And I failed to check the train times: on Saturdays there are not trains from Freiberg to Dresden every 20 minutes, no, there’s one at 5.09 and one at 7.09. That latter not quite getting me to the airport in time.

So crack of sparrow fart it was again. And for some reason there’s no hot water in the flat that early in the morning……grumble, moan, whine…..

Which is going to arrive/leave from platorm 3. So I am on platform 3.

The station has 6 platforms. Number 6 is by the exit, and is reached by stairway 1. Numbers 5/4 (different ends of the same platform) and 3 are reached by stairway 2.

Platforms 1 and 2 are reached by stairway 3.

So, does the Hamburg Express arrive/leave from platform three, as the listings, my ticket and the station announcements all say? No, of course it doesn’t, silly. It leaves from platform 1 which is above stairway 3.

When I talk to the train conductor (who is having a quick breath of fresh air at the halt and this being an international train yes, he speaks English) he says yes, Platform 3 means up stairway 3, not anything as stupid as what is actually marked as platform 3.

Dang, why are the English so dim? Are you a conservative or something?

Ho hum. And that is today’s news from parts foreign.

Weather for Freiberg, Germany

-11°C | °F

Mon

Tue

Wed

Thu

Clear

Wind: E at 11 km/h

Humidity: 38%

-11°

-20°

-11°

-15°

-7°

-20°

-2°

-17°

Amazingly, I’ve decided not to walk 5 km along the road to go and look a second hand cars today.

It is entirely possible to be “an arrogant jerk with an ego complex the size of Texas” and still know what you are talking about.

Are you a ‘hate reader’?

Tell us if you deliberately read articles you know you’ll dislike, just so you can take issue with them

One of my posts at Forbes has been tweeted by that nice Mr. Fry to his 3. something million followers.

This one.

It’ll be interesting to see the end result….especially given that I’m paid on traffic over there.

dear tim,

your writing is terrible. please stop writing. do not reply.

best wishes,
M

I rather hope that it’s not this Michael Barbazette:

Michael Barbazette

Primary/Secondary Education Professional

Greater Chicago Area
Primary/Secondary Education

Past

SES Tutor at The Princeton Review
Tutor at UNO Charter School Network

Education

DePaul University

For if it were he must have been emailing at 3, 4 am. When all good little education professionals should either be in bed or in charge of their capitals.

I know have a useless 1 GB memory card and a 2GB in the machine, courtesy of the little shop around the corner. Fortunately, as is true all over the world, computer nerds speak English.

So I’ve now 1 GB of free RAM with Windows, Vodafopne, Firefox etc running in hte 1 GB they were all taking up before. For €25 which is a bloody liberty I tell ‘ee. Why I remember when that upgrade to 640 kb was a big and expensive deal…..mumbles into his grey beard and falls asleep at the table drooling in senescence…

I’ve got a new little netbook to travel with. And the little bastard just keeps running out of memory.

I’m already running Firefox without downloading images. And that seems to take 250 MB or so of the 1GB RAM available.

As far as I can tell cache is set  to 4096. I really shouldn’t be having Firefox repeatedly crashing as out of memory.

However, poking around and looking at system resources etc I seem to have something which is demanding 600-700 MB just as normal usage. I am running the Vodafone internet acess through a pen app. But that shouldn’t take up that much. And, looking in the apps running window of Task Manager, that is all I’m running, windoes and the Vodafone app.

So, err, where’s all the memory gone? And why isn’t some of it going to cache etc?

In short, how do I get a system that doesn’t keep falling over for being out of memory?

So, update. Looking at task manager as this thing is right now.

Firefox, 120 MB.

Mobile broadband, 39 MB

Exploer 15, Plugin Container 12 and nothing else over 5 MB.

And yet something is using 800 MB and change altogether.

1013 Physical Memory, 150 cached, 214 available and 71 free.

814 MB in use according to resource manager.

And I’m beginning to get an inkling of an idea: l;ast time it fell over I had a look there and there was 300 MB or so “modified” rather than in use or free.

So what’s doing that “modified” bit then?

For what does happen is that it’s fine from a cold start and then a few hours later it falls over (it makes Firefox fall over that is) until I cold start it again. So is there some process filling up memory?

Oh, and using AVG not Norton and AVG is pretty light itself isn’t it?

Update 2:

“Oh that’s a point, the standard Windows look-as-stupid-as-a-Mac interface uses up shitloads of GPU, and if your little netbook hasn’t got much of a GPU, that’ll slow it to a crawl, so turn that off and use the standard XP type theme.”

Erm, OK, how?

Today is the day to buy a desk and a chair! Woo Hoo!

More typing when I don’t have to sit on the floor to do it.

I know this street very well. Used to work in one of the restaurants you can see up on the high pavement, at another just up the little alleyway there. Bought my flat from the estate agents you can see (upside down, when the altercation is going on) at the other end of the street.

Indeed, my flat is a whole 100 yards or so up that alleyway.

And yes, that is the A4 that she’s parked her car on.

Dunno who the bird from Ulster is but I’m sure Mr. Luke, if he should care to comment, can tell us which shop it is she has in that area.

I did everything right of course, I’ve done this turn up in a new country and get organised thing before. You’ve no references, no contacts, no credit record, but you’ve got to find a flat, rent it, get the phones in, all that stuff. The secret is to have cash. When the estate agent says, well, how do we know you’ll pay the rent, just pay the rent in advance. In printed spondoolies. Works every time.

Pretty much everything else works the same way (except, in Germany, weirdly, the banks. You’ve got to get your rental contract signed off by the town hall before you can have a bank account. This can only be done on Tuesday afternoons. I got the rental contract on Wednesday morning. Ho hum).

