Past Diatribes

(To the best of my knowledge, I am the only man in Dublin with a Toaster Oven.)

A MINOR FIRE occurred on 5 December, but this was not due to any electrical fault of the part of Black and Decker or the ESB (Electrical Supply Board). Carmel placed a plastic bag on top of the Toaster Oven while in use. The damage, other than some burnt, stuck-on plastic gunk, proved negligible, and my mission to educate the Irish in the dangers as well as joys of Toaster Ovens is under way.

WELL WELL WELL. The Christmas season in Dublin! You should see the decorations up on Henry Street, the automated display in Cleary's window, and beautiful lights in the trees on O'Connell Street. It's fantastic. Everything is all set to knock the socks off "the culchies" when they congregate in Dublin on the 8th to do their shopping. (That's a tradition, here: everyone from "down the country" hits the capital on this one day to buy all their pressies.)

Mentioning O'Connell Street, talk nowadays surrounds the new monument they are going to build there to mark the millennium. It's going to be a giant silver needle, 450 feet high, I hear. Seeing as it will cost approximately four million pounds, reaction to the proposed "Stiffie by the Liffey" is decidedly mixed.

Well, whether it be for Christmas or the millennium, high on my wish list is some more hard disk space. The laptop I bang away on with me two fingers (as Carmel puts it) is a 80486-75 machine; in English, that means it's pre-Pentium and at least four times slower than any bottom-of-the-line system selling today. The other specifications have been left as far behind as the processor: my hard disk is a meager 540 MB. Still, it's absolutely sufficient for my present needs and I love the thing to death. I just wish I had some free space to store all my lovely work on!

If you are in my shoes, here's an interesting tip that freed up something like 60 MB of much-needed room: get rid of the "secret" copies of all your e-mails!

I was surprised to learn that a copy of everything that had ever been in my "in" box, "out" box, "deleted" box and "sent" box was still lurking in my hard drive. These files can be found by going into C Drive, Program Files, Internet Mail and News, Default User, Mail, and then the four files found there with .mbx extensions. Open these up in Word Pad or some other word processing format and you'll see.

Funky, huh?

I wonder if you could solve some crime knowing this----- "So, Mr. Gotti, you DIDN'T order that Mayor Cathcart get whacked? You deny all knowledge of the insidious, murderous plot?!" ---- "You prove it, copper, there ain't no evidence to finger me- (them electrons's been all recycled, like you gonna be- heh heh heh-)" Some shit along those lines.

Anyway, I'm getting off the point. I erased all the content in those .mbx files and wound up with about 60 MB breathing room, found the functioning of my Internet News and Mail programs unaffected, and arrogantly challenge you to try to connect me in any way, shape, or form to the illustrious downfall of Mr. Newt Gingritch- heh heh heh---