Meeting interesting people on the internet

Mary Dunwich writes:

My LingQ student has sent me a writing submission to mark! I think it is about yak herding, though it is a little hard to be sure. "TibetanChick" has an English vocabulary of about a hundred and fifty words, at least ten of which are very rude. I think she must have had some contact with the American military at some stage.

Still, her English is a lot more impressive than my Tibetan. Fair play to her for deciding to learn. It just goes to show, there is nothing in the world so dangerous or daunting that a granny somewhere isn't prepared to try it. Go TibetanChick!

James' new computer is certainly an interesting bit of kit. It sprawls over the workbench like an animatronic octopus. I've seen external sound cards, external DVD writers and external speakers before, but this is ridiculous. Most of the components of this computer are external. I'd be surprised if there's anything left inside the casing at all. Many of the components were designed by Harry the Geek, and as they are passive optical components they don't hum and they don't get warm. All they do is emit a faint, eery glow. If H.P. Lovecraft had ever owned a personal computer, it would look like this.

Harry says that his phase-shift photonic transmission system increases the speed of operation of the computer into the realms of Gigahertz, and increases the effective bandwidth of the internet connection to some Terabytes a second. Surely he can't be serious?

Harry also claims he's got Ouija for Windows 6.1 working on it. Apparently it works best with a tweaked version of Windows 98 (or Linux), and with the extra bandwidth you can increase the signal-to-noise ratio to quite reasonable levels. Oh goody. My son is already friendly with one deceased person, and I would prefer him to spend more time amongst the living. Some dead people weren't at all nice. Atilla the Hun, Napoleon, my great-aunt Fanny. I hope the security is sufficient to block out unsolicited messages. I must check the firewall settings before I let him use it.