If anyone wants me

I'll be in Ilkley for the rest of the week (until Friday afternoon).

Ta ta.

mum=socool

Am posting from my mum's iPAQ, over her wireless network. I can also use it to control the television.

I HAVE THE DOOMSDAY DEVICE.

YOU HAVE 24 HOURS TO DELIVER THE GOLD.

PC diddlings

Having returned to Ilkley, I have the opportunity to investigate my strangely nonfunctional PC here. (To reiterate: the lights on the keyboard do dance in manner most unbecoming, and the screen it does remain blank.) Upon opening the case and experimentally activating, a likely cause becomes apparent: Processor fan no worky. There's clearly power going in - the fan on the graphics card buzzes merrily, as well as the aforementioned keyboard seizure - but there is no motion from the processor cooling unit until the power is switched off, at which time it jerks fanwise but once. To my A-Level Physics educated eye it has the look of a busted electric motor. Perhaps it is the alternator.

So the questions now are ... (a) Which bits of my PC will require replacement, and (2) how much can this reasonably expect to cost? I myself am quite unsure what knock-on effects this fan malfunction will have accrued; I suspect the processor will have performed a HACF^[1] but do not know what else this may have affected. As far as cost goes note that I'm not looking for bleeding edge, or even anywhere particularly on the knife; the current processor is 400MHz. It is required only to talk to the interwebs and back again. Stretford houses my game machine (lovingly constructed by pkgem's SO).

I strongly suspect this will be something I will be putting off until I am once again gainfully employed. But I'm still curious...

[1] Halt And Catch Fire. Mythical processor command from the early days of computing, computer nerd shorthand for entering an infinite loop calculation the heat of which eventually causes the processor to melt. Would be commonplace in modern PCs without the aid of the cooling unit.

"Boy George, I think he's got it"

Am annoyed with Will And Grace. In the beginning Will mocked Jack for being such a very stereotypical gay; nowadays there's very little real difference between them. I initially warmed to the show because - to put it bluntly - not all the gays were flamers. A lot of them were just regular people. And Will's sexuality wasn't the whole joke, though sure, some humour came from the contrasts.

I saw a show today where they were training a recent Out. (Which was bad enough in itself, of course, but if it was Jack and Karen it would be down to the characters' bad judgement.) But by the end they had shown that not only did every homo have to act that way to be accepted, but they'd also implied that it was somehow built in, no matter how resistant the subject initially proves. Very disappointing.

But enough about me.