The other thing you have to do of course is find a good bartender. They know everything. You solve one set of problems one day and then, supping a pint or two at the cocktail hour, ply the barmaid with questions about how you do this, or where the cheap furniture shop is, or the method of providing parking spaces.

Which is where I learnt that eastern Germany just doesn’t have laundrettes. Apparently.

Just odd.

Cut and paste doesn’t work, the formatting gets lost.

Printing to a .prn file does something I know not what.

So, err, how do I get Table 2 into a form that I can stick into blogging software?

Technologically ignorant middle aged man would like to meet geek……..

Excellent, OK, thanks, I have this now. And, err, with the near dozen versions I now have it appears that this blog is better than the Geek Squad…..

If you’ve got an old desktop computer with as little as 348MB of RAM, it could be fun and useful again with the help of Jolicloud.

As little as 384 MB of RAM?

Dang, I still recall the day my XT was upgraded to 640 kb.

Let’s imagine that Etxebarria is, indeed, going to teach creative writing. What she’ll discover on her first day is that the students in her seminar room have very little interest in how much money they are likely to make from their published work. I teach on just such a course at UEA, and I can report that no one tries to write, starts to write, keeps on writing, because they think it would be a handy way to make a living. I’ve never yet had a student ask about the finances of publishing – how much they might get for a piece of work, as if it were a piece of velvet or a stash of jewels. They don’t ask about sales, either. They write – just as published authors write, and will take the most congenial job that allows them to carry on writing – because it is an innate drive, an itch that won’t go away.

I can imagine that this is true of those who go on creative writing courses.

To extrapolate from those who want to write about upper middle class adultery in Hampstead to all who deploy words routinely is ignorant though.

I know why I write. For money. Sure, this blog thing, it’s fun, entertains me if no one else, allows me to try out ideas and I certainly started it simply to see whether I could actually write.

Comes, I think, from having played music as a child and a teen. You know, once you’ve gone through that process of Grade III*, climbing the Roman numerals until you fail at VIII, you know very well that practice is what is needed. You’ve simply got to do in order to get better at doing.

I thought I could write, certainly hoped that I could, and hammering down several thousand words a day was part of the process of exploring whether that was true.

Oh, and I should add, when I did start I was skint. So as soon as confidence had risen far enough that I thought I really could hack out 800 words that someone might like to pay for off I went looking for someone who would pay for 800 words. Found a few people too.

Running a small business, even if it is the shadowy international scandium oligopoly, doesn’t pay all that much nor, as everyone who has run a small business knows, does running a small business pay all that regularly. Wiggles in cash flow come out of the income of the person running it.

So eight years later around half of my income comes from writing. I might be unique in that freelancing is a more stable source of income for me than my other job.

And thus I refute Ms. Hughes. I am not a blockhead and thus I write for money. Even if this, the training ground, is done just for the fun of myself and a few hundred readers.

*There is no I or II, or at least was not, for the trumpet

Rightwing libertarianism recognises few legitimate constraints on the power to act, regardless of the impact on the lives of others. In the UK it is forcefully promoted by groups like the TaxPayers’ Alliance, the Adam Smith Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs, and Policy Exchange. Their concept of freedom looks to me like nothing but a justification for greed.

As I do/have written for two of the four I think it’s safe to assume that I’m one of those being talked about here.

And I’m afraid that’s a characterisation which makes me rather angry. For the reason that it’s bollocks.

If you look through the tens of thousands (yes, it is that many, from the formal here to the informal on this blog etc) pieces I’ve done over the years one of the major points I make is that there are rights that conflict and the question is how do we balance those conflicting rights?

Not whether we should, not an insistence that the rights of the powerful should trump those of the less so. But what mechanisms do we use to sort through which rights should prevail?

Monbiot is talking cock basically.

Is it something that exists in the UK?

If so, at which stores?

“I’m off for a deep hot bath. Maybe then I’ll feel like doing the housework”.

“OK, although having the bath before the work is interesting….”

An hour later. Wifie on sofa.

“Didn’t the bath make you feel better?”

“Yes, but how can I clean the floors without hot water?”

Umm…

No, I’m old enough and wise enough to know that technocratic solutions to boiling water are not what is called for here.

Plus I cuold do with a couple of hundred grand.

Promise not to leave my family for the sake of my job in return.

Mr Hartnett is Britain’s leading taxman but faced a political storm in October when HMRC confirmed it struck a deal with Goldman on waiving interest of “smaller than £10m” on a £30m tax bill. The tax was on bankers’ bonuses paid through an offshore company in the British Virgin Islands, a tax loophole eventually closed by Gordon Brown.

However, Mr Mba said the interest payments amount to around £20m. He said it includes £10.8m of interest accrued up to October 2005, on top of that from October 2005 to February 2011. The total liability facing the US bank was around £43m, not £30m, Mr Mba added.

And that looks very close to what I said had been going on two months ago.

No banks paid interest on the money up to 2005. Goldman arguably should as they didn’t settle but fought. But maybe they didn’t and that is where the £10 million comes from. Or perhaps they should have paid interest from 05 onwards, while they fought, but they didn’t. That would also be about £10 million.

So the whole argument is about which of the two interest payments they should have paid but did not, leading to the discussion about wherther they were “let off” £10 or £20 million.

I don’t say that I actually got it right mind, too early for that. Only that I do seem to have managed to lay out the problem properly, something no one else was doing two months ago.

All of which makes me very interested indeed to see what the rumoured coming enquiry is going to say about Vodafone.

Would be so very interesting if I was right there, wouldn’t it?