that will be made during the transaction.


Furthermore, you indicate your options towards assisting me as I believe that this transaction would be concluded within fourteen (14) days you signify
interest to assist me. Anticipating to hear from you soon.


Thanks and God bless.

Best regards,
Doris Matins"


Now, obviously, I'm very tempted by this offer. Who wouldn't be? But then I thought on. What happiness have wealth brought Ms Matins, and her late father? Murdered in his prime by rampaging Ivory Coast cocoa merchants, leaving his only daughter alone in the world, with no-one to turn to by the Ivoirian Chamber Of Commerce, who are themselves apparently so reduced in circumstance that they get their business contacts by trawling web forums looking for people who inadvertently fail to hide their email addresses.

And of course, there are literally hundreds of near-identical cases that you hear of every day. I believe that being terribly, terribly rich must be one of the leading causes of death in the world by now.

I should help poor Doris. I know I should. She's alone in this world, at the mercy of Cocoa Assassins, but I just haven't the courage. A life of looking over my shoulder, wondering if this bar of Green and Black's is the one that the shadowy Chocolatiers of Doom have poisoned? No thank you. Not even for 18% of $10,500,000.

I just saw the Sky News headline "Third Doctor Charged Over Terror Plot" and thought "Isn't Jon Pertwee dead?"

Pr0n spam continues unabated. In point of fact, much of it seems to be escort spam, which pleases me in some fashion - no passive consumer of pr0n, I! They've clearly got me down as a man of action.

There's two competing escort agencies who are enticing me to engage their services. The first is going for the direct approach, suggesting that I should "fuck more people man" and "fuck them and chuck them", and inform me that "these girls are paid to leave" - the last of which seems misogynistic even for a pimp. The other, however has other suggested activities. So far, their suggestions have been "lets have a cup of tea" and "lets go to the beach" which seem like far more charming alternatives to me.

Still, I won't be swayed. Sure, a cup of tea or a walk on the beach sound good, but I suspect that while they're talking all romantic, they're really only after my body.

I've just started to get an exciting new series of pr0n spam of late. The mails consist of an embedded image advertising the pr0n in question, and some text, which is an extract from The Lord Of The Rings. I can only assume that this is some new genius concept in filter evasion which suggests that the heavy pr0n user is also a Lord Of The Rings aficionado, with spam filters trained to suit the passing of fragments of Lord of the Rings. Sounds pretty plausible to me.

However, this one I got today was a bit of an own goal. In that it had the standard picture of a sultry young lady gazing lustfully at the viewer, under which was the fragment "'Not a bird! ' said Sam mournfully."

Which is kind of a shame, because it didn't seem to be that kind of pr0n website.

Behold: a Seamus Emulator.

I see that there's an inquest into Saddam's execution, because they were jeering at him during the thing.

Can't have that, can you? I mean, think of how the poor chap's going to feel. They've put a noose round his neck and are about to kick him off a high platform, then all of a sudden, people start calling him nasty names.
"Hang on!" he's going to think, "Maybe these guys don't like me!"

Hmmm. Too inappropriate as an avatar image, or just inappropriate enough? I can't decide.

Every year, at this time of year, the evil masters of Barbie release a DVD starring Barbie as some princess or other. Not stop-motion video with dolls, alas, but bargain-basement "everything's soooo shiny" CGI. Released simultaneously with this DVD will be a special edition Barbie doll dressed in the DVD's costume, and quite possibly princess dresses in child sizes, tied into the movie.

If you have a young girl of the appropriate age, you keep this information from her as long as possible, but as soon as it gets out that this thing exists, that's all she wants for Christmas. Such is life, and you buy the DVD and bits of plastic if you don't want to be considered the most evil parents in all Christendom.

This year's offering, however, takes the cake. Barbie and the Twelve Dancing Princesses. And yes, you've guessed it, that's twelve different (if changing hair and dress colour counts as different) dolls to buy. I mean, come on Mattel, play the game!

