25 November 2010 (Thursday) - PCs, Rants....

With “My Boy ^TM ” away for the night and me being on a late start today, I was looking forward to a lie-in. So today would be the day that next door’s dogs started screaming at 6am.

And then the post arrived. Waitrose have sent us an Xmas card with a money off voucher. If I spend forty quid with them, they will give me a fiver off the bill. That’s nice. If I use the voucher and spend forty quid with them, then they will be only “rather more” expensive than Tesco.

I then had a go on-line for a bit. My poor old PC is seriously struggling. The anti virus updater was having “General Errors”. After a bit (a lot) of fiddling around I eventually uninstalled the anti-virus and the re-installed it. I would like to say “successfully re-installed it”, but that would be tempting fate. Let’s just say that the thing managed to update itself, which it hadn’t before, and I’m hoping for the best. Mind you, it still sounds like a helicopter trying to lift an extremely heavy load.

To work, so as it was on my way I stopped off at Comet and PC world to look at their new computers. A few months ago I was keen on the idea of a “micro” computer: a tablet or a laptop. Having tried the Internet on my phone and found it to be impractical, I think I am looking to replace my PC on a “like for like” basis with another deskyop style PC.

The problem is that when I got my current PC four years ago, it was the cat’s cock as far as PCs go. And in the intervening four years I’ve rather lost the language of PCs. Looking at what was on the shelves in the shop, the specifications of the various machines might as well have been written in Greek for all the sense they made to me.

And for the second day running I found myself in agreement with the government. As I drove home this evening there was an article on Radio Four about how the government have decided to put a cap on how much housing benefit people can claim. The radio program featured an interview with Manni. Manni is twenty eight years old, has six children and rents a five bedroomed house in central London. I dread to think what the cost of renting such a house would be. But because Manni would seem to have breeding as his priority (rather than being able to support the fruits of his loin), he only has to pay sixteen per cent of the cost of renting his house. Tax payers stump up the rest.

The radio program then went on to interview a local community leader where Manni lives. Abraham Pinter (who runs many nearby schools) said how the government’s plans to restrict the amount of housing benefit people can claim will force people out of areas where housing costs are high. People will have to move away to areas where housing is affordable.

He wasn’t keen on the possibility of this because if this happened he wouldn’t be able to see so much of his grandchildren. I could understand that, and I sympathised. Until the interviewer asked Abraham how many grandchildren he had. Go on – guess. I nearly crashed my car when I heard. This bloke has twenty eight grandchildren. Twenty eight !!!

The entire radio program can be downloaded and listened to as a podcast here. Please could someone listen to it and explain to me how it can be fair that as a taxpayer I subsidise everyone else to breed like rabbits, whist having made a conscious decision myself to only have two children because (much as I wanted more children) I knew that I couldn’t afford a third.

And having had a rant, I’ll end on a lighter note. Over on Twitter there is another tweeter. He has yet to do his first tweet (or “twit” as he prefers to call it), but I’m reliably informed he’s enjoying the whole “twitting experience”. Why not send him a “twit”?...