Nurse the screens

For almost a year I've been doing all my work with a Lenovo x220 laptop. It's a wonderful device: the anthesis of the glossy, beautiful design of Apple's shiny computers, it comes in a gloomy black case with a slightly rubberised lid so it doesn't slip through your hand when you're carrying it. There is little joy to be had in looking at it: it's harshly utilitarian, rather than being a pleasure to behold. And when the lid is open, the Lenovo logo is upside down. Apple fixed that about ten years ago. Did they patent having logos the right way up, too?

Good night

The club was packed tonight, which was a welcome surprise and a change from Thursday's almost empty room. Having seventy people to perform to presents different issues to seven: it was more difficult to make sure the whole room was involved, and the audience had a lot of local Hong Kongers, for whom the sophisticated wordplay often falls flat. Unfortunately even my crude stuff usually relies on a subtle difference of meaning between two homophones, so that was something of a challenge.

I hate computers

Last night I installed Windows Media Player on my laptop, so that I could play music from my enormous hard drive (not that I like to boast) through my Xbox.  I'm not quite sure why I did this.  I haven't ever felt before that there was a big gap in my life which could be filled by playing music through my Xbox.  After all, when I'm using the Xbox, it's so that I can drive computer-generated facsimiles of cars around non-existent racetracks, and I've always been happy in the past to do this to the sound of computer-simulated engines.