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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Rayner's LiveJournal:

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    Saturday, September 19th, 2009
    1:51 pm
    A bad case of gas
     Dear Meter-Reading Bloke,

    The digits 3 and 5 are not interchangeable, especially when you do it in the thousands column.

    HTH,
    [info]pfy


    (After a chat with customer services, my bill has just gone from £2058.68 to about £9)

    Saturday, August 22nd, 2009
    6:00 pm
    Another computer clearout
     I have the following computers, laptops, networking gear, and parts to give away, because I desperately need the space. They're all yours if you want 'em. If not, they go on Freecycle.
    • Tower PC. Intel Celeron 333 MHz processor. 128Mb RAM. 1 Gb hard drive. Tekram P6PRO-A5 motherboard. S3 ViRGE 4Mb video card. CD-ROM and floppy drives. Adaptec AHA-2490UW SCSI adapter.
    • Scanner (Primax Colorado Direct 9600) with driver/software CD and cable. Worked OK when I had Windows 98, but haven't had much luck with it under XP.
    • Two Netgear N524 network hubs. 24 ports, 10baseT Ethernet. Believed working, but not tested.
    • Intel AnyPoint 3240 DSL modem. USB connector. No cables, unknown whether it works.
    • Dell PowerEdge Scalable Disk System 100 (SDS100). Some kind of RAID disk array. Contains six disk trays with 9Gb SCSI disks (but has empty spaces for another two). I don't have the software for it, so out it goes. Warning - this thing is heavy, I don't recommend moving it on foot!
    • Laptop, Dell Inspiron 3000. Pentium 200MMX, 64Mb RAM, 2.1Gb hard drive. 800x600 SVGA TFT display, floppy drive, one USB port. Currently running Damn Small Linux. It seems to keep forgetting the BIOS settings, so the CMOS battery might need replacing.
    • Laptop, Dell Inspiron 3200. Pentium 266MMX, 64Mb RAM, 4.1Gb hard drive. 800x600 XGA display, floppy drive, one USB port. This one probably also needs a new CMOS battery.
    • Laptop, Dell Inspiron 3200. Pentium 266MMX, 208Mb RAM, 4.8Gb hard drive. 800x600 XGA display, floppy drive, one USB port. Might actually have a working CMOS battery. Running Kubuntu Linux, but I don't have the password.
    • CD-ROM drive for the above Inspiron laptops. Slots in in place of the floppy drive.
    • Some kind of audio cable, 5-pin female DIN to 2 male RCA.
    • CD-ROM audio cable (4-pin flat connector at each end)
    • Broken 386 laptop. Screen is cracked, battery is dead, floppy drive doesn't work. If you connected an external monitor and keyboard, you'd have a really ancient and slow PC. It dual-boots DOS and some ancient version of SuSE Linux. If you can use it for anything, it's all yours.
    Leave me a comment if you want any of them!
    Thursday, July 30th, 2009
    11:45 pm
    I am standing at the checkout in the supermarket. I have decided to stock up on various headache tablets, because I have run out. Anyway, I might, conceivably, get flu at some point. The belt whirrs along, and it is my turn.

    Checkout Guy: I'm afraid I can only let you buy two painkillers.

    I stare at the conveyor belt. There is one packet of aspirin (16 x 300mg), one of ibuprofen (16 x 200mg), and a box of Lemsip.

    Me: You know, I'd have to try really hard to top myself with those. Maybe if I crammed them into my mouth and tried to choke on them.
    CG: On this occasion, I'll make an exception.
    Me: Oh. Thank you!
    CG: You made a good point.
    Thursday, July 16th, 2009
    2:03 am
    Dignity FAIL
     I just saw a really fat cat run through some railings and get stuck halfway. There was a long, manic flailing of paws until he gave up, reversed, and stalked off huffily into the bushes. It is times like this I wish I could upload bits of my memory to Youtube.
    Saturday, June 27th, 2009
    4:07 am
    Arse moriendi
     Right. I've been thinking about this dead singer bloke and everyone's reactions, and I seem to be coming to different conclusions to most people. This means I must inflict my thoughts on you lot for instructive purposes.

    First of all, the most notable feature of all the Michael Jackson jokes so far is that they have been a bit crap. Look, people, it's not like there's a lack of comedy potential here. As an upstanding citizen of the Internet, I demand better depravity than this.

