Over this weekend I’ve successfully moved Tivo, which means we now have something like 80 hours available for recording TV. I doubt we’ll need that much, but we’ll see.
I’ve also been plundering old data off old PCs before they go to the great repair shop in the sky, which has been kind of fun, in a very sad and geeky way.
One PC was old enough to be drawing an IT pension – a Pentium 1 chip, and still using a serial port for the mouse. No CD-Writer, no USB, no networking, Windows 95 (just), and no modem jack – that used a serial port too. The data’s been moved off that by floppy disk, it’s so old. I can’t remember the last time I used Win95, but hopefully I won’t have to do so again for a while.
The other one’s not quite so bad – Win 98, anyway. Still no USB, but at least it’s got standard mouse and keyboard sockets, so I could resurrect one of my old spare sets of gear. And I can use a CD burner on it, which makes life a lot easier.
After the data’s come off them both, I’m not quite sure what we’ll do with the (slightly) more modern one – it may end up servicing as a Linux machine or something. I just haven’t decided yet.
The other one though is likely to find it’s way to the IT dump in the sky. Even third world countries wouldn’t want it.
OK, I said I would be quite happy to get the hype over with, but there’s just one more thing to observe upon about the entire affair (pardon the expression)
They’re having their honeymoon in Aberdeen, of all places. Christopher Brookmyre summed up Aberdeen in my estimation.
‘Scotland’s Fourth City’ wasn’t exactly a winning slogan, especially considering that there was a dizzingly steep drop-off after the first two, and it still put them behind the ungodly shit-hole that was Dundee.
The also self-conferred nickname ‘Silver City’ was another over-reaching feat of turd-polishing euphemism. It was grey. Everything was grey. There was just no getting away from it. The buildings were all – all – made of granite, and the sky was covered in a thick layer of permacloud. It. Was. Grey. If Aberdeen was silver, then shite wasn’t brown, it was coppertone. It was grey, as in dull, as in dreary, as in chromatically challenged. It was grey, grey, grey. And the only thing greyer than the city itself was the the fucking natives.
“A big boy did it and ran away” © Christopher Brookmyre, 2001
Says it all really. What a fun honeymoon they’re going to have.
