Recursive Words

The life and times of a work-from-home software and web developer as he fights a house, four women, two cats, idiocy, apathy and procrastination on an almost daily basis.

  • Everything everywhere all of the time

    After a couple of days staring at thousands of lines of code, I took the night off from pretty much everything this evening. I would love tell you that I used my time productively, but I did not – and perhaps that’s no bad thing.

    There’s this mania to always be busy – to always be up to something or other – it always seems (to me at least) like such a slippery slope. Being a busy idiot.

    I can’t help feeling sometimes that chasing your own tail all the time is a really good way to forget who you are, what you love doing, and who you love spending time with.

    I even struggle to keep in touch with the circle of friends I’ve made on the internet. It’s not the biggest of circles – probably only just enough to form a circle, if I’m honest – but they are the most wonderful escape from the endless rush.

    It’s not just me either – everybody seems to be on the same treadmill at the moment – nobody has time for anybody. It almost feels pointless reaching out. But I do. Somebody has to.

    I guess even though life continues to stomp all over us, we still manage to find each other in the gaps from time to time. A word here. A sentence there. More often than not we manage to miss each other in passing, then discover the messages hours after the fact – but we try.

    While endlessly swimming against the current, I will admit to finally starting to think about a future where I go “all in” with the content creation stuff – rather than trying to do everything, and be everything, all the time.

  • Saturday

    Saturday

    Busy day ahead. After scraping myself out of bed this morning, and wandering down for a shower and shave, I discovered a box in the hallway. Amazon had somehow already managed to deliver everything I ordered yesterday.

    Inside the box (a box of boxes, in typical Amazon style), there is a wall mount for a television. For the last several weeks a huge flat-screen TV has been propped against the wall of the junk room – it’s going to be hoisted onto the wall above the computer monitors – allowing me to watch all manner of streamed rubbish instead of getting on with whatever I should be getting on with.

    Also inside the box is a “desk shelf” – turning the desk the Commodore 64 is currently on into a “double decker” desk – giving me room to put monitors above the computers and keyboards. The hope is the Commodore 64 will become a bit easier to use, and I can leave the Raspberry Pi plugged in – pretending to be a Commodore Amiga until the FPGA based Amigas arrive (next year?).

    Finally, the box also contained a DVD player. It looks just like a laptop until you open it up – I imagine the creators figured out a crafty way of re-using laptop hardware to turn them into DVD players – removing the keyboard, and most of the internals. You end up with a portable movie playing device that allows me to play the collection of DVDs I’ve held on to for the last decade – that I couldn’t quite part with. Most of our CDs and DVDs went to a recycling service called Music Magpie many years ago.

    This is where I admit to having the box sets of Melrose Place, Dungeons and Dragons, Buck Rogers, and various other TV shows. Oh – and most of the Studio Ghibli movies. And yes, I’ve been looking at the box sets of Masters of the Universe and She-Ra.

    After building the shelves, hanging the TVs, and whatever else, I also need to go cut the lawn. It’s on a knife edge between being “a bit unruly”, and being “an impenetrable jungle”.

    I’m sitting in Spoons, if you were wondering. An English breakfast just vanished – now I’m burning time until the market opens in town – to get some freshly baked bread, and a few other bits and pieces before heading home.

    The book shop is just down the road from Spoons too – I can almost feel it’s magnetic pull. Maybe I’ll go take a look (we know it won’t just be a look, don’t we). A little voice on my shoulder is whispering about books to read on holiday…

  • Falling in love with the Masters of the Universe

    2026-08-07 Falling in love with the Masters of the Universe movie

    A few days ago I wrote that I only made it half-way through the Masters of the Universe movie before giving up and walking away – mostly on account of Jared Leto’s ridiculous portrayal of Skeletor.

    A couple of days later – while scrolling YouTube endlessly instead of getting on with what I should have been doing, I ended up watching some “reaction” videos – where Gen-Z content creators breathlessly pretend to watch movies for the first time, and talk all over the movies instead of actually – you know – watching them.

    Anyway.

    Along the way, I happened upon a couple of comic book guys that appeared to have been waiting for the new Masters of the Universe movie as long as I had – and their excitement was palpable. They said something about the snarky journalists and content creators dissing the movie that struck a chord with me – the movie wasn’t for them.

    A cog turned in my head.

    I was eight years old when the Masters of the Universe toys arrived in our local toy-shop – their arrival coincided with my ninth birthday, and made the choice of that year’s birthday present an easy one for my parents.

