On the dangers of telling your boss you have a blog

and giving him the URL.

My office desktop computer is a Dell. Slow as a wet week despite having a Pentium 4 HT at 2.8 GHz. It has 512 Megs of memory and when I'm trying to debug interprocess communication problems (our software does a lot of that) I can see the hard disk light on continuously as it pages memory in and out. One copy of VC6 and two copies of VS2003 with all symbols loaded pushes memory usage! Once the commit charge exceeds physical memory it behaves like it had a SC/MP[^] as the CPU!

Sometime in January I requested an upgrade to a gig of memory. Cheap enough even at Dell prices but it's taken nearly 5 months so far and the memory still hasn't happened. Of course the request has to go to Singapore, be approved and return but even so; I think the last slow boat to China sailed decades ago!

So today I was deep in the bowels of some mailslot code[^], tracing the creation of a message in one process through a second process to the third and the machine was running like a dog that died last week.

So I hit up Dave. 'Dave, even if it's 108 F outside my machine runs like frozen honey!'. He was puzzled; apparently the memory upgrade had been approved some time ago and he promised to look into it.

An hour or two later he called across the partitions. 'I know where your memory went!'. 'Where?' I replied. 'The wine has destroyed it!'.

Bastard! :-) I just know he read my post sometime ago about being an alcoholic!