27/11/2002 @22:16:57 ^23:36:55

Victory for capitalism!

I sent off a form to Tesco, yes, Tesco(!) and despite ticking heavily the "unemployed" box they still gave me their lowest denominator of credit card! Hey, consumer society, must help the masses to spend spend spend! I reckon they hope I'm some idiot who'll spend all his money - especially this near to Christmas - and then have to pay loads of interest and thus help Mr. Tesco feed his poor starving family.

But little do they realise! I never intend to use it unless absolutely necessary! No, see the idea is sometimes you can't pay for stuff with a switch card (yes Mr. Atherton I'm looking at you, oh and all those credit card age verification free porn services, hehehe, I'll be looking at you too) so you know. It's just something useful to have. If I use it I'll pay the money back within 25 days or whatever and never have to pay interest, and Mr. Tesco's poor starving children will not have their 9p tins of Value Baked Beans tonight.

Also, the card is purple and has a picture of a sunflower on it. How can you refuse?

They've got my number!

I sometimes read Digitiser, Teletext's gaming pages on Channel 4. It's funny but far too short since they rearranged the pages again to accomodate their new "youth lifestyle" section, what's it called, "Mobile Phone Text Message Massive Bling Bling MC Bigup Pass The Weed Bruv AARGH GET THE HELL OFF MY TV FUCKERS!", no wait, "Sauce" or something, sorry I got sidetracked, where was I...

Anyway, so today Digitiser have got some news story about people in South Korea addicted to the internet. Not very new news, I know, we all heard about that guy who died after playing online games for 36 hours straight in an internet cafe a month or two ago. But some research types have published a list of symptoms of internet addiction, and of course Digi put their little spin on it, and this is what was posted.

It's doubly funny because it's true! Filth-encrusted hat, oh man.

1337 M1cH3l5oN-M0rl3Y 3xP3r1m3Nt

Finally, at last today I got around to fitting my shiny new network card into the computer. So far however, I've been unable to determine which direction my computer is moving relative to the ethernet, and have to conclude that there's some weird shrinking thing going on, or the ethernet doesn't exist and the speed of data flow is a universal constant (about three kilobytes per second)

Or it might just be that I haven't got anything to plug into it yet.

Hopeless jokes aside I also made a new kernel etc. to add the drivers, and also all the firewalling stuff. That is, netfilter/iptables, the documentation for which I spent Saturday and this afternoon reading. I love this but I couldn't tell you why for the life of me, especially given that misuse could fuck your system six ways from Sunday.

In the meantime though I have to say there's something so very sad and lonely about a single network card that has nothing to plug into it.

PS Before the upgrade I'd accumulated something which to me is quite impressive. Check this snippet of output from the command 'last reboot':

reboot   system boot  2.4.18           Fri Nov  8 18:55         (18+22:42)

Yay, nearly a 19-day uptime! Not much by some standards but it's the longest time I personally have ever left a computer running...