I have visions of a board meeting at Mattel, in which the one sane man left in the company attempts to bargain the assembled fatcats down from the original concept, Barbie and the Fifty Dancing Princess And Their Two Hundred And Fifty Close Friends.

vardebedian, here is a site that will sate your shameful desires, albeit temporarily:

http://hornymanatee.com/

( my xmas stocking )

The monitor being dead, and well outside any warranty, I thought I'd open it up and see if there was anything to be done. Take it apart, and follow the smell of charred electronics.

Tracked it down to one component. Looks like a diode near where the power supply plugs in. Surface soldered, and I haven't the equipment to fix it. Odd to think just how tiny a component makes the rest of it basically scrap. It's plainly fixable in some sense, but equally plainly, it'd cost more than replacing the monitor, and then I'd be left with a warranty-less piece of kit, with the same column of dead pixels.

It's amazing how disposable really complex devices have become.

Are you all in there? I can perceive you, albeit dimly, as if through a glass, darkly.

My monitor crapped out. It was a pretty average 17" LCD. It was bought to replace a 17"CRT which also crapped out in some way. Hence, when my monitor crapped out, I was forced to delve into the depths of the garage in search of a replacement. And here it is. A Tatung 15" CRT monitor, that I bought back in 1996.

In fairness to it, it's ten years old, and it's never failed me, beyond being absolutely tiny to my twenty-first century eyes. Nice to have something to fall back on.

I read recently that there's this amazing new workout which can make you fit if you exercise for four minutes a day.

It's also the case that the training montage music from Rocky IV is about 4 minutes long.

Surely that can't be a co-incidence.

Alright, to start with, never buy an Orange mobile phone. (That's the company, though buying one coloured orange isn't likely to be a good idea either.) Having done so, ooh, 12 months ago, I am now getting a nuisance call about twice a day, trying to sell me another 12 months contract in the guise of a "free upgrade". They all do it, of course, but Orange appear to have sold my details to every jackass on the planet.

So, I've had a fair old chance to come up with interesting ways to deal with unwanted sales calls. My methods so far have included:

1) Monosyllabic unhelpful answers: Eventually they get to the end of their script and give up.
2) Pretend it's a bad line, and you can't understand a thing they say: Again, they eventually give up.

These are both fun, but have the drawback that you still have to speak to them. This leads to my latest method. I say hello, they do their introductory spiel, and then I say nothing. Nothing at all. Existential doubt sets in at the other end. I had a fabulous couple of calls of this kind today. I went silent, and the guy just sat there going "Hello? Hello? Can you hear me?" for a few minutes. Then I got his manager, who did the same thing, only she sounded really annoyed with me. You know, like I was wasting their time or something. Obviously, they could hear ambient room noise, so they knew I was there. Eventually, after passing the phone back and forth, they hung up. So far, so ho-hum.

The next thing I know, they call back. I answer, say hello. He does his spiel. I say nothing. He then proceeds to scream at me down the phone. He literally bellowed "HELLO!?" at me at the top of his voice, four or five times.

I mean, the guy's selling me a phone, right? Am I going to buy a phone off someone who screams at me?

Someone needs to reorganise the recycling around here, given the weather. One week they collect garden waste, the next week they collect cans, bottles, etc. Only nothing's growing in the gardens. All the lawns are dead so there's no grass cuttings. Meanwhile, people must have more than doubled their consumption of beer and soft drinks.

Challenged by skorpionuk to come up with five tracks with the word "blue" in the title, I found:

The Dream Of The Blue Turtles - Sting
Blue Lines - Massive Attack
Folsom Prison Blues - Johnny Cash
Bullet The Blue Sky - U2
Goodbye Blue Sky - Pink Floyd

Leave me a comment, if you like, and I'll set you a word.

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I just recieved an email from my local cinema, suggesting that if I were to solve the Da Vinci code, I might win some lovely prizes. I can't help thinking that if it's that easy, the film can't be very interesting.