Friday's bile

I managed to close out my England-Australia position to guarantee roughly equal profit no matter what the result -- the grand sum of a fiver. Which I promtly spunked away in some spur-of-the-moment god-i'm-bored fit of madness on the favourite at some race at Del Mar at 11pm UK time. At least, I assume the horse lost.

I also closed out the last of my sterling-dollar positions yesterday. After being hit for just over a grand, I was eminently grateful to get back to virtually even by the middle of this week. Get out, I said to myself. You don't really need to hedge your dollar position, since you aren't planning on converting the dollars back into sterling any time soon.

Far better to choose to report the figures of PJBirks plc (sole shareholder, P J Birks) in both dollars and sterling, and then to focus on which one looks nicest.

That's not to say that my currency speculating days are over. I just won't keep a long sterling position when I think sterling is going to fall.

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Does not compute, does not compute

Long-term readers of this litany of woe may recall that I upgraded to Windows XP a few months ago. However, I couldn't get the dual monitor system to work, so I downloaded the latest driver for the second graphics card, after which I entered several hours of hell, utterly unable to get the machine working at all. Eventually I managed to get it started again (without the second monitor working, natch), so I stripped out the driver, deleted the dual monitor set-up, and returned to some degree of normality.

Anyway, at the end of last week, in the middle of serious tidying up in the wake of collapsed ceilings and the like, I found the card of the guy who fitted the second graphics card and set up my machine for two monitors in the first place. Ah-hah! I thought. John (for that is his name) will be able to fix it up. So, I telephoned him and, last night at 8pm, round he came.

An hour and three-quarters later he had just about got as far as I did when I installed XP in the first place -- viz, the blue screen of death, with not even safe mode solving the problem. He looked at me sadly and said: "I think I'm going to have to take this away, Pete".

So, I'm minus the main computer until Monday. I got the laptop fired up with a line connection rather than a wireless connection, so I can play a single table, just.

Oh, and I bought a four-to-one USB extension "especially suitable for laptops" and plugged in the wireless connector. "You have attempted to connect a high-speed USB connection to a non high-speed extension. See documentation for how to solve this conflict" it said, unhelpfully. I think I have a case for taking that back to Maplins, since I bought both items there.

Computers, how much money is lost to the economy doing things with them that we didn't have to worry about in the past? I dread to think.