BILLGOTCHI ---------- HATCHING After installation of Windows (version doesn't matter) it takes only a few minutes until the little digital pest peels out of its shell. Nobody knows exactly how he looks. But he's nosey, crafty and hard to educate. always up for a prank, the funny li'l fellow stops your mousepointer, messes up your desktop or secretly changes the graphics resolution. Hardly ever does the screen look like when you left it, so by now it should be obvious even to the most technology-faithful: there is life in there! FEEDING If Billgotchi doesn't get fed regularily, he gets upset. Hints on your pet's shape can be found in "Controls/System Control/System/Features" [lacking a windoze box I can't accurately translate that, the menu is probably called something else -mb] - but they're meaningless. Gotchi likes to fool you by showing an "optimal configuration" message and still not behaving himself. He communicates with funny messages like "doesn't respond" or "application is overloaded. Li'l Gotchi shows cute buttons that say things like "terminate task" but don't work. DISCIPLINE A pet has to be told off now and then. Billgotchi's punishments are called "drivers". The little jerk's friends give you loads of the wily things but they're built to mainly hurt daddy.. That's called "outdated" or "sloppily programmed" in Billgotchi-talk. GAMING One has has to take care for a pet. In unpredictable intervals, Billgotchi catches one's attention and sends daddy out to shop for an update. After that, daddy has to spend hours, often days, playing with Billgotchi. And no, not just some simple button-pressing - he's got an enormous repertoire: buying books (and reading them), calling up hotlines (and listening to expensive music!) or inviting (ex-)friends to join the game. TURNING OFF THE LIGHT Sometimes even Billgotchi has to go to sleep. In former times one simply turned off the light with a flip of the big switch, but since Billgotchi has been developed so sophisticatedly he insists on a complicated going-to-bed rite. For obscure reasons he calls it "shutdown". He hardly ever goes to sleep instantly but rather asks some stupid quiestions first, like "do you want to save changes to ^^kwrxLTB34_b?". Really contrary he gets when having been given a DOSe of his old toys 'n games. Then he dead tiredly mumbles something about closing applications first, without telling daddy the secret of How (Ctrl-Alt-Q or something). Billgotchi becomes a real jerk if for example you switch off the scanner before he's had his evening prayer: then he goes to bed with brute force, and nobody knows what kind of monster he will be the next morning. THE END Can Billgotchi die? The cruel answer is: NO! Somehow he always creeps out from the pit. How often has there been hope that the old beast would now be pushing up the daisies forever, but every time his manufacturer came up with an even newer, even more colorful, even greater Billgotchi - and the disease stayed. And it's even infecting more people! Millions and millions of Billgotchi-owners have shelves full of boxes from all the old expensive versions. But somehow he's found his way into our hearts anyway, didn't he? [originally by Werner Tiki Kuestenmacher, published in the Erlangen electrical engineering student's newsletter, translation by me] ttyl! Matthias