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Well I thought I might as well try to program in Turbo Pascal but what about what it was like in the 1980s. I remember when I was about 14 my Uncle had a computer - which had a testing system for network security. All it was, was a menu system in which you had to work out the the password if you cracked the password you could get further. Actually it was a form of penetration testing. All I can say is that the guy who created it was a big Star Wars fan, he spent the summer of 1977 seeing Star Wars every day he could - so he saw it 34 times over the summer. So it was easy to get that he used R2D2 then C3P0 though the final level was a bit harder and it was THX1138. He did make it seem that it was the Russian nuclear weapons activation for a bit of fun. Still it was impressive given that computer games were very very primitive.

To think I could do it well here is the most basic Turbo Pascal programs I could come up with that actually worked in version 1.

Program Hello;

Begin

clrscr;

writeln ('Hello world ');

Repeat unil Readkey;

Old style programming - well I just found the old Ada compiler that was used when I did my aborted attempt to get a degree in Software Engineering. I think I was the only guy in the class who had actually read all the online help, thanks to my 4 meg 486 running at 33mhz. I am currently using a laptop with 2 Gig running a duel Core running at 1.2 Ghz with Windows 7 and that is an incredibly out of date laptop but it still works. The thing that surprises me even more is that I even managed to get Turbo Pascal version 1 to work on it.

Well the thing that gets me is that I am currently running 30 and 40 year old software and as I started on Ada 83 I realised how much Python has borrowed off Ada.

The past 2 years have demonstrated how spoilt people are. Last year there was Donald Trump's attempt at a coup and boy was it a half arsed affair. The following Month the Generals in Burma did one and they did it properly in the Randal's honey Bager style that they didn't give a F**k. So on the day Trump managed to have five people dead and was aided and abetted by the Republican party to avoid the real consequences in a craven act of arselicking rarely seen outside the fringes of dark web pornography. I do wonder how the likes of Ted Cruz can sleep, but then the proverb 'The Bad sleep well' comes to mind.

Anyway I got myself a new laptop, it has to do with me having a cool slim and slinky laptop being too noisey and getting so hot I burnt my arm near the cool fan. I had Windows 10 and a 250 Gb hard drive and it ran like a brick as it only has 1.5 gb Ram and a piddly 1.2bg dual core processor. Looking at those specs from when I decided to start computing that would have been a super computer : today its an antique. Well, it had Windows Vista an operating system I managed to avoid but I had sort of seen it working long enough to see although it looked good it was bad. This may actually be due to the collective consciousness of humanity having thought it was a bad move. So I quickly upgraded to Windows 7 and when I was I realised that Windows 7 is just Vista that has been fixed.

So now it appears I am in the whole cycle of bad TV again, the Christmas and New Year was a pretty dull affair. The BBC showed the better stuff a new version of Around the World in 80 days which had more depth of character and a better story that the current Dr Who which had a story that was so boring that they should just get a pair of drunk guys to narrate it to make it exciting.

Then there is the streaming services, a majority of it is utterly awful yet there are some fun things. I did manage to see the new Series of Dexter, I missed the final series but season 7 was a bit of a disappointment as it became just a bit too contrived. Admittedly I thought season 3 was bad and if it had not been for the sheer awesomeness of John Lithgow I would have give up on Dexter. Season 5 with Johnny Miller : yes I loved him as Sick Boy in Trainspotting. Anyway watching Dexter looks quaint as you see all the chunky mobile phones they use and the weird looks like some flavour of Linux on the computers.

Now there is looking for a job - my career has been sort of the thing that has been missing in my life. I found out how much my gran interfered, the job applications hidden in a bag, the letters she read and hid and who knows the amount of phone calls I missed out on. Of course there was the whole answering my mobile phone, the one thing I never got was the need to carry my phone on me all the time. My mother does the same and as I can't get any TV reception in my room I have to endure the whole her sitting watching several hours of shit TV as it has become clear how awful the old version of All Creatures Great and Small was, they now have the ugly Mrs Heriot and the stories that appear to have been pulled out of someone's bottom.

Right I have been trying to read another legends of Dune book. As a rule Brian Herbert and kevin J Anderson's efforts at Dune are welll how would I put it, a waste of trees. I read the whole Butlerian Jihad books and they can be summed up with 1 dimensional characters - one very bad sex scene. Some of the most stupid plot lines as interesting characters did really dumb things for the sake of whatever the plot was about and well more dumb followed by some magic that was particularly not like Frank Herbert's writing. This resulted in the really shit ending to the Dune books as Dune 7 was turned from a well crafted story into an incredible disappointment.

Having read comic books I tended to avoid Super heroes : Superman was an incredibly juvenile character for many years as almost every issue gave him a new super power. Batman was a creepy vigilante who appeared to be in a gay relationship with his ward / junior crime fighter, This is exactly the level of writing that Brian Herbert's writing fell into. He is utterly clueless about computers it literally reeks of the old fashioned idea of computers - I dug out my old BBC Micro and the first thing I did was disassemble the Operating system Roms and it is a thing of wonder. This insight into computers is beyond Brian Herbert as the computers are almost as stupid as the people. Actually they were dumber.

