Don't Rain on May Parade

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Happy Mayday.

Also known as International Workers Day. If you're pagan it's the Festival of Beltane, or the Summer Solstice, and if you're German too it's Walpurgis Night. If you're American it's probably Labour Day, unless you're a bit mad, in which case it's Loyalty Day.

It's got a christian meaning too but no one can remember what it is. That doesn't seem to matter - it still gets celebrated.

It's also local election night all over the country, but that doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

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I spent yesterday lugging unwieldy furniture up and down stairs, heaving sacks of rubble into a skip, and on one occasion dropping a large bag of bricklike books onto my foot.

I spent today talking to bureaucrats.

On balance, I prefer yesterday, which I why I agreed today to do yesterday again tomorrow.

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Another name from the past contacts me. Aimee, who I met at university, and who sat through several weeks of me trying to teach them esperanto...is now an esperantist!

She's also the author of the online equivalent of keeping a list of things to do in your pocket - with the benefits that you don't have to decipher your own handwriting and you can't accidentally send it through the wash. Which always happens to my post-it notes.

She's looking to practice her esperanto and renew our acquaintance. Sounds good to me.

Iuj amikecoj daurxas, iuj mortas, kaj iuj dormas dum jaroj. Oni neniam scias kiuj faros kiun.

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How large is your XP?

On installation, WIndows XP is about 1.3GB. But half an hour's work removing unnecessary services, components and backups gets it down to 1 gig. Some more work with tools like XPLite and you can have a fully functional XP of 800MB - especially if you remove the driver and DLL caches after installing all your software.

With some more tweaking, in particular the removal of networking capabilities, you can have a 600MB installation that can't access the internet, but can do most of the other things you'd want to do on a computer. If you're devious (or you use nLite), you can get an XP of 400MB that's fast and good for computers dedicated to one or two tasks - like being a Digital Audio Workstation - though it might be unstable.

After many trials (and a few tribulations) I've settled on an 850MB installation, that with a judicious choice of low-RAM-and-CPU-usage software, turns my old 800GHz 1024MB laptop into a workable DAW that can also play movies, read email and do accounting.

Not that I have any money to account. If I did, I'd get a better laptop.

Obviously these estimates don't include the actual programs, which are on a separate partition. Speaking of which, one trick I hit on: Set up a fixed-size page file on its own little partition. Reduces fragmentation and seems to increase speed.

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As an addendum: How many versions of Vista are there? Six? Ten?

Actually there's just one. You pay different prices for the Basic, Premium, Business or whatever version, but what you're actually paying for is the activation code. The fifteen gigabytes of bloatware is identical for all editions - which means if you buy the Starter edition and enter a code for the Enterprise edition...you get the Enterprise edition.

Clever, eh?

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