    I can also remember the evening – while playing outside with friends in the street (when does THAT happen any more?) – that the cartoon was first shown. I remember rushing indoors mid-pretend-Wimbledon-final-with-the-girl-next-door to watch He-Man knocking the stuffing out of Skeletor and Beast Man.

    I am the generation that the movie is for – and I needed to give it a second chance – and while my other half was out the other evening, that’s exactly what I did. And – viewed through nine or ten year old eyes – the movie became kind of wonderful.

    We’ll gloss over the brutally funny jokes about fisting throughout the movie – because I wouldn’t have got them at ten years old anyway. We won’t gloss over the post-credits scenes, where Orko and She-Ra made their first appearances. I almost did a happy dance. Granted, I was two cans of cider and curry in by that point, but who could have guessed that the appearance of She-Ra would have made me so happy?

    Maybe it’s all tied up with the Commodore 64, the Amiga, the flip-phone, and a hundred other things – the desire to go back to the way things were once upon a time – even if we’re only visiting. Escaping to a simpler time – when we had little or no responsibilities, expectations, or obligations.

  • After midnight

    After midnight

    2026-08-06 After midnight
    The clock ticked past midnight thirty minutes ago. I’m not entirely sure why I’m still up, but here we are.

    There’s a random playlist playing in the background. Just enough distraction to cause me to stop writing, listen, reminisce in my head, and not write very much at all.

    Gary Barlow is singing “6th Avenue”.

    I’m contemplating working from a local cafe in the morning. A change of scene. A change of pace. I need to write an important document for work. I need to get it right. Not having the washing machine, the dishwasher, or whatever else reminding me that I need to do this, that, or the other for a few hours would be useful.

    We’ll see.

    I’m also thinking about joining the local gym. We live within walking distance of a really great gym. I don’t know why I haven’t thought about it before. Even if I only use the running machines, bikes, and rowing machines, it will be worth it.

  • Stuff and Nonsense

    Stuff and Nonsense

    I’ve been meaning to write something – anything – for the last several days. I just haven’t managed to start. I’m hoping that typing these few words will somehow hand crank the part of my brain that looks after suck things. I struggle to understand how I used to pour words onto the page so easily. Perhaps it’s like a muscle – writing – and if you don’t use it enough, it becomes more difficult.

    Maybe.

    I’m just re-winding in my head through the last few days – wondering what I might tell you about.

    I finally made my way to the opticians a few days ago – a year late. My distance vision hasn’t changed at all, but anything close has got a little worse. I guess this will be the pattern until I need glasses thick enough to turn me into the mole man from The Simpsons. I ordered two new pairs – both with completely different frames (a lesson learned the hard way) – one for occupational use, the other for reading.

    The reading glasses are wire rimmed. After putting them on and looking at myself in the mirror, there was something of a double take – either James Potter, or Steve Jobs was gazing back at me.

    I’m still tinkering with the Commodore 64 – learning more about it all the time. I still get a kick out of dialling into the WOPR at NORAD, and filling my name in as “Joshua”. I still haven’t caved and ordered an Amiga.

    I still haven’t bought a typewriter either.

    I do keep picking up the bullet journal and writing half a page in it – I’m not back to using one full time though. I can almost feel the pull back away from technology at the moment – back to cassette tape Walkmans, analogue wristwatches, flip phones, and paper notebooks.

    Commodore have started making a flip-phone that won’t let you use social media. When I first saw it, I thought “that’s terrible!”, but the more I think about it, the more appealing it becomes. I’m thinking I have two phone numbers – one that only close friends and family know – the basic phone – and the other for everything else – the smart phone.

    Anyway.

    The rest of the household are helping at a summer camp in town called “Lighthouse” this week – run by all of the churches in town. A small army of red-shirted helpers provide “edutainment” for several hundred local children. I’ve never helped because I’ve always felt it would be a bit hypocritical – given that I don’t believe in any sort of god.

    I’ve always wondered how much more popular the summer camp would be if they removed the religious angle entirely – given that (if statistics are to be believed) over 50% of adults in the UK no longer have any sort of religious leaning.

    After work this evening I met the rest of the family in town – at Spoons. It was sort of my idea, based mainly around avoiding washing up (I somehow found myself washing up five times yesterday).

    Why is it while walking any sort of distance into town, you’ll invariably find yourself directly behind a couple walking slower, who will be completely blind to you walking directly behind them – and if anything will slow down once you’re stuck behind them?