The heroes were on the other side straight out of comic books, they were heroic but also utter dicks. Xavier Harkonnen is killed off just as he becomes interesting whilst they keep the cardboard cutout hero Vorian or as he is called Vor ... yep he gets a nickname yet is an utter dick shagging around the place. Anyway the whole Atriedes / Harkonnen blood feud is actually so banal. Xavier Harkonnen became a villian for political reasons whilst killing off a total bastard. Abulard his grandson becomes a villian for insubordination in a battle. The Great granschildren are spolit brats who are wanting to kill Vorian because they lack some form of funderstanding. Anyway the plot goes the way it was expected in Sisterhood of Dune and once I had got past the first 180 pages of turgid prose that did little for the story : it got surprisingly better and in less than a week I managed to finish the book still it took months to reach the hurdle.

Thanks to Covid-19 I have been watching too much TV and making a hole in my DVD collection as I have ended up buy DVDs I never got the chance to watch.

A Game of Thrones - this is a series where it started off good then went downhill. Good grief the last 2 seasons were progressively awful in fact it was the episode in which they had a Starbucks cup that highlighted that the just did not give a damn.

Vikings - fantasy Vikings with historical facts all over the shop guys who lived a century apart were brothers and so on and so forth but Ragnar Lothbrok is a billion times better than that terrible film with Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis.

Star Trek Discovery or STD and well it is an STD that can't be sorted out with a shot in the arm. It looks good but it has some of the worst dialogue ever seen in the Star Trek franchise. Season 1 was a mess, they ruined the Klingons and it just comes over as not being star Trek.

The Star Wars film - watching the last Jedi is that it is not a Star Wars film. It lacks the feeling of a Star Wars film and the dialogue was so dumb - the worst insult is to be called 'a snake' come on that is like the dumbest thing that could come to mind. It was a mess and if it had been done with a more competent director it may have worked. The only film I could say that it resembled was an appalling 1970s Italian attempt to rip off Star Wars called the Humanoid which was god awful

Then there was Solo which started off promising but well went down hill.

Listening to Radio 3: When I was yuounger Radio 3 was just a channel I had to pass through on the dial between Radio 1 and Radio Forth or Radio Luxembourg before it sort of was only advertising a crappy shampoo or Malboro cigarettes as it played the music that was banned by Radio 1.

Radio 3 was a station that played classical music and had the presenter jackets. Then whilst going to work in the morning at 7am to start at 8am I chanced on some amazing music on Radio 3. Well, Wogan was having a diatribe about something and Radio 1 was playing a track whilst not telling anyone what it was as the DJ was going on about how little he cared about music as he played a song that he was paid to play. Actually Radio 1 sort of lost my interest after john Peel died. Anyway Radio 3 does play some good stuff and at times it is actually playing better tunes than Radio . Admittedly Radio 1 did have the Friday rock show which went downhill due to Tommy Vance started to play Death Metal which is to Music to what a kick in the teeth is to dental work. Actually it might have been when the powers that be decided to have a cull of old DJs. I remember that DLT decided to jump rather than be pushed as he resigned on live radio. Still, to think DLT was the guy who introduced Jimi Hendrix and Cream on stage.

Still I recently watched 4 Music and Top of the Pops which was always a rather sad affai. I saw the episodes from the 1980s on BBC 4 and although there was some good music. There was some pretty awful performances as bands had to mime or even worse have the song interpretted by Dancers which is pretty awful. The high points were bands mucking around and Cheryl Baker from Buck’s fizz wearing a leather dress and it was obvious she was not wearing knickers which was the high point as the song was quite awful. Then there was Jimmy Savile a man who as a presenter was always the odd one out - he was at least 20 years older than the other DJs and apart from groping young girls, he dressed in a way that screamed dirty old man. Fair enough I didn’t beleive he was a paedophile but there was always something offputting about the guy. One time he was wearing a ring that had a glass eye in it which I was sort of creeped out by as I must have been about 5 or 6 at the time. Then there was the track suit - okay he did charity marathons so fair enough but as track suits were the uniform of dodgy old men when I was at school it should have raised warnings about him. Still, his charity work and the fact he would visit Mrs Thatcher and had an OBE as well as all his connections were the perfect cover. Until Louis Theroux did his documentary and well creeping me out was an understatement as he boasted that he used to beat people up and lock them in a basement during his career as a nightclub manager. All I can say is that Paul Daniels was a vast improvement.

I had held back on getting a decent phone for a while as frankly the only place I would like to insert a mobile phone is down someone’s throat. Last week I had to endure this guy’s life story as he was on the phone for the whole journey. The irony is my phone was a far higher spec one than his. Yep he had phone envy as I coul;d read news and listen to the radio on it. Actually I could listen to the radio with my old phone which was crap. Anyway this must list as a form of torture the delights of the Galashiels bus - a woman talking about how she hates ATM: fair enough ATMS can be buggers especially when you have to make sure someone has not installed something to steal your details. However, she was not talking about cash machines ... well that was my mind completely warped.