October

1st. October already and I still haven't managed to start typing up the June page of this diary. Mum and Dad came and cut back the prickly pyracantha hedge and other plants around the patio. It looks much neater now and the bright red pyracantha berries can be seen to better advantage.

Estonia

2nd. My regular carer came back from a holiday in Eastern Europe and gave me a picture showing a scene in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. Much of the old part of Tallinn looks like this, she says. Had to look at a map to locate Estonia and Tallinn.

3rd. Received a postcard which my carer sent me while she was in Estonia.

Labradoodle

On the Jimmy Young show the regular pet expert was asked if he knew anything about a breed of dog called a Labradoodle. It's a cross, of course, between a Labrador and a standard poodle. According to the expert it has an excellent temperament but I can't imagine what the animal looks like. The poor thing must get a laugh every time its breed is mentioned: it's hard to take a name like "Labradoodle" seriously.

[You can see what it looks like at www.labradoodle-dogs.com.]

New computer (1)

3rd. Ordered a new computer from Multivision Computers. I've never been able to install most of my scanner software because the disk of my existing computer is full. Furthermore the 40 megabytes of memory which it has is the maximum it can take and that's not enough to run Netscape 6 comfortably.

When I was in charge of a university Unix system in the late Seventies we used to store all the essential system files and all the files belonging to over 100 users on a single 80 megabyte disk pack. I allowed each student one megabyte of filespace, which was quite generous in those days. Those disk packs were big heavy things, about 45 cm in diameter and about 7 cm thick. I remember the capacity clearly because one of the packs had it printed in big letters on the case and every time I walked past the rack where the packs were stored my eye would be caught by what appeared to be the word BOMB but was really 80MB.

In contrast the old laptop which I've been using up till now to access the Internet and maintain my website has an 800 megabyte hard disk—and even that is pathetically small by today's standards. The new computer will have two 20 gigabyte hard disks—50 times the disk space of the laptop. Should keep me going for a while.

10th. New computer delivered, a week earlier than expected.

12th. Unusually warm sunny day for October. Very pleasant out.

Windows Me Media Player

The first time I inserted an audio CD in the new computer's CD drive I was surprised first to see Windows Media Player start up by itself and then to see it display coloured patterns moving in time to the music. It never did that in Windows 95. These "visualizations" are cool! Some of them are reminiscent of the opening sequence for Doctor Who (Jon Pertwee period). Particularly clever is the way Windows Media Player can change smoothly from one pattern to another within the same group.

18th. The nasturtium has produced a pretty trumpet-shaped flower, golden yellow with red markings. The plant's sap has a pungent smell which makes you screw up your nose—hence the name "nasturtium", from Latin nasus tortus, twisted nose.

UBOS

Switched on a children's programme called UBOS to see what it was. Turned out to be a cartoon series about a school for young wizards and witches. Now where have I come across that idea before?

Power cut

23rd. The power went off just before 6.0 p.m., as I was about to watch Star Trek: Voyager. Went out to see what was going on. There was a fire engine standing by the pub at the end of the road so I walked up there to take a look. On the way I met a neighbour who said that there had been three or four explosions and a lot of smoke at the pub. But when I got there I could see no sign of damage or smoke. It wasn't even affected by the power cut: the lights were on and people were drinking as usual. As it was such a short distance I had—unusually—gone out without my brolly, so of course there was a heavy shower and I got drenched on the way back. Had a cold evening meal by candlelight. Power was restored about 12.30 a.m.

24th. Was got out of bed this morning by the door buzzer going.

Of course the timeswitch which is supposed to unlock the door for the postman stopped for 6½ hours during yesterday's power cut. I'll have to put it right. Each group of six or eight flats in the Court has its own front door, each front door has its own timeswitch, and all of them will be wrong. I reckon the postman will have a lot of buzzing to do.

New computer (2)

26th. Finished testing the new computer. I found a number of problems and had to make several phone calls to Multivision Technical Support about them. The most serious problem was that when I connected my printer to the parallel port it kept producing printing errors, most often inserting vertical whitespace between the top and bottom half of a line:

Multivision weren't able to solve this initially and for a while it looked as if I was going to have to reject the computer. The thought of having to repack it (it had taken me three days to unpack it), pay for a carrier to take it back, and then probably argue with Multivision over my right to a refund made me feel quite depressed. Fortunately they did get the problem sorted out in the end.

27th. According to today's page in TV Times, "Clocks go forward one hour at 1.00am, when Greenwich Mean Time [GMT] ends and British Summer Time [BST] begins." They think summer is coming. If only!

What colour should a computer be?

One of my lecturers at university was Iann Barron, then of Computer Technology Ltd., now best known for his subsequent work on the transputer. During one lecture he told us that one of the most important questions to ask when designing a computer was "What colour should it be?" He said that in the future computers would increasingly be used in offices, so the right colour for a computer was brown, to match the office furniture.

In actuality a sort of pale grey seems to have become the de facto standard for computer equipment. Nearly all the units making up my new computer are this colour (see picture above), even though they are from a variety of manufacturers.

A few years after that lecture, Iann Barron's company brought out a new range called System 2000 (pronounced "system twenty double-oh"). And were the modules brown? No, they were a garish orange!

On the Computer Unit coffee room whiteboard, one of the students did a good drawing of Snoopy in his fighter pilot helmet, shaking his fist skyward and saying, "Curse you, Red Baron!". As a joke I changed it to "Curse you, Iann Barron!". A month or two later I came into the coffee room one day to find that it had changed again, to "Curse you, Colin Taylor!".