some new computer thing

Gaah. Today, after quite improbable levels of delay, I actually moved into my new office, having sacrificed a live chicken employed seried ranks of increasingly miffed and querulous emails to persuade the IT department to come and install the new computer. The eventual installation was annoying since, while the consultant did it remotely (watching the possessed cursor do its arcane stuff always amuses the hell out of me) it turned out to be very simple - everything was here except the IP address, and after some of the more baroque manifestations of my technojinx in the last year or so I can acquire an IP address more or less in my sleep. I could thus, drawing upon my Elite Ninja Computer Superpowers, i.e. the ones that have randomly collected on me like moss after years of dating computer geeks, have done the whole installation myself over a week ago, preventing a world of irritation and delay. Growl. On the other hand the IT dept almost certainly frowns on overly empowered clients, and there's a good chance their Black Maria might have carted me away the instant I triumphantly achieved connectivity. Perhaps it's better this way, when all I have to worry about is the strong likelihood that I'll fall over the network cable and kill myself, it being too short and sitting smugly at ankle height just behind my chair, like a rake in the grass.

The other challenge is to survive the irritations of the moving-in period. A new computer annoys the hell out of me - everything's in the wrong place, it's like new clothes, ill-fitting and uncomfortable, missing my favourite buttons, pockets and fancy decorative doodads, and furthermore some sod with a poor sense of humour apparently sews the ends of the pants shut at intervals. (This translates as the tragic realisation that a new computer has not, as I'd subliminally hoped in defiance of all logic, miraculously solved the problem of the so-called "operation" of the thing that my Cherished Institution amusingly identifies as "bandwidth". Tchah.) On the other hand, I'm deriving considerable amusement from watching student attention wander to my bookshelves, which now display a choice selection of fairy tale, science fiction and vampire novels, causing a gratifying tendency for their little minds to wander in the middle of their delineation of their particular problem.

Must now finish annotating this unfortunate Tolkien thesis, which has once again been pushed to the end of the To-Do list by the lost and plaintive incursions of students. Excelsior!

Last Night I Dreamed: a confused sort of magical apocalypse, entailing massed ranks of tornadoes, waterspouts and typhoons advancing across the bay on Cape Town. The salvation of the city rested in the preservation of a small handful of assorted nuts or seeds, which had to be kept safe from the Bad Guys and planted in a walled garden somewhere. Hip-hop teens may or may not have been involved.