Kerblam! by Christopher

Tuesday, May 20
Personal debt, and amusing placenames

I was somewhat alarmed to re-read on the BBC News site last weekend that personal debt in the UK passed the one TRILLION pound mark almost four years ago - and it's well on the way to doubling. That's a huge amount of money (and a UK trillion is far more than a US trillion). I also learnt that, according to the BBC's Hugh Pym, "If you took £1 trillion worth of £5 notes they'd cover a county the size of Leicestershire." Blimey.

We also keep on getting debt collectors' notices through our letterbox for one of the tenants who lived in our house before we moved in, and at last count he's run up more than £4,000 worth of debt... How do people manage to live so far beyond their means for such a long time without realising that they'll probably never be able to get a decent credit card, loan or a mortgage again? Having bad credit to me is worse than being shot; at least you can recover comparatively quickly from most gunshot wounds.

Oh, and then on my random pootles around the Interwebs, I found a town in central North America called "Truth or Consequences". I'm not kidding: //www.flickr.com/map?place_id=aTimE6CbApWrrSmE for the cold, hard proof (and geotagged pics).

This then sent me off on a voyage of discovery, finding weird placenames... This compilation of US and UK names had me scratching my head in places. I mean, what could possibly convince someone to christen a town with a name like Monkey Eyebrow?

Anyway, that's my thought for the day. Now time to go back to trying to wash the paint off my hands (we were painting our living room this evening.)

Labels: bizarre, grumpy old man, kerblam, money, names, paint

Dragged out of Christopher's memory and pasted
into his blog at 5/20/2008 02:39:00 AM. Roughly.
Blog ID: 5010052612680702259· | Permalink

Saturday, April 5
Feel old? Yeah, so do I.

I just cleaned about 10gigs of MPEG-2 video files off my PC (DVB-T rips)... At about 2 gig per hour, they soon build up. Three DVDs later, 10 gig more free space! Woo and yay.

My first PC had a 10 gigabyte hard drive in it, and I just remember thinking "cor, I don't think I'll ever fill that up..." How wrong could I be: my fileserver (other machine) has more than 1 Terabyte of (mostly filled!!!) storage in it, with more planned.

And to think my old Acorn A3000 has a hefty 2Mb of video memory, and something like 16Mb total system memory... Hardcore. I loved how you could dynamically alter the memory allocated to the graphics card so you could up its allowance to play games :D In fact, my latest dabbling in the wonderful world of computers is a project to build my own Linux-powered SAN - it'll be a steep learning curve as my commandline Linux knowledge is currently far too limited! (Example: I had to google to find out what rm -rf does... In short, don't ever use it unless you have a least a couple of free days afterwards.)

Oh, and I was rushing out of work on Friday afternoon, my foot slipped off the (huge) doormat they have and my foot went kinda-sideways off the edge of the mat. Quite painful, and I had to drive home with it - and now it's giving me gip every time I put weight on it. Not pleased about that.

Found another grey beard hair this morning too when I was looking in the mirror. Great.

I feel old before my time :( I was up at 4am today too, because I went to bed at about 8:45pm on Friday night! Pass me my slippers...

Labels: age, grumpy old man, kerblam, moan, newspaper, old, pipe, slippers, whinge

Dragged out of Christopher's memory and pasted
into his blog at 4/05/2008 09:20:00 AM. Roughly.
Blog ID: 420113903992953304· | Permalink