    Secondly, the important bit. When I die, you all have my prior permission — indeed, encouragement — to make the most tasteless jokes you can possibly think of. If they also involve a boxful of dead babies, a wood chipper, and elephant penises, even better. There's no bloody point dying if everyone's going to stand around all po-faced and solemn about it.

    You see, I will be dead. If there is no afterlife, I will be incapable of giving a shit. If there is an afterlife, I will have better things to do than give a shit.

    Furthermore, being all serious and respectful will be a distraction from the fact that there are enormous opportunities to consider. Just for a start, I hope that, within 24 hours of my death, there will be nothing left of any alcohol I owned.

    Before the authorities know I'm gone, I hope my identity will be used to relieve a major bank of a figure with many zeroes on the end, used to buy several tons of illegal explosives, and named as the sender on a crate of rabid badgers express-couriered to Tony Blair.

    You have my permission to take my corpse and fire it into the Houses of Parliament using a trebuchet, with a note attached reading "I hate the whole fucking lot of you". Alternatively, try to reanimate it as a zombie or cyborg or flying skull or something. Yes, I hereby donate my body to Mad Science. Don't accept ideas from anyone tedious like Damien Hirst. Gunther von Hagens' "The Science of Goatse" exhibition is the lower bound of acceptability here.

    If, when I die, you get an idea that's hilarious, insane, head-explodingly awesome, or preferably all three, I reckon you should go for it. Don't you buggers dare mope around being "respectful" when you could be thinking of ingenious ways to give those fucking Acai Berry spammers rectal prolapses.

    Right, I'm off to bed. If I should die before I wake, and all that.
    Sunday, May 24th, 2009
    5:20 pm
    Setting a bad example
     My pension company is urging me to save the environment by switching to paperless communications. Personally, I think they could start by not sending me two copies of my annual statement and three copies of the "Go Paperless" leaflet.
    Thursday, May 7th, 2009
    12:22 pm
    Monday, March 9th, 2009
    1:38 pm
    I bought a coffee and some fries at Burger King on Saturday, because I was about to go on a three-hour bus journey and needed something to keep me from dying of starvation before I got to the end of it. This cost three pounds and something, which is a rant all in itself. But anyway, this is how the transaction went:

    Me: *pays with a ten pound note*
    Server (handing me six pound coins and some shrapnel): Sorry, no fivers.
    Me: No worries. Just a sec, this one's a fake. And this one... oh, and this one too. Do you have any real money?

    He did, at least, exchange them without fuss, but I bet they went straight back in the till for the next poor sod who is in too much of a hurry to check their change. After all, he'll just get in a heap of trouble at the end of his shift if he's short by a few pounds.

    If I have to put up with much more of this, I'm going to start paying for everything with my own personal currency, which will consist of notes saying "I promise to moon the bearer on demand". This, you understand, is a more meaningful promise than you get from the Bank of England.

    And despite all this, I still seem to have another two of these bastard things in my wallet. To whoever's making them: if I find out who you are, I intend to cram them into all of your available orifices until you die of lead poisoning.
    Wednesday, March 4th, 2009
    1:51 am
    One of my earliest childhood memories.
     I have very few memories of the most impressionable, formative years of my life. A scattered handful, however, occasionally surface, and this is one of them.

    When I was a little toddler, I had a jack-in-the-box. But this wasn't the jolly, smiling, bouncy toy you're thinking of. Oh no.

    On pressing the little button on the front of the casing, the catch would click open and a low, moaning wail would shudder from the innards of the box. The pitch rose to the squeal of a bird being devoured alive as the lid very... slowly... crept... open, the shadows within revealing a limbless, swollen-faced mockery of the human form squirming from its prison. My parents tell me they tried introducing me to this infernal device more than once, and every time I burst into tears and ran away.

    Other children had alphabet blocks and teddy bears. I had a deformed screaming homunculus in a box.


    [EDIT]: The diabolical contraption has a web page.
    Tuesday, November 11th, 2008
    3:17 pm
    People who argue about the Monty Hall Problem really get my goat.
    Monday, September 15th, 2008
    6:14 pm
    If A. A. Milne were a financial journalist

    A news story on today's Yahoo Finance - possibly through being typed in a hurry - described the world's stock markets as "tumbley". I thought this was a charmingly whimsical way of reporting billions of pounds of losses.

