Is This a Game or is It Real?

How to prepare your laptop for a jam session the following day:

1) Find that Reason is not, as you thought, installed. And that both partitions are full of stuff that needs to be cleared off, but backed up first. Four DVD-Rs of it.
2) Try to burn a DVD-RW. Fail. Try twice more with the same result.
3) Try to format the DVD-RW on the laptop. Find that it won't. Try to format it on a different computer. Succeed.
4) Try to burn to the formatted DVD-RW. Find that the laptop still can't.
5) Grudgingly decide to use four DVD-Rs. It takes roughly an hour per disc.
6) Delete the files from the hard drive. Dig around the piles of CDRs, in search of the latest Reason. Install.
7) Test the speakers at 0600. Remember they'll need to be good and loud to be heard over the guitar.
8) Try desperately to get some sleep, because the jam starts at 1200.

As I write, It's 0430 and I'm nearly at (6).
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Dino has learned to climb stairs. But only when no one's looking.

Also, as mother and I have independantly discovered, he doesn't 'get' singing. If you sing to him, he gets puzzled and unnerved.
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I'll have to look at OpenOffice for Christina C's computer (thanks to Nick for the recommendation). I may end up using it on my own.
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While burning those DVD-Rs, I'm reading PDF excerpts from books on politics and history that I came across while researching Herman Kahn.

Kahn was a big wheel in the RAND Corporation and founder of the Hudson Institute - both American early think tanks concerned with the cold war 'balance of terror', and with using game theory to work out strategies for a possible nuclear war.

He was a phenomenally bright man, with an IQ reckoned at 200 or 220 and a head teeming with ideas. Some plausible (that the Russians weren't stupid monsters, that nuclear war was possible), some a bit daft (that there could be a winner, and life afterwards would be bearable), and some completely barking (that game theory could win it by modelling the Soviet mindset). In fact, a normal person, but writ very large.

Intriguing site. Though appalingly catalogued - perhaps it's a replacement for the photocopied handouts usually given to students in lectures.
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Reading on, I'm reintroducing myself to game theory, starting with the famous Prisoner's Dilemma. If taken literally, it should be impossible to buy a bar of chocolate in a shop, because the customer will shoplift, and the assistant will refuse sale for fear the money may be counterfeit.

In fact, the well known 'system of trust' in banking institutions couldn't exist. And the IPD extensions of revoked and restored trust don't help.

Speaking vaguely of which, three ebay fraudsters were jailed today for conning small amounts from hundreds of bidders.

If a stranger walked up to you in a shop and said they'd undercut the shop's prices by sending you the item in a week if you paid cash now, would you trust them?

Maybe greed creates gullibility, but only for small gains. The 'Nigerian' email is still a failure, and it promises wealth beyond the dreams of avarice.