    Maybe they were non player characters? Or extras in the TV show I’m not supposed to know anything about.

    A pint of cider, and a beef madras cured most of the world’s problems, while hearing all manner of stories from my daughters – who are now “lighthouse keepers” at Lighthouse (read: helpers).

    Tonight has been mostly spent noodling around with not much in particular. I’ve been slowly building an old DOS based computer recently, and filling it with “abandonware” – software that is so old you can freely download and install it without the copyright holder bothering to chase you to the ends of the earth. I’m still intrigued by George R R Martin’s use of Wordstar as a word processor when writing books – on an air-gapped PC.

    Perhaps that’s what I should use the Commodore 64 for?

    It’s getting late.

    I should really go fall into bed I suppose.

    I just downed a cup of coffee, and it’s made me more sleepy, if anything – figure that one out.

    Oh – I nearly forgot! Last weekend we visited somebody I used to work with for lunch, and then went for a walk in the woods with them. It was kind of wonderful – not only to see some friendly faces from the past – but also to just go for a walk, and leave the list of things that need doing behind for the day.

    Perhaps I need to do that more often – the whole “downing tools and going for a walk”. I will admit to walking into town at least a couple of times a week at lunchtime – purely to stretch my legs. That the route takes me past a supermarket that sells great sushi is a happy accident, honest.

  • The Idiocy of Apple

    The Idiocy of Apple

    2026-07-31 The Idiocy of Apple

    I bought some Apple AirPod “tips” yesterday. That’s their name for the little rubber bits that you stick in your ear. You won’t believe how long it took me to find them, given that they call them “tips” – it’s not the first word that comes to mind, is it. Anyway… I digress.

    This evening, the invoice for them arrived in my email – addressed to a friend in America, with her private address as the billing address (which I didn’t know previously, and she definitely didn’t tell me).

    After an hour digging a sizeable hole in the digital firmament with Google Gemini as my trusty pickaxe, and explainer of everything, I found out what happened – and it’s going to shock you.

    I filled in the Apple Store order form on the web – logged in as myself – and clicked the “Pay with Apple Pay” button. A few moments later my wrist watch vibrated – asking me to confirm the purchase. I tapped the button on the side of the watch a couple of times, and the form on the monitor updated – telling me my order was on it’s way.

    Here’s what happened behind the scenes – as far as I can tell – or as far as Gemini thinks…

    Apple charged my card. It then checked the billing details, and found none. And this next bit defies any logic that I can come up with. Having found no billing details on my account (because I’ve never filled any in), it looked for anybody in my contacts that I had recently interacted with – and found the friend that I had shared Apple Fitness data with about a year ago – while playing with the app, and wondering how it worked. So the billing mechanism took her name and personal address, and filled my order out with it – all without asking me – or her.

    It gets worse. It didn’t just fill out the billing details – it set the details as the default payment details in Apple Wallet for the card used for the transaction – so any further transactions on that card would have her name on the invoices too.

    It’s crazy, isn’t it.

    Anyway.

    Normal programming is resumed now. I’ll go back to flying pretend aeroplanes, writing idiot blog posts, eating terrible pizza, and avoiding buying a Commodore Amiga.

    I might have ordered some noise cancelling headphones today. Proper big ones that make you look like a Star Wars extra. I looked at the Apple “Beats” headphones, almost passed out when I saw the price, then looked at their studio headphones, actually did pass out, then finally headed to Amazon and looked at sensibly priced headphones. Why am I doing it? Because even with the largest “tips” on the damn AirPods, the noise cancelling doesn’t work – apparently I have the biggest ear-holes in the known universe.

    Oh – one more thing – started watching the movie of “Masters of the Universe” while my other half was out last night. She got home in the middle of the movie, plonked herself down on the sofa, and said “was just talking about this – {insert name of lovely friend} said it’s worth watching – it’s so bad it’s good”. She wasn’t wrong. I gave up half-way through, after Jared Leto’s fake English Skeletor accent wound me up too much. I’ll give it another go at the weekend, I suppose.

    Dammit – I really wanted Masters of the Universe to be good. I had the toys. I remember them coming out – and playing with them. I got He-Man and Skeletor for my 9th birthday. I’ve looked them up on the internet – you can’t buy the original versions any more – not without visiting eBay and spending a small fortune on them.

