Swings and roundabouts

One minute I'm singing the praises of the solitary life, and the next minute my friend D's kid writes this in his Facebook status update --

[Anonymous Son-of-D] is installing software to replicate a COM port via USB to trick a DOS program into working in Vista

-- and I am re-plunged in gloom.

I mean, if I'd ever got round to having one, chances are s/he too would have been able to say that kind of thing, and all that that implies for personalised helpdesk service finely tuned by filial obligation.

And if, like D, I'd had four ...

Oh well.

Computer says no

When I bought my strawberry iMac in 1999, the Bloke immediately christened it Pink Patty. When I replaced it with the white eMac in 2004, the new model seemed to me to be a boy (possibly because it wasn't pink), and was therefore inevitably christened Patrick White.

(Who was, of course, gay, or as he would have preferred to put it, homosexual -- which is often also signified by pinkness, though not pinkification, which is reserved for full girliness. How's that for a little gender identification construction problematisation clarification valorisation.)

Now Patrick White is one of the many computers dotted about the country who that think daylight saving finished over the weekend. So every time I look at the on-screen, erm, time, I have to add an hour.

Yes, of course I know how to fix this. But I have a sort of atavistic fear of contradicting and correcting any entity called Patrick White. The old poppet has been dead for over seventeen years now, but the idea of gainsaying him still makes one shake in one's shoes. So I might just leave it alone, and by next week the time will be correct again with no intervention from me. Patrick White is merely ahead of his time; 'twas ever thus.