This was written last night.
I am sure that you are all glad to know that I am allowed to use my computer now. To answer jedimacfan’s question, I’m afraid I don’t actually know much about PC hardware, but some of the specs are as follows:I have an Intel dual-core processor, which is nifty, and pretty fast. I have two hard drives, so that my OS is either Windows XP or Fedora Core 4, depending on whether I’m doing normal work or Linux exercises. I have developed a passionate dislike for Linux, by the way; firstly, we are forced to use command-line, which is utterly unlike anything I have ever done before but reminds me disturbingly of the DOS systems people used when I was extremely small and people were still walking around with frighteningly-large hair, listening to cassette tapes and doing aerobics, back in the days before internet or even Windows 95; and secondly, Linux is not nearly as slick as Windows is. True, it’s free, and is undoubtedly the best free product I have ever experienced, and there is a minimal amount of ‘This is a useless box. We will now arbitrarily shut down your program without saving your progress and frustrate all of your attempts to discover why.’ – but all the same, in many ways it just doesn’t measure up to the slick, commercial products.(Anyway, getting back to my computer…)The case is really nifty, it’s silver and futuristic with a transparent panel that allows me to observe its inner workings, although this last point isn’t so cool because I have discovered that something in its interior glows bright green, necessitating the use of my teddy bear as wall between my eyes dazzling green light whenever I want to sleep. One of these nights I’m going to dream I’m in Harry Potter and someone’s casting an avada kedavra on me, and then things’ll really get irritating.The monitor is 17 inch (honestly, we use centimetres here, so why are we still given information in non-metric measurements? It’s not like I earned inches and whatnot at school, you know) and flat, and if you press the surface it shows pretty rainbow colours, although I haven’t actually done that because Dad explained to me that this was not a good idea after I did it to the computers at school last year.
Speaking of Dad, despite the late hour, he is currently on the family computer. A decade ago we had games on our computer, and Dad decided to find the disk that they were stored on. Chip’s Challenge, JezzBall, Tetris and Cruel (Solitaire variant) are among his discoveries. Last I saw he was playing
Taipei, ‘oriental game of skill and chance.’
I hadn’t seen the hairdresser for several months and my eyes were sending out a search party for my eyebrows, so today I got my fringe cut and had blonde streaks put through my hair. Honestly, I hate my hair sometimes. Bill Bryson says that his hair “seems to be listening, in some private way, to an album called Dance Craze ’97.” (Bill Bryson, ‘Notes From a Big Country.’ 1998, Doubleday,
London)Unfortunately, I know exactly what he means. I usually wear my hair out, in which state it has a windswept yet attractive look. It refuses to sit entirely straight, instead fluffing out. Should I tie my hair back, however, I inevitably have a vaguely Einsteinian look as though a mild electric current has run through me and then exited through my hair. A large quantity of my hair is too short to tie back (when I was twelve, I had a habit of yanking at my hair when frustrated, which usually resulted in snapped hair) and so four centimetres of hair stands out away from my face while the rest sits looking cowed. Neither hairspray nor gel fixes this. It is most frustrating.
Anyway, stuff to do, things to see, so I better go.
~PD