  • Growth

    Growth

    I used to work for a small company, where most of my time was spent putting fires out. If I couldn’t figure out how to do something, there was nowhere to turn, so I ended up acclimatising somewhat. Blind panic, chaos, and fireproof trousers were very much my normal.

    And then we got acquired – by a much bigger company – and a curious thing appeared in my calendar booking options – “growth days”. A number of days I could book throughout the year to use for professional development.

    I subsequently learned that having the capability to do something, and the capacity to do it are two very different things. I’ve been working for the much bigger company for two years now – and just took my first growth day.

    I’ve been feeling strangely guilty all day – researching and learning something for myself, rather than progressing the project that’s been towering over me for the last however-many months. I’ve become conditioned, I suppose – I can’t remember the last time my calendar wasn’t filled with various pretty colours that roughly translate to the phrase Jack repeatedly tapped into the typewriter in “The Shining”.

    Anyway.

    The day is now over, so I shouldn’t really be thinking about work – but here we are.

    In other news, my other half just came home with the exciting news that the cabin we have booked aboard a cruise ship for our holiday has been upgraded. We entered a blind auction for upgrades, and apparently did rather well. We’ll have a sofa, a bath, and a balcony during our month-long voyage around the mediterranean.

    It’s all getting very real now. After two years waiting, departure is perhaps six weeks away. Both the formal and casual clothes have been acquired. I just fished my silver pocket-watch out – a wedding present from my better half – last used during our honeymoon. I need to get a battery put in it.

  • Escaping to Spoons on Sunday morning

    It’s a little after 9am on Sunday morning and I’ve bagged a booth table at Spoons. A “Small American” just disappeared (pancakes, bacon, eggs, sausage, and hashbrowns), and a “bottomless coffee” is about to follow it.

    I’m not sure I have much to report at the moment – other than trying to break the world record for cardboard on our driveway (the paper recycling bin is already full).

    A group of older people just wandered past – eyeing the booth I’m sitting in – doing their best to look disgruntled with my entire existence. The booths are prized real estate in a town that values appearances over just about anything else. Sod them. I was here first.

    While scrolling the other lunchtime I happened upon an American content creator visiting the town I live – recording a breathless travelogue. It was interesting – seeing the town from the perspective of a visitor. When you don’t know what you don’t know, everything looks so much better.

    My other half often accuses me of having a chip on my shoulder about the wealthy older people around town. It’s funny though – slowly but surely her fuse has been shortened. The very same community that like to be seen to be going to church, and like to be seen to be supporting good causes also complain endlessly about any change whatsoever – especially if it benefits anybody outside of their retired community that claim the world was “better in their day”.

    There is a local newspaper whose online articles are typically filled with “anonymous” comments by the above community – filled with spite, vitriol, racism, and hate. I shake my head – the same people that complain about “young people wearing hoodies” go to inordinate lengths to create burner email accounts and false identities to “have their say”. No doubt they’re the same people the algorithmic timelines have surrounded with concordant feedback – validating their prejudice at every turn.

    I’m trying not to laugh. A young family just sat at a table nearby. Their young charge is systematically sweeping everything off the table. The menu just flew several yards across the room. Dad is diving around, apologising as he collects back the recently airborne ammunition.

    Anyway… what else is there to share?

    My computer arrived back on Friday.

    I’m not sure if I told the story here about it. I’ll bore you spectacularly for a minute or two. It turned out it’s had a fault hidden deep in its brain ever since I bought it – a cancer of sorts. A design flaw in the CPU meant it could request more electricity than it could sensibly deal with – which is fine from time to time, but ends up after two years with it starting to lose it’s tiny little mind. After a brain transplant, it’s fine again.

    I’ll blame the absence of the computer for me having acquired the Commodore 64. Idle hands, the devils work, and all that.

    Anyway.

    Time is marching on. More families are arriving. Time to get out of dodge. No doubt my exit will trigger a rush for the vacant booth. I’ve seen it happen before.

  • Down the rabbit hole

    Down the rabbit hole

    The Commodore 64 arrived at lunchtime. It’s now wired up to an old CRT monitor, and after some tinkering, I connected it to a re-creation of the ARPANET system you last saw in the movie “War Games”.

    I can’t quite describe the feeling of sitting in the dark of the junk room while a glowing, blinking cursor stuttered it’s way across the screen, typing the following question:

    Would you like to play a game?

    I’m not sure if I’m enthralled, excited, or terrified.

