All alone in the night....with the Daily Mail....

Yes, the apocalypse is here and we're all doomed. Apparently, Gordon Brown was wrong when he said there'd be no more boom and bust. Shocking. And apparently this recession will be as deep as some other recessions we've been through and maybe not quite so bad as some others. Wow. And some nice hedge fund manager has told people not to buy sterling. Er, hang on..

Anyway, I may have only lived through 3 of these recession things, and a couple of dodgy downturns but I don't recall anyone boring for England on the subject on *quite* the same scale as all the column-writers and pundits are doing on the telly and in the papers at the moment. And I certainly don't recall reading as miserable a collection of views as have been doing the rounds in the papers the last few weeks. Honestly, if you just read the papers and watched the news, you really would think the apocalypse had come, and this time the Devil has chosen to turn up as a giant bank manager rather than Mr Stay-Puft.

Now, as stunning an admission as it may seem from someone with my mercenary tendancies, can I just say that whatever problems are here or are coming, IT'S FUNDAMENTALLY ONLY MONEY AND LIFE GOES ON. And if you step outside the front door, the world is still there. It strikes me though that some journos just want to initiate or at least wallow in misery as part of some bizarre mass hysteria. Strangely though, none of the pundits and columnists seem to be affected in the same way as the people whose lives they are writing about. Quel surpris.

So until people can write about these things a bit more constructively, I shall be getting my news from The Sun and Digital Spy websites, thank you. Might not keep me bang up to date on who has come up with the longest possible duration for the recession this week, but at least I'll have all the latest on Girls Aloud to keep me company.

AAARRGGGGGGHHHH!!!

As some of you know, I am a bit of a techie-type person but without any sort of techie-analytical type characteristics. I can't remember any physics stuff about circuits and electricity and my Commodore 64 training in how to print my name ad infinitum doesn't get me very far these days. I am however a phenomenally sore loser and hate to be beaten, least of all my some glorified calculator. So I get to the same result as someone who knows more about these things sooner or later, I just get there with a lot more swearing and gratuitous bashing of delicate circuitry. Yes, once again, I have suffered a crashed laptop, and once again I have fixed it. Took me TWO WEEKS mind, during which time I discovered that:

- following instructions didn;t fix my problem, but not following them did;
- 'Readyboost' doesn't do what it says on the tin;
- printer software suites that sit in your memory system are nasty little buggers that should be taken out and shot/uninstalled; and
- a certain well-known provider of an anti-virus program has produced an installation process that achieves more than any virus ever did.

I don't know why I expect software to work. I expect it to be produced by people who have some idea of what effects it will have when people install it. I think I assume this because as with a lot of companies, people can hide behind glitzy packaging and flashy websites. In reality though, they're probably called Dwayne, drive an old Ford Capri and smoke too many fags.