~It's All Just A Little Bit of History Repeating...
2004-11-21 - 1:17 p.m.

Bleh? I don't know how I'm feeling right now. Probably, mostly, there's the figitity feeling of knowing I should be at least doing some preparation and, really properly, should be trying to knock over comments for 5-10 of my students' reports. They're due on Friday, and we have a report writing day on Thursday, but I don't want to leave them all til Thursday, nor do I want to spend Wednesday/Thursday/Friday madly trying to get them finished. Nonono. But, you notice, I'm still not actually writing any comments. Maybe I'll keep a notepad window open and just write some as the thoughts occur. One report done is still better than none.

Dianne and Tim came over last night for dinner. Tim brought a longlong LAN cable to connect the laptop to the modem around the wall instead of cross-country room as I have had it. I made my best ever mars bar slice and everybody hoed into it, so I felt pretty chuffed. Mars bar slice is so easy to make. Since Dianne's taken all the good recipes with her, I made it off the top of my head. Basically, you just cut up and melt a stack of mars bars (I find 3 is a minimum) with a heap of butter/marg in a pot on the stove. This is not even vaguely difficult, it is just tedious because the nougat takes forever to melt properly and you have to continue stirring to make sure the melted chocolate, caramel and butter don't burn, but it's not at all tricky. Then you add enough rice bubbles so that they're totally covered by the mixture and can be all stuck together, but you don't want a heap of runny stuff dripping everywhere - when in doubt, go for too few rice bubbles, and add more butter beforehand if you think the mars bars won't stretch. Then you spread them out in a slice/baking dish tray thing, with glad bake underneath and put it in the fridge. You leave it til it begins to set, but slice it before it's set hard (so maybe 10 minutes after you put it in the fridge). Once it's properly set (20 mins more), it's nifty and yummy!

So simple. Anyway, I think I got a little snitchy at Tim at one point (well, I stopped laughing and I went to the fridge to get a drink, but there was the sentiment). He also downloaded Mozilla Firefox for us last night. Now, I trust Tim probably more than either Ross or Martin, who have both often tried to be helpful with the computer. Ross actually built our new computer and has always been so helpful, but he lives in his own little "I love windows '98" world sometimes and doesn't always have a good understanding of exactly what our computer needs are, and assumes some things. Martin just doesn't know half as much about other people's computers as he thinks he does and we try to keep him away from ours!! Tim's pretty good, though, he's been very helpful with many things. We've just been burnt too many times with people going ahead and doing things to our computer without asking. I tried to find out why we needed Mozilla Firefox and all he would really say was that it could do more things than IE.

Now, I'm not one of those who is against using anything not Microsoft, but I have no problems with IE. I like IE. Firefox may be a trillion times better and that's all good, but I don't particularly feel like learning my way around a new browser and changing all the preferences right now. I know this new computer has stacks of space, but so did our last computer when we first got it. Then we installed a gazillion programs and started using the internet and so forth, and we began having an unsafe lack of hard drive space. This time round, I've loaded a lot of my CDs into itunes and we're able to play short video clips and things from the net and all of that, but Mum and I are still really conscious of not wanting to take all of our new space for granted. We want to be able to download new programs and features without worrying about space, and that requires us to be frugal in other respects.

So I deleted Firefox today. It's probably a great program and I may download it again in the holidays or something and use it, but I don't need it, so why should I have to have it? I've begun to resent people who change things on my computer without asking. Oh, and I remembered why I got snitchy. Silly Ross forgot to put in a floppy disk drive, even though we said we definitely wanted one. He gave us one since, but hasn't been round to install it. Tim had a look at it yesterday and said that it was too small for the space we've got and we'd need a new front surround for that port-hole-thing so that it sits in there properly. So that's annoying of Ross, who made the silly computer, so should know that our only smaller front section is currently taken up with our zip drive (another thing which, in this case, Ross said we'd find fantastic and has quickly become obsolete, but we need it still because of all the things we've saved on the zip disks), didn't give us a bigger surround or something with the drive. I got even more annoyed, though, when Tim started telling me that we don't need a floppy disk drive anymore, that they're obsolete and we can get by with other drives and disks and things now, especially as he networked the laptop and that does have a floppy disk drive, so he reasoned that we could use that to transfer data. I started trying to tell him why we needed one, but he was smilingly not having any of it. In the end I just said, unsmilingly "Well, you know we want one!" and walked into the next room.

It's just annoying. It's like with my car. It's an old '86 Ford Laser. It takes leaded (lead replacement, anyway) petrol, it doesn't have intermittent sweep, it doesn't have power steering and it's not electronically fuel injected, so I have to try and figure out constantly how much choke to use to start it up. I would love a new car and could afford a new car, but I'm not getting a new car. There's nothing wrong with how my car works. It runs, I don't travel far to work so the dear leaded petrol prices aren't much of a drain on my pocket, it's got a lovely back wiper that I love and it has working air conditioning, which I couldn't live without. The only reason I'm thinking of maybe getting a newer car anytime soon is that I've been having trouble with my neck and shoulders and I'm thinking that I maybe should get a car with power steering. The steering isn't the cause of my problems, but I don't think it's helping much when I've got to park in tight spots or do a lot of manouvering. But there's no reason to get a new car just because there are better ones. This one is fine. Well, it's the same with floppy disks. They work for us, half our files are on floppy disks, we don't currently own USB drives or card readers or anything, so we have nothing else really to save onto that we can transfer between computers at home and elsewhere and save there as well as here. I trust Tim's advice when I ask for it, but I've decided that I don't really want it offered all over the place just because he knows a lot about computers and works for an internet company.

Oh yes, did I mention I went to bed late last night, woke up early and then dozed badly? So I suppose I'm tired enough to go a bit ranty!!