An Arkansas man has apparantly awoken from a 19 year coma.

This raises an interesting point – namely medical ethics. Now that it has been demonstrated that someone can recover from that length of time in a coma, will doctors be more prepared to keep coma patients on life support for longer periods of time?

On a lighter note, as the article mentions, back in the early Eighties, America lived in constant fear of being bombed, by a foreign power. Strange how things change isn’t it?

I had the weirdest experience last night with a floppy (disk! Put that smirk down.)

Daz returned on Sunday night with an old laptop from his dad. I don’t know the technical specs, but it’s definitely old school. It’s got Win for Workgroups 3.11 on it. You can close down Windows and go to the DOS command line and all that stuff. The software’s limited, but it’s got Write, so I figured I could sit it on my lap and type whilst watching TV. But first I had to get a copy of the Union Jack script off my PC and onto the laptop.

So I found a diskette, and I saved the script as .txt. Then I went downstairs and popped it into the laptop. No sign of the file- a bunch of tiffs I didn’t recognise and not a single .txt. Now, my PC has issues with saving things sometimes (I’ve yet to lose anything as a result, I just consider it an ‘eccentricity’) so I thought I’d try again. Back upstairs and pop the disk back in, saving an .rtf and .doc as well this time.

Still no script as far as the laptop’s concerned.

I tried a couple more times, then I thought of checking what the PC thought was on the floppy. Various file format versions of the Union Jack script, and no tiff files. So I thought I’d see what happened when I saved something on the disk from the laptop. I took the disk upstairs and popped it in the PC.

Which immediately shut down.

This stunned me. It pissed off Emily, who was halfway through an unsaved LJ post at the time. Then it just got weirder. When the PC had rebooted I opened Windows Explorer and clicked on the A drive. The computer tried to install Easy CD Creator 5. It did this every time I clicked on the A drive. Much cancelling ensued, but eventually I got it to shut up long enough to look at the drive’s contents. Unsurprisingly, the file I’d saved from the laptop was nowhere to be seen. Strangely, for a 1.44meg disk, the total data on it weighed in at 1.58 megabytes!

I don’t know. I think the floppy is some intersecting node between parallel universes. When it’s in the laptop I can see the content (the tiff files) from one universe and on my PC, the other. If the laptop only had an image package that could handle tiffs, I’d be able to get a glimpse of my other existence.

The problem was solved with an unsullied disk, formatted in the laptop.

The Gettysburg address in Arabic.

I finally did it, I finally went in. It’s something I told myself I’d do years ago. You can’t see in from the outside, the windows are blocked off and hung with esoteric equipment. There was chain hanging up by the door.

Inside, it was lighter than I’d expected, with close packed shelves full of all manner of strange implements. Normally, at this point, I’d skulk around for a while, staring at things I didn’t need or understand. But today I knew exactly what I wanted. I didn’t realise I could get it by the metre though.

I’m feeling all satisfied now. Now I know where to go next time I need DIY stuff.