pumpkinstrokemarrow

One of the things that the econuts (or perhaps econannies) run on about these days is the fearful waste of electricity involved in leaving all one's PCs switched on, more or less all the time, power saving strategies and widgitery notwithstanding. It occurs to me, given the fifth law of thermodynamics or something, that all the electricity being pumped into one's PCs must emerge, sooner or later in the form of radiation: heat, light, sound or whatever. And that all of this winds up heating one's house (or bedsit, as the case may be). Furthermore, that the amount of heat is a constant multiple of the amount of electricity consumed, irrespective of the way in which one chooses to effect the conversion. So, in the winter, having one's PCS on is a perfectly respectable way of providing a bit of background heating. Argument falls in the summer, so perhaps the answer is to blog in the winter and bean in the summer.

Talking of which, the fourth row of broad beans went in yesterday afternoon. Preparing the ground going a bit quicker now that it has dried out a bit. Dug the ground needed for one row - a patch perhaps 3 feet by 15 feet - in two takes in around 4 hours altogether. But still getting new mice sign in the rows previously sown. Assuming that is that the micro mole hills are indeed caused by mice digging for beans. I rake them out on every visit so that I get to see the new ones.

Saw a rat without a tail on the way out. Not very nervous as it let me cycle right past at about six feet. At least it looked like a rat without a tail. So; either, despite two reasonably good looks, I did not see the tail; or, a fox had eaten the tail; or, it was of rat like appearance but was actually something else, but a something else without a tail (a TB informant avers there is such an animal); or, possibly, it had shed its tail (like certain lizards) and was in the process of growing a new one. We will never know.

Another TB informant spent some time explaining to me last night that games computers run monolithic programs on near naked computers. That is to say that they do not avail themselves of the services of Windows, Unis, Linux or any such thing. Which I found rather surprising given that the formerly specialised computers you see at points of sale and registration - for example in shops and airline terminals - all seem to run on Windows these days. The convenience of having a proper operating system completely dwarves (dwarfs?) any performance hit one might take. The argument is presumably that games need all the power they can get and are not going to spend a bean on running windows. And they are probably written by serious geeks who like beavering away down in machine code and who would resent working in a proper development shop. Maybe we will get to know. Interesting point, so I must try and think of some operating system services that a games geek might be interested in.