I have returned to the sunny (well grey - but daylight at least) streets of south east London and it hasn't really changed very much. According to my brother this ' walls closing in on me' feeling is normal upon returning home from uni. I'll probably write more about my current environs in a while, for the moment I'm preoccupied with the thingy I'm writing this on.
I'm currently using the old computer in the spare room while my dad plots about linux based networks with squid proxies. He will put in a network in the house (something he has been planning on doing for years) and so soon I will be able to update this thing somewhere a little more private (a strange consideration I know considering anyone with enough patience to put up with my whining can read this thing) but its an issue for me - I don't like having people watching me over my shoulder while I write even if its an essay or something.
I'm amazed by this computer though, it is so staggeringly slow that what I'm typing doesn't appear on the screen until about 3 seconds after I type it and the computer has made a variety of thinking noises - at which point entire sentances appear in big blobs. I don't remember this thing being so slow before - I know that it could be that it just seems slow compared to my current PC which has about 4 times the power but I would have remembered it not having enough power to show type in real time with 1 application running.
I'm thinking that perhaps the principles of entropy apply to computers. As a computer gets older and more filled up with random old files and applications - whether deleted or not - the power of the computer will dwindle away until eventually it ceases to have any usable processing power at all. This process is exponential, accelerating towards the end of the process. It seems that in the time that I have been at university this thing has been decaying at a greater rate than it was previously and probably in a relatively short period of time this once mighty machine will crumble off to the great spare bedroom in the sky.
Its a bit sad really seeing as I can remember when this was a towering machine of great funkyness. It also seems to me to be a reason why deep thought takes so long to come up with the answer, probably by the end of the 7 million years it was nearly useless.
