Wednesday 17 September 2008

Pic of the day: That's something new indeed, or at least very very rare.

Probably too good to last

Each month I pay my bills around the 15th. There are two reasons for this. The most obvious is that I get my salary on the 12th, like so many state employees. (It actually shows up on the accound two days before, but 12th is the official payday, unless it falls on a weekend or holy day, in which case the last preceding weekday is payday. Pretty straightforward.) The other reason to pay bills on the 15th is that I have usually got all the bills for that month by then. It happens that bills show up at other times and with so short notice that I have to pay them separately, but far from every month.

This month, I thought there might be enough to pay my bills before the month's pay came in, since it had recently been summer. (We have a month without tax deduction in the summer, June or July, but we pay that much more the rest of the year. I believe it is to help people pay for their vacations. Because we all know the working people won't put aside enough money for their vacations unless the government arranges for it. The horrible thing is that it is probably true in very many cases.)

Yeah, there was enough. There was around two month's pay sloshing around in there, before this month's addition and after paying the dentist bill directly when I left the dentist. And despite this month having a pretty good crop of bills, these and the food budget took away only perhaps 60% of this month's after-tax salary.

I guess I should buy a new computer before Fate discovers that I have money and does something really unpleasant to me. Or I suppose if you're an old friend of mine and really want a book or a record or some such, you could send me a link to your Amazon wishlist.

"Unfortunately" there is not much difference between the desktop computers now and the one I bought last November. It has a quad-core Intel CPU running at 2.4 GHz, whereas the current model in the same price range (or just below) is 2.66 GHz. Although I would probably go for the 3.0 GHz dual-core, since Sims 2 can only use one of the cores anyway, but lets Windows run on another. Today I have two cores happily crunching protein folding for Folding@home, but running that marginally faster is not something I'd pay for. Sorry, scientists.

I don't know what happened to the "doubles every 18 months" but I guess these 10 months have for the most part not been among those 18. If I'm still around when Sims 3 comes out (in February) more of the 18 months will have passed, so perhaps there is a better machine. Or better yet, perhaps Sims 3 will use multiple cores, like a modern program should.

Or perhaps my job moves to somewhere else and I have to move with it. (They can't fire me, not without a really good reason, but they can try to shake me off.) In any case, I sincerely doubt I shall save up a small fortune and buy myself a pretty little house in the countryside with white fences. That's not the kind of guy I am. This is. The guy you see here in my journal, that's the kind of guy I am.