As always these things take a while to get set up - not least because of all the applications that have to be reinstalled.

But now I have a PC with a 2.6Mb dual core processor, 2Gigs of RAM, Disc space totalling 1,352 Gigs of space across three physical disks. The video card has more memory than my old PC. It moves faster than shit off a shovel.

All I need to do now is work out how to get it to recognise the nice clean wireless keyboard, so I can use this tatty, grubby old thing as a reserve fall back.

For oncer, tech is my friend!

With any luck, this will be the last post I make from this machine.

My friend, Glyn, who has done so much to keep this brute up and running across the years, has built me a new one from scratch and having tested it, is expected about 3pm this afternoon, for delivery and install. I daresay that there will be some fun to be had shifting applications around and all, but this will be the first new build from scratch that I have had in a computer for close on ten years.

This machine, Frankenstein, as I like to call it, has been upgraded bit by bit in that time, so that I think the floppy drive is all that is left of the original. Since I cannot remember when I actually used a floppy disk last, I shall be waving a tearful farewell to it when the new machine arrives.

A little of Frankenstein will live on, however. The 200Gig Hard Drive I installed a couple of years ago will be shipped to the new machine to complement the 500Gig drive in the new machine. What with the 750 Gig Seagate external drive I also have, I anticipate that it will take hours for my storage space to get used up.

Having just moved and had my broadband connection switched to the new number, I find that my internet access keeps dropping and even when working, downloads at about 880kps. It is supposed to be around 6Mbs and was typically around 4.

Given that the move was only completed in theory yesterday (20 June) and that we had intermittent access prior to that, does a new connection take a while to bed in, or should I be contacting either Plus.Net or BT? There is a lot of interference on the telephone line too, since the router was plugged in. I have it running off an adaptor that changes the socket, should I have the socket changed?

I can live with it for now, but the current speed will be useless for Furtle when she starts gaming again.

With the move coming up and the consequent expense that involves - effectively three months' rent, removal costs and, if I'm properly unlucky (which in fiscal terms, is the Lea way), two sets of council tax in June, plus getting TV and broadband installed et cetera and so forth, I should not be thinking about additional expenditure.

Nonetheless, I am finding it very difficult not to keep looking at new computers. Moreover, I am toying with the idea of moving to a Mac, because I am weary of the expense and time taken with anti virus software, firewalls and other annoyances brought about by benighted, buck-toothed, bespectacled and loveless idiots of the modern world whose mission in life it is just to stop everything working properly. The problem, of course, with Macs is the initial expense and the difficulty in getting something that is affordable and expandable. By expandable I basically mean hard drives and memory. I don't tend to play games, so I don't generally speaking, need the latest graphics card, and am happy if I can surf the net, write and calculate stuff, burn DVDs, listen to music and watch the odd video.

I guess that I am going to have to stick with this cranky olf thing for a while yet, but...

Well I am suitably worn out this morning before anything really gets going. It’s pretty much entirely my own fault so any whining I do should be viewed in that context: I have a habit of going to bed late, well after midnight even during the week and it is not unusual for it to be after one in the morning before I crawl under the duvet. It is not as bad as it could be as my alarm doesn’t go off until 7.20 in the morning but I should, I think, aim for an average of an extra hour asleep every night.

Last night it was my intention to get to bed around midnight, but for the second evening in succession I fell foul of the ordinance that states that any maintenance of a computer can only take place after eleven o’clock at night and that any such job, scheduled for ten minutes shall take a minimum of ninety and by preference, much longer.

This it was that in trying to cajole the supposedly ‘automatic’ and wildly misnamed ‘live update’ feature of Norton 360 into working (again), that I finally crawled into bed at just before 1.30. The previous evening it was 2.30, having decided to spend about ten to fifteen minutes uninstalling any application on my PC that hadn’t been used in the past three years on the grounds that I could really do with the space on my C:\ drive. At some point I am going to have to get some friendly soul to transfer my current C:\ drive to one of the physical disks on my machine. It is only about 40Gig and over the years has become so horribly cluttered that even “PC tune up” applications (which themselves take up valuable space) give up the ghost rather than deal with it. This is particularly annoying since I have various other physical disk drives in the machine with a total of over 300Gig of space excluding the 750Gig (which my PC insists is only 680Gig, so nyah, nyah) external drive I recently acquired. It is particularly aggravating that most programs and applications insist on installing on the C:\ drive when there is so much space elsewhere. Ho-hum.

Anyway, it’s done now.

In other news, there is some doubt in Whetstone as to the competence of the Spring Co-ordinator. People have been reporting Green Day in other locales for about ten days now, but it remains far from certain that it has arrived in the Dollis Valley, the main area of greenery around the Athenaeum Club. Some trees and bushes are determinedly in bud, others remain resolutely wintry and bare. There is no consistency of approach and I suspect that like much else in London, a function that was once governed by a single authority has been contracted out to the private sector, each little organiser doing its own thing to its own timetable because theirs is the ‘best and most efficient’ way of doing it. After years of unwelcome rule by Red Ken, I find this worrying. I should have thought that of all people, he and his far-left-leaning creed should have ensured that in matters such as this there would have been some top heavy bureaucratic institution of the Stalinist variety ensuring that the seasons run on time, or at least that there is an official and dogmatic reason why the dates are being varied for different species of tree and bush.

This means that I shall have to vote for Boris as Mayor next month. By then I should expect that the Spring Co-ordinator will have got the plants whipped into shape, and that everything will be properly green, so I don’t expect him to do anything (this year at least) to improve the co-ordination of tree budding in the capital.

It’s just that I think the capital would benefit from being governed by an inept but well-meaning sheepdog for four years.

I should be working, it’s not as if I don’t have stuff to do, but I find instead, that my mind is wandering on to more important topics.

In particular I have been pondering something that has vexed both colonel_maxim and myself for a not inconsequential length of time. Watching the X-Files recently and then an episode of Without a Trace brought it all back to mind. It is the use of technology in TV (and film) drama. I am not talking here, about fantastic technology, the sort you find on Star Trek or Babylon 5 and that genre. I mean instead such items as the desk top computer and the humble telephone in all its forms.

The first point concerns the computer – and I would appreciate visual examples of where I am wrong, rather than confirmation. This came back to mind because both agents, but primarily Scully in the X-Files regularly type up reports on a computer.

Does nobody in TV drama feel the need to use the space bar or return keys? No matter how much they write, it is always tappity tap on the alphanumeric keys, never the space bars and return keys (nor, indeed, the ‘shift’ key). Despite this clear typing deficiency, what appears on the screen is always properly punctuated, spaced and formatted.

And the telephone. This has become a problem more in the past few years, I think, as writers try to cram more dialogue in. The phone rings, is answered. The listener may answer a couple of times with single syllables and then hang up. They will then spend a couple of minutes relating the contents of the fifteen second phone conversation. This can only mean that characters in TV drama routinely receive their telephoned information by data burst.

So my question is, why do they not have regular mind numbing headaches given that they must have small modems implanted into their ears. I know they are much quieter now than in the days of my old 1440 dial up, but really.