    What if it’s not a simulation? What if the WOPR is real?

    I wonder if Ally Sheedy will come past in the morning?

  • A blanket fort filled with forgotten totems

    The massive computer that normally sits under the desk in the junk room and helps to heat the entire street was picked up by a courier this morning. We won’t talk about how much it cost me to insure it – I’m glad I did though, given the way the driver threw it first at his own feet, and then into the back of the van. I wonder if he knew quite how valuable its contents were? Or if he would care that his actions could cost his job if the insurance has to be activated?

    It’s quite depressing really – that posting a computer requires not only backing up it’s entire contents, but also insuring it against the very people that you are already paying through the nose to safely deliver to a destination.

    Madness.

    Anyway.

    Given that I have no pretend aeroplanes to occupy myself for the next few days, my attention has turned back to the re-invention of youth and the Commodore 64 I talked myself into ordering.

    I imagined the Commodore would take a month or two to arrive on my doorstep – given the breathless experiences of others. You can imagine my surprise then, when my phone pinged this morning informing me that said computer would arrive tomorrow.

    Tomorrow! (cue coat hanger smile)

    This is where I admit to perhaps pre-empting its arrival – such is my idiotic excitement – with a series of purchases that lean ever further into bashing the same dent in the universe. I’m not entirely sure if I’m running away from the world, or building a blanket fort filled with long forgotten totems.

    Is it nostalgia? Perhaps. In the same way that pot-bellied middle-aged men drive the sports cars they pined over during their youth, and women of a certain age fixate on a particular “look”, I’m returning to the foundations of my involvement with the digital firmament that now surrounds us.

    I don’t really have a reason, other than perhaps a strange siren song of sorts. Can an inanimate piece of hardware call out? Maybe it’s the idea that calls out. Or the memory. I don’t know.

    Maybe I don’t need to know. Maybe I don’t need a reason either.

  • The twenty five year clothes shop

    2026-07-18 The twenty five year clothes shop

    In September we’ll be celebrating twenty five years of not killing each other. Twenty five years ago we celebrated the start of the adventure by boarding the P&O flagship “Oriana”, and galavanting off around the mediterranean for a couple of weeks. Twenty five years later we’re repeating the escapade – only on a different ship, and for quite a bit longer this time.

    You know that one where you’re looking in the holiday website, and you think “oh – this cruise goes here, here, and here”, or “that cruise goes there, there, and there” – and you keep scrolling, and you keep scrolling – and then you see the cruise that goes “here, here, and here, and there, there, and there”. And you figure out it’s still two years away – so you ask your employer if such a thing is even possible – and they say yes – and then suddenly you’re not only saving for a month long escapade – you’re also facing two years without a proper holiday.

    Yes, we’ve had the odd city break – but we’ve not really been “away away” for two years now – and given the mayhem and madness that has happened during that time – some of which will never be written here – let’s just say we’re looking forward to it now.

    The holiday of a lifetime that was two years away is suddenly six weeks away, and is throwing an entirely different set of challenges at us – or me, in particular.

    You know the one where you only tend to buy clothes once in a blue moon, and then wear the clothes until they fall apart? I’m right at the “falling apart” bit with most of the clothes I own – and apparently ordering shirts from Amazon causes your other half to frown quite a lot.

    The last suit I bought was for a wedding in Ireland – the marriage of a co-worker. FIFTEEN YEARS AGO. It’s still hanging in our wardrobe at home – squashed between similarly aged clothes that haven’t been worn for similar amounts of time. In my head I think it’s probably fine. It won’t be. And that’s why we went shopping today.

    After spending the last five years quietly amassing a horde that Smaug the dragon would have been proud of (or at least might have nodded approvingly towards before laughing behind my back), I went shopping at an “outlet village” today, and spent a good chunk of it.

    I’ve never set foot in a Hugo Boss store before today. I was in the middle of looking down my nose at a rack of suit jackets thinking “no clothes are worth this much money” when a studious young man with a faintly European accent suggested my exact shoulder and chest measurement purely by observing me for a few seconds. Before I knew it one of my hands was being guided into a sleeve, then the other, and after a shrug of my shoulders I caught my other half smiling. I walked to a mirror and took a look.

    So there IS a difference between a Marks and Spencer suit, and a Hugo Boss suit. And perhaps my other half’s frustration with me always buying clothes that are “good enough” had some basis in truth. I ended up smiling at myself in the mirror – begrudgingly.

    I will also admit to inhaling quite spectacularly when the total came up on the checkout.

    It’s not that I don’t like spending money – it’s just that I don’t like wasting it on things that aren’t really needed. And while I hear the sage advice of so many telling me that it’s better to own a few really good quality items of clothing, rather than a wardrobe full of rubbish – it’s still difficult (for me at least) to spend more than I might on things that don’t really matter (to me at least).

    I’m probably coming across as a proper curmudgeon that persists in jeans with holes and worn-out t-shirts. While uncomfortably close to the truth, it isn’t the whole story – I promise you. The truth is more along the lines of I don’t tend to spend money on myself. It’s not that I don’t have the money – I work hard – I am luckier than most (read: the harder I work, the luckier I get) – it’s just that I don’t want for much.

    Since the girls came into our lives about twenty years ago, everything got funnelled towards them. Given their background, it was only natural to want to give them the world – and we tried. We almost broke ourselves in the process (actually, we DID brake ourselves at one point), but we tried.

    Now the girls are grown up, earning money, and STILL living at home (don’t laugh), the story has changed somewhat. We won’t talk about one of our girls creating a miniature version of herself either.

    I don’t really know where I’m going with this.

    Perhaps I’m trying to justify spending money on myself for the first time in twenty five years. By the time we got in the car to come home I had bought a suit, shirts, dress shoes, shorts, trousers, running shoes, and more.

    Apparently tomorrow I have to empty two thirds of my wardrobe upstairs into bin liners for fabric recycling. I also have to arrange a skip for next weekend – to empty half the contents of the house into – twenty five years of accumulated “lets not throw this away just yet – it might come in handy one day”.

    The shopping list for the holiday isn’t finished yet.

    There are several formal nights aboard the ship. Formal means dinner jacket, wing collar shirt, and dickie-bow tie. Now I know my exact suit measurements, I’m scouting out online retailers for a dinner jacket that’s “good enough” to survive the holiday, and perhaps a night out with friends where they get to laugh at me wearing said dinner jacket.

    Who knows – perhaps I can talk them into dressing up too? We could re-stage Casino Royale at home and play cards to win the last piece of chocolate brownie.

    Worth knowing – I’ve never played cards for money. I’ve never played the national lottery either. Or smoked. Or taken drugs (well… discounting alcohol, paracetamol, ibuprofen, or the steroids last year when my lungs tried to stop working).

    Anyway.

    I’m rambling now.

    I guess the most fun part of today was people watching. Not only the people wandering around the shops trying things on – also the staff. The assistant in Hugo Boss was wonderful – quiet, unassuming – and seemingly lacking any prejudice. I was wearing worn out shorts and t-shirt that has seen better days. There was no way he could have known I had walked in to spend a small fortune on a suit. Perhaps people that look at suits rarely do so for fun. It’s not the sort of thing you would do without needing to buy one, is it?

    In contrast, the final shop we visited was “Super Dry” – the faux Japanese fashion brand. The arrestingly beautiful young girl on the checkout had the best “resting bitch face” I’ve ever seen (also worth noting that I have three daughters who practice their disinterest skills very regularly). No hello, no please, no thank you – just the minimum interaction required to process the transaction then move on to the next victim. Wow. She’ll go far.

    Anyway.

    We’re home now.

    My twenty five year clothes shop is done. Back to ordering shirts from Amazon, and risking the wrath of my other half.

  • Stepping Back in Time

    2026-07-17 Stepping Back in Time

    I just ordered a Commodore 64. I’ve been thinking about it for a very long time. There’s a bit of a back-story behind how the Commodore 64 computer has re-appeared in the world after 40 years – I won’t bore you with it.

    The biggest question on most people’s mind will probably be “why?”.

    I guess a part of it is me buying something “for me” for a change. Something fun. Something that isn’t “for” something. Something that isn’t “for” anybody else. Something harmless to tinker with that will keep me out of trouble.

    I’m not sure what I’ll use it for either. Perhaps as a word processor? Perhaps to hack into the file that governs everything in the universe? (you have to read “Off to be the Wizard” to get that joke – it’s a fun read).

    Perhaps – as mentioned – I don’t need a use for it.

    Of course while tinkering with the Commodore 64, I’ll really be waiting for the same team to pull their finger out and re-create the Commodore Amiga.

    I’ll shut up now, climb back under my stone, and deliberately NOT look at the flip-phone that Commodore have also developed, even if I do love the idea of it.