    The next step was, of course, this:

    ( A Bear Market of Very Little Brain )

    I am sure someone out there can write a better attempt than that. Anyone feel up to it?

    Thursday, September 11th, 2008
    5:37 pm
    The Large Hadron Collider has a webcam.
    Sunday, June 15th, 2008
    3:49 am
    Blue eyed dressed for every situation...
     So. Yazoo are back together for a reunion tour, 25 years after they split up. Alison Moyet, she of the unmistakable husky voice. Vince Clarke, he who is the synthesiser-geek half of Erasure. Much wonderfully bouncy synthpop. There is practically no way it can fail to be awesome. I intend to go. Who else is interested?

    Their last UK date is at the Hammersmith Apollo, this Thursday night. So if you want to come, speak up now so that I can get tickets on Monday.

    (I know there is at least one person on my friends list who would like this. Come on, it's worth flying several thousand miles at short notice, right?)
    Friday, June 6th, 2008
    2:51 pm
    Tomorrow I'll be on a 20-mile sponsored walk along the Thames Path to raise money for BLISS, the charity for improving the chances of survival for premature babies.

    It's in support of BLISS to commemorate the organiser's two nieces, who were born last year at just 25 weeks, and who are both deeply missed.

    We are walking from Hampton Court to Windsor, with a lunch break at the ten-mile point in Chertsey. You can sponsor us by going to http://www.justgiving.com/blisswalk. Any and all support is welcome and very much appreciated. If nothing else, sponsor me for getting up at some horrible hour of the morning to get to Hampton Court by nine o'clock.
    Tuesday, March 25th, 2008
    6:47 pm
    I saw this sidebar ad for plastic surgery today.

    So... did she only have enough money to get one of them enlarged, or something?
    Monday, March 24th, 2008
    8:15 pm
    Computer clearout, part 1
     If you want any of these things, please comment. They are free to anyone who'll take them away.

    Also, does anyone have any spare SCSI cables lying around?

    Mini Tower PC:
    AMD K6 266MHz processor
    Gigabyte GA-5AA motherboard with AGP, PCI and ISA slots.
    64Mb RAM
    CD-ROM and floppy drives
    No hard drive or graphics card (I can probably find a hard drive somewhere if you want one, though).
    AT case

    Bay Networks Advanced Remote Node (model CV1001004). Two 10Mbit Ethernet ports (RJ45 and AUI connectors). Three 44-pin serial ports. ISDN BRI S/T module. DB9 serial console. DB9 modem port. Has a 32Mb PCMCIA flash memory card. 1U rack-mount case. Front bezel keeps falling off. Came out of a skip and I have no idea what I'll ever need it for.

    Four 1Gb IDE hard drives.
    Two CD-ROM drives (IDE).
    Four 3.5" floppy drives.
    3.5" to 5.25" mounting kit, for putting a floppy drive or similar into a 5.25" bay.

    Yamaha sound card (ISA slot)
    10/100 Ethernet card
    Sound Blaster Vibra16 sound card (model CT4170).

    11 IDE cables, various lengths
    5 floppy cables, various lengths
    A couple of CD audio cables (the ones that go from a CD drive to the sound card).
    2 KVM cables (I think - they've got male PS/2 connectors on each end, anyway).
    Modem cable
    Phone extension cable

    Heat sink and fan (from a Pentium 2, I think)
    Small pair of PC speakers
    Mouse pad

    Bag of broken stuff: hard drives, motherboards, expansion cards, RAM, floppy drives, etc. Maybe you can use them for spare parts or in a craft project or something.
    Wednesday, March 12th, 2008
    6:15 pm
    Friday, March 7th, 2008
    7:06 pm
    Overheard on the train
     "...he put the stuff on his ear, like. That was before he caught fire..."
    Tuesday, March 4th, 2008
    1:19 am
    The knob-enlargement spammers are getting more and more surreal:

    Many men suffer from a smaller than average manhood, but finally, you can change that

    To hell with mathematics, now everyone can be above average!

    12 more inches aint so bad, dont you think so?

    Twelve more inches? Either standards have gone WAY up, or I'm getting spam intended for elephants.
    Wednesday, February 27th, 2008
    11:40 pm
    Chilli chicken + poor chopstick control + eyes = FAIL

    Dumpster-diving two oscilloscopes on the way home = WIN
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