For some reason I find myself writing this in an old copy of Microsoft Works on my old steam powered laptop. Some people probably think that because I am a software developer in the daytime, I have some kind of amazing computer system at home… well that’s sort of true - we have have a very clever setup of old hardware.
Perhaps I should explain as quickly as possible (attempting to not send everybody to sleep). I typically use my old laptop - it’s a 266Mhz Toshiba Satellite; about a tenth of the speed of a modern family PC. I run Windows 98SE on it, because that’s just about all it can handle. To make matters worse, my little laptop only has 64Mb of RAM - enough to run Windows, the virus killer, and not much else
W has a 1.5Ghz Toshiba laptop that gets a bit of a thrashing - she does her family tree research on it, so typically has as many as 10 applications open at once. It’s got XP on it, and is actually pretty good (but still only half the speed of your typical machine today).
In the back room we have a “file server”. I coin the phrase very carefully though - in reality it’s an ancient desktop machine that W was given, with a large(ish) hard drive from a computer that packed up, and a CD burner robbed from another machine I used to have… It runs Win98, and has a new HP LaserJet 1010 hanging off it.
Connecting all this stuff together is a Netgear hub, and a Belkin 54G wireless ADSL switch/router - which means I can sit here typing this in the lounge watching the television.
Although I constantly winge about my little old laptop being a bit crap, as long as it can browse the net (thankyou Firefox), and play chess (thankyou Fritz 5), I’m perfectly happy with it. It even stretches itself to web development from time to time via Textpad and SmartFTP…
All of our computers are protected by AVG Antivirus and ZoneAlarm - and of course the Wireless router has a hardware firewall in it.
Asleep yet?
I guess it’s time to add a few words about what happened today in the office.
Finally, I am nearing the end of development on the big project I have been moaning/worrying/bitching about for weeks in this blog. Principal development was basically finished today, but I need to test the entire thing properly, and add validation code throughout the project (to stop users doing things like entering 32nd January into date boxes).
At lunchtime today we went to the “Dog and Badger” public house and the MD shouted everybody a drink and a meal - it was appreciated by all, and gave everybody a chance to meet the new bloke that’s started in our office. He seems to be settling in fine.
God this is boring, isn’t it. There must be something more interesting that I’ve been up to…
Aha! - I drew a picture the other night! For the first time in probably four years, I sat down with a drawing pad and drew a picture of some woman in a magazine. It was okay, but it’s obvious I’m a bit out of practice. I’ll probably get W to pose for me to get some more practice - I might even upload the results to this blog if enough people ask to see the drawings.
p.s. I just discovered that the word processor in Microsoft Works 4.5 puts carriage returns in where word-wraps were… is that crap or what?