You're probably familiar with 'Hello, it's your bank, honest, look we've got all the right logos and everything. Anyway, please give us all your details at plausible-address.co.uk@nastyaddress-concealed-by-having-it-in-hex.somewhere' fraud spam.

Here's today's:

Hello dear client Barclays Bank.
Today our system of safety at night has been cracked!!!
It not a joke!!! It is the truth!!!
We ask you, in order to prevent problems, to repeat
registration of your data. Make it very quickly!
Administration Barclays Bank.

Plain html, no graphics. Plus the way they've done the URL means it doesn't work (in my non-MS email program, anyway).

It seems to be connected to these geniuses at adver-line.com

Perspective work in United Kingdom for all comers to have good money!
Our company requires employees able to receive our clients' remittances in United Kingdom. For doing it you should open an account at one of the following banks: Barclays, Halifax, Natwest, Lloyds and inform us the account data.
After that our clients make remittances to your account. You get the money and send them by Western Union to our company
(you'll be informed of the account data after the transmission)
What's your profit?
You will get 10% commission from each remittance. Since all remittances will be about $5000, your profit will be up to $500

Yep, I'm convinced…

Let's see, ignoring palmtops and computers that have never been the main one (a Lynx, a CP/M box with 8" floppies, a Mac, a QL, an Archimedes, a…)

I've gone from two 4MHz (ish) Z-80s, one with 16k RAM for £120, and one with 48k RAM also for £120 a couple of years later..

.. via a 2MHz (ish) 6502 (effectively the same speed as the Z-80s) with 48k RAM probably for £399 (and free 5.25" floppy drive when Lasky's lost the credit card details) ..

.. via a 4MHz Z-80 with 128k RAM that I'd like to have working again for about £400 with one 3" and one 5.25" floppy disk drive..

.. to a 8MHz 8086 with 640k, for about £250..

.. to a 20MHz 386DX with 4M and a 40Mish hard drive, for about £1k..

.. to a 33MHz 486DX2, 4M to 16M – that cost £250 on its own – to 48M and a 1G drive and also upgraded to a '66MHz' 486DX2 and a '99MHz' 486DX3 before settling into the '120MHz' Cyrix M-2 that's still in the flat, for about erm, probably almost £2k if I could add it all up..

.. to a 450MHz AMD K6-III that's now here at work with 384M and about 40G for about £600..

.. to a 2GHz P4 with 1.25G RAM and 120G+40G drives for about £500.

Note that the last one was the cheapest since the 8086 and after the beginning, I've only tended to get the next one when it's been a) around for about a year and b) about three times the speed of the current one.

It's been similar with printers – although that's because since HP Laserjet Series II and III printers became available for about £20 second-hand, I've been happy with them.

… was a 2400 bits per second one: absolutely cutting edge stuff compared to the 300 bps ones or the 1200 bps from them to you but only 75 bps from you to them (!) of the previous UK standards.

It was an Amstrad, and it came with a portable luggable PC clone called the PPC-640 thrown in.

(This was about the size and weight of two reams of heavy A4 paper short edge to short edge, 8MHz 8086-clone CPU, 640k RAM, twin 3.5" 720k floppies, small black and white LCD screen with no back light making it Somewhat Difficult to read unless you had a good light source behind you, and CGA graphics = 80×25 characters or 320×200 in four ugly colours, or 640×200 in black and white. Eight or ten D size batteries would run it for about an hour when disconnected from the mains.)

Doing it this way was, for a while, the cheapest way to get a 2400 modem! Some people bought one, attached their 'real' PC to the PPC's serial port and ran a small program on the PPC so their PC would think it was directly connected to the modem.

They cost about £800 new. I paid about £250 for a second hand one, less than a year after the launch.

File compare. Stolen Adapted from from Unix, it's been around since the early days of DOS. It allows you to compare two files, to see if they're identical, and if not, show the differences.

In its early days, it was ideal to see if that copy of a file onto a floppy was accurate. Now, I sometimes use it to see if the copy onto a CD-R is ok.

How do you think it – the version with Windows 2000 anyway – works? You've got two 700M byte files. How would you compare them? Read more

The director of the Lovers' Guide series: "You don't really see, as a man, other men ejaculate, how could you?"

(This was part of an interview that was part of the bonus material on the LG to Sexual Positions DVD.)

It's here, in PDF form.

I'm still in part 2, and it's clear that the mess wasn't just the direct result of trying (and failing) to wriggle out of living up to guarantees promised decades earlier. Marketing decisions throughout the 80s and 90s were placed ahead of being sure they'd be able to continue stated policies. The guaranteed rates were just one of these.

So, for example, they paid some investors more than they 'deserved' in order to attract many more new investors through appearing to be towards the top of the various performance league tables. You can't do this forever.

The phrase 'pyramid scheme' is coming to mind. In one very important sense, it's not as bad as a classic pyramid con – they didn't pocket the money (although they paid themselves nicely). But as these are the people expected to perform over thirty plus years to provide a pension for their investors, it doesn't inspire confidence.

I wonder what a similar enquiry at other 'life offices' would turn up.

The Beatles' "Can't Buy Me Love" lasts 2 min 11 seconds.

Wagner's "Rhinegold" takes 2 hours and 35 minutes to make the same point.

Still worth seeing though, particularly at ENO. I saw their concert version (= singers on a bare stage, sometimes moving about a bit) a couple of years ago, and this year they're staging them all (= sets and acting too) with (I think, but haven't checked) the same cast. It does make a difference.