Boo! They delivered 2x1GB sticks instead of the old 1x2GB
Hooray! It's DDR 400 instead of 266
Boo! It doesn't seem to work
Hooray!(ish) It works if you plug only one stick in
Boo! Something is still Wrong according to the GIMPS torture test thing.
Boo! Actually, now the auto-speed detection has decided it's actually DDR333

In other news:

Boo! No XP 64 driver for this cheap webcam.

Given the evidence, I would suspect that the motherboard is the issue with this cheap crappy thing. I can't see it being cooling because the thing is on its side with the case open and everything feels cool. Yes, I have been earthing myself. Frequently. Note that it doesn't matter which RAM stick you put in or which slot you put it in, it just doesn't want to work with both of them in there (although I shall repeat the exercise after posting this). Also, I will run a torture test on the Dell, then borrow a DDR266 stick out of there and try it on here before assuming motherboard.

At least it woks well enough to IRC and post to HuSi - which is a good use of a 64bit machine.

Oh yeah - manually setting the memory speed down doesn't help.

Any suggestions welcome. Well, ones that don't end in "off" or start with "close your eyes".

In other other news:

There's been plenty in the news this week to agitate a Guardian Reading Liberal such as myself. Is it just me, or is Charles Clarke transforming into the sort of evil buffoon character that you might see on some Cartoon Network show? The business with compensation for wrongful imprisonment has made just about everybody hate him in an attempt to save approximately 0.2 pittances from the home office budget. They even had one of the non-babykilling mothers in the Daily Hate (which I saw in the chippie last night - might have been the Daily Hake (ho, fucking ho)) sounding off on the subject.

Talking of Guardian reading, I noticed that Toynbee was sounding off today about salaries and the like. I didn't actually know that in some Scandinavian countries, anybody could look up anybody else's tax return on teh intarweb (not mine - late again). I think it's an interesting idea. Doubtless executives, builders and other tax-dodging lowlifes would still hide a lot of their income, but it's an idea. Actually, people might go ballistic when they see how little tax some of these people pay. Being a lefty, she also dragged out the stat that in 1970, CEOs earned (averages) 10 times what they paid their workers. Now it's 54 times. Hmm.

More Guardian reading: this amused me. Sometimes I wonder if Brooker is related to Rogerborg.

I am thinking of sending my CV to a Crap Corp rival at the weekend. I do have a lot of specialist knowledge about $BORING_SUBJECT which cuold be useful and being a pleb at LCC is starting to grate a little. I knew I'd be working well below my skill/knowledge level when I started, but in spite of what was said in the interview (surely not untruths in an interview!) they've missed a couple of chances to give me real work.

At LCC, there's a "for sale" intranet thing. I notice that people are trynig to get trades for the "McDonalds Monopoly" cards. Maybe if they win, they'll be able to afford a new heart from a healthy Chinese dissident.

In answer to the missing info from the last episode:

• It's OK, but not as good as Salt
• Yes. Five. None of the purple ones though. I plan to have another go under more controlled conditions.
• Somewhere on my hard drive
• Blah, blah, far too busy/some other feeble excuse. It's on my TODO list right after "writing a TODO list"
• Yes
• On the mend but still not up to boarding properly yet
• I'll think about it
• So do I - gives some flavour to an omlette. Eagle eyed viewers might have spotted that I changed this poll option for ... reasons
• I think it's a good idea, but I can't be arsed
• Yes