Internet

I’ve been playing Nation States for a month or so now. My nation, Wavuncular, is now classified as a ‘Father Knows Best State’, apparently. I’m not sure how this happened.

The People’s Republic of Wavuncular is a very large, safe nation, remarkable for its compulsory military service. Its hard-nosed, hard-working, cynical population of 122 million are ruled by a mostly-benevolent dictator, who grants the populace the freedom to live their own lives but watches carefully for anyone to slip up.

The enormous government juggles the competing demands of Defence, Law & Order, and Commerce. The average income tax rate is 30%, but much higher for the wealthy. A powerhouse of a private sector is led by the Beef-Based Agriculture, Uranium Mining, and Book Publishing industries.

The nation is ravaged by daily union strikes, corporations cut costs by taking away safety-features on their products, drunk drivers are sentenced to death, and traffic jams are a common sight due to construction work from a massive overhaul of the nation’s freeways. Crime — especially youth-related — is well under control, thanks to the all-pervasive police force. Wavuncular’s national animal is the gabbidon, which is also the nation’s favorite main course, and its currency is the wavunc.

Wavuncular is ranked 2nd in the region and 68,478th in the world for Largest Public Sector.

The SCO website was cracked this afternoon, with this amusing effort:

Very good!

The old ones are always the best… had this brought to my attention on Palimpsest.

THE BASTARD OPERATOR FROM HELL OFFICIAL ARCHIVE

I am starting to suffer big time from cacky internet connections. For some reason Gmail is running appallingly slowly, and it hasn’t been possible to check my emails all day. It is only a beta, I guess, and of course it might be a problem on the office server. Annoying, though.

I’m suffering a bit at home as well, last night Matthew was trying to access the internet to do a bit of research for his RE homework and it just didn’t want to play ball. We are on AOL at home, largely because it is easy for him and my gf to use, though it is a pain as I have to be in Windows to use the broadband – from linux I have to use dial-up.

I am thinking about wiping my PC and starting again, as it is pretty slow on all counts. It’s just the thought of copying all my files across onto CDs is too much to bear… but it will be worth it. I have installed and uninstalled so much on the Windows side that the whole thing must be clogged, and despite having AntiVir, a firewall and Spyware monitoring software installed and running, I am not convinced that something nasty isn’t at work somewhere.

By running the system restore CD, I could simply install SP2, AOL 9, some drivers, Dreamweaver, MS Office, OpenOffice.org, Webstyle and some games and I would be done. Then just install Linux in a small partition for my use, and leave it at that. But where am I going to find the time?!