Wednesday 31st march 1999
 

love

i think that's the thing about films about love, they make you feel (well me, anyway) about your own love life, or lack there-of.

and it's kinda weird coz' i just watched this film about this guy who meets a girl, who's a lesbian, and he likes her straight away, without knowing this, and they hang out and stuff, and he falls in love, she, upon hearing this says "how can you expect me to change, just like that?" etc. but she does decide he's the one and stuff. so that's really cool, but then he finds out about her past, can't find an appropriate way of dealing with it and they break up. then that's about it, but there's stuff in there that make you kinda well up inside because you've never known the love they feel, and then they see each other a year later, they don't "hook-up" (slang). Hmmm... there's so many important people out there, female friends that i have and think the world of, and know that you know they'e not "the one" and stuff, but like knowing that i have had and do have an amazing friendship with them it makes me feel sad that i haven't met the person, who is the one, the one that will take that deep friendship to a whole new level of love.

Reliable PCs?

anyway - since my computer Janet is no longer with me, and Bob (the computer at my parents house) is waiting for a fresh CPU, I am reverting to using an Atari Ste connected to a PC monitor, which handles ST Hi-Res (my Elonex). But anyway, that brings me on to the subject of the "cost" of PCs. Our Ste when we bought it was £450 with 2mb, which went down to about £200 when they were last available. It's still working after 8 years of use - £200 for a reliable, well built, personal computer that you can use for years. How is this possible with a PC? The cheapest PC you can get now is around £400, and okay, I guess, but can you say that it'll work for 8 years? Pot-luck at that price, a machine that'll crash at every opportunity, with operating systems that wish to cause havoc at any time it can. To get a quality machine, which would have any chance of lasting 8 years you'd need to pay at least £1000 for a machine from the likes of Compaq and Dell, yet, can many of us afford to do that? No, we more often than not, spend £400-£500 on a machine that won't last much longer after the 1 yr warranty has run out. Just some ponderings I've been having.

Keys

But one thing that bugs me heaps about Amiga and Atari machines is the lack of pageup, pagedown, home, end keys. Well here I am using First Word + which took 2 seconds for me to get to OS, and then another 5 seconds to get to the Word Processor and guess what I stumble on, if you use shift and right arrow, you have the end key, and if you use the shift and left arrow, you have the home key, neat eh? Another neat thing - the monitor's noisier than the Atari! When is your monitor ever noisier than your PC? When the PCs off?

Windows 98 Not as much fun as I thought.

One thing I've noted after installing Windows 98, is it's liking of turning off your hard drive... I find that one turned off after a couple of seconds of not being used and then couldn't be waken up! Another I find going to sleep and then ending up with heaps of bad sectors - so I heartily recommend turning off all options to turn off the hard drive in Windows 98, and even your bios, even with systems that have new UDMA 2 hard drives! Another problem, my parents have a Graphics Tablet, which no longer work after installation of Windows 98.

And to close..

Well, life is strange, and uncertain, and after an amazing last week (just gone), I feel strange this week, I always do when I write these things, otherwise there'd be no point writing them (possibly), I think it would bum everybody out if I wrote about nothing, or about how happy I am such on such a day, but I think that if I do write how happy I am such and such a day, people will expect me to be happy the next time they see me. Oh yeah, another thing, if you can pick up an Atari ST (fm or e after the ST) from a second hand shop or car-boot-sale, then do so, they'll be at most £30, and you can plug them straight into your TV, and they read DD PC disks (the STe formats PC-Disks too) and they are an awesome back-up for when your PC goes down, and believe me, it will (one day), and you can use them to type some stuff up, and save to disk, and then when you need to get it onto your PC, you just take the disk over and load it up.