A Pipe and a Keyboard

Grandad is really pissing me off.

He has this habit of messing around with software, and has installed a load of useless crap on this PC.  It could now be outpaced by a snail on Valium.

Of course I keep uninstalling things, but for every program that is removed, there is half a ton of crud that is left behind, whose sole function seems to be to slow the machine down and take up large chunks of disk space.

I wouldn’t mind too much if he used the programmes but invariably he plays with them for an hour or so, gets bored with them and then heads off to the pub leaving me with the mess.

His latest fad is Twitter.

I don’t like Twitter.  It is just mindless chatter that epitomises the modern generations and is a distraction.  Unfortunately, he seems to like it.  He has garnered quite a following by all accounts, though I can’t understand why.

I tried removing it, but he came back from the pub the other night, a little worse for wear and threw a mighty stroppy fit.  He demanded his Twitter.  As we are running low on crockery (again), I had to relent and reinstall it.

Now I have to suffer a barrage of notifications every time one of his pals writes something.  It is very irritating.

The sooner he gets bored of it, the better.

The Twit.

Sometime back in the early 90s, I bought my first PC.

At the time, I wanted a top of the range model, as I wanted it to be future proof.  I therefore went for the maximum amount of memory and a huge hard disk size.  Everyone said I was mad, and that I would never be able to fill the hard disk, but I went ahead and bought it anyway.

It had 2Mb of memory, and the hard disk was a massive 40Mb.  It was a very fast PC too, and ran at 16Mhz.  I was the envy of the office.  It was worth every penny of the £1,800 I spent.

I’m writing this on a laptop.  It cost me under €800.  It has 2Gb of memory and a 250Gb hard disk.

So it has 1,000 times the memory, and 62,500 times the hard disk space, and cost about one third the price.

Grandad uses the laptop from time to time, and has filled up most of the hard disk with his files.  Frankly, I’m a bit wary of those files, and I’m a bit scared to look at them, but he is very possessive about them so I have to leave them there.  He says it took him a long time to find those files on the Internet and has threatened violence if I remove them.

I decided to buy myself some additional hard disk space.  It is a 1Tb drive.  A Terabyte is 1,000,000,000,000 bytes, or the equivalent to 25,000 times my original PC’s capacity.  Numbers like that scare me a little.

I am expecting delivery any time.  My problem is that if Grandad finds out about it, he is going to appropriate it for his vast collection of images.

How many glossy photos can you store in a Terabyte?

A hell of a lot, I would imagine…

If any of you have been reading that other blog Head Rambles, you will know Grandad who is a crusty old bastard.

You will also know that he doesn’t do his own typing.  That is all done by ‘The Other Fella’.

Well, that’s me.

For the last couple of years he has been ranting and generally venting his spleen on an unfortunate world, and I have had to put up with it.  I have had to tolerate every single word of his ravings.

I thought the time was ripe for me to set up my own site, as a means of retaining some of the sanity that remains.  Now I will be able to write as I want, and not as that cantankerous old bastard dictates.

I’m not yet sure what I will be writing about.  Maybe some of my own thoughts?  Maybe some of the true stories about Grandad?

This could be interesting?