Seeing as I’m currently off work for the next few days, I have finally decided to tidy the absolute cess-pit which had became known as the room I occasionally sleep in, and type this blog from.

Since I redecorated it in 2003, I’ve never really tidied it. Although yes, I’ve been around and picked up the odd thing now and then, I’d never really gave it a proper going over. Yesterday, I decided that it was about to be completely cleaned.

First, I decided that it was time to get rid of all of the old computer junk that has been lying around for the past few years, namely a monitor and two computers. One of which was George, my first computer over 1Ghz. Obviously, it’s not much use now, and seeing as I’d gutted it for parts years ago, it was even less useful.

The monitor was a stupidly large (and faulty) 17″ monitor, which for whatever reason had began to turn pink (the screen colour that is, now the actual monitor). This, for the first time in about 8 years, leaves me with only one computer in my room.

However, moving the computer did leave me with an unexpected surprise… inside of George, still sealed in its anti-static bag, was the 160Gb SATA drive I’d bought, and then lost, back in 2006. Wahey!

After I’d got sick of tidying for the day, I thought I’d hook it up. I hope you don’t mind a bit of computer geekery at this point. (Well, Chad, the only person who ever whinged about my computer talk is away now for 6 months, so I assume it’s OK)

I hooked it up to Windowcam3, which is currently running Windows 2000. Aaaaand, it didn’t work. At all. I assumed that Win2000 wasn’t going to play ball with SATA, so I removed it. It was a bit of a tight fit in there, to be honest, as the case wasn’t designed for 3 hard drives, so I thought I’d try getting it working on Beastbits (my main machine). Now, this is where I get lost….

Next, comes Windows XP. Now, the plan was to replace the 120Gb IDE drive with this 160Gb SATA drive, by installing Windows XP on it from scratch. From past experience, you CANNOT install Windows XP onto a SATA drive unless you have the appropriate driver on a floppy disk.

Unfortunately, I don’t. In fact, I don’t even have a floppy drive. And, to make matters worse, my DVD drive doesn’t read CD disks.

The “solution” to both problems was (supposedly) to include the SATA drivers (Silicon Image 3112A) onto the disk, and then write it to a DVDRW so my drive could understand it. Don’t ask me how to do any of this, as I won’t tell you, but needless to say, it didn’t work. The disk booted, and STILL failed to find a hard drive. Back to square one, but that is, quite honestly, a project for another day.

I went to bed, with my room half tidied. In fact, not tidied at all. I was more concerned about getting that bloody hard drive in use.

This morning, I woke up and looked at the clock. 9AM. The sun was blazing in the sky, drying up the pavements. Of course, it was 9AM by the only clock in the house which hadn’t been put into British Summertime. It was really 10AM. Bugger.

I got dressed, and before I was even out of my bedroom, I was tidying. This was clearly going to be an all-day job.

It was. Believe me, it was.

When the day started, you couldn’t see the carpet. When it ended, I had even hoovered. In fact, for the first time in years, I can wheel my chair out into the middle of the floor and spin on it, without crushing anything. It’s a miracle.

I also found approximately 50 (no joke) coat hangers in this room.

It’s not quite finished, as there’s still the area behind the desk to do, but at least I can get to the door without feeling like I’m on the krypton factor. Still, at least I got a little bit of a bonus…

Approximately £6 in loose change picked up off the floor! Yay! Go me and my untidy ways! Ahem.

Talking about untidy, it looks as if the council (or someone) is beginning to spruce up The Marina again, or rather, Jacksons Landing.

Andy The Iridium Fan was down there yesterday, and was talking to the security guard. And, I quote from the comment he left…

“I went to ‘JL’ on Saturday 29th March 2008 only to find the car park all fenced off with a sign that read ‘DEMOLITION’-oh uh!, so I spoke to Dave the security man and asked him what was going on he said “a private firm is going to gut the building and clean it up but not not demolish it”

Interesting. Only time will tell to see what “tidy up” means. I’m sure Andy will keep me informed, but unfortunately I guess it means it’ll be the end of his explorations around there, mainly because there’ll be nothing left to see. Still, never mind, there’s always the photos to remember the place by.

EDIT: Before anyone asks for full panoramic shots of my tidying efforts, I won’t post any until I’m entirely satisfied with the cleanliness of this room, which may never happen, but meh!

Oh yes it is. In fact, it was actually out yesterday, but seeing as I was a bit busy for most of yesterday, I’ve only just found out 30 seconds ago.

This means that I will do one final backup, and get cracking on updating. I shall hopefully see you all safe and sound on the other side.

EDIT: It’s all installed, and hopefully, someone from #speccy is reading this, and is trying to break the site….

Oh, OK, I’ve just finished a 12 hour shift, yet I shall still attempt to please both of my readers by including an update on the past few weeks’ events. Unofrtunately, it really has been desperately unexciting. In fact, I have actually drafted a few posts up over the past few days, but never completed them. It’s been THAT boring.

Therefore, I shall, start with a post I wrote last week, which starts off with the annoucement of my jury service…

Yes, a big brown envelope plopped through my door the other week. I looked at the returns address… HM Courts service.

I quickly made my excuses, and headed towards the nearest entrance to the nasty shopping centre. I spent the rest of the day wondering if I’d been cursed. Considering I’m sat typing this now, I don’t think that’s happened… I wonder if the curse “missed” me, and shortly after, someone ended up in Jimmy Cook’s with a roof tile in the back of their head, or something?

Sooooooo, that was the trip to Middlesbrough which took place on Monday last week. Unfortunately, that’s the only bit of excitement that’s happened to me over the past few weeks. Jury duty, and crappy yo-yos. The joy.

A little earlier, I also updated my computer, as I explained in another desperately boring post…

I have once again updated the storage in my computer. You may remember that a few months ago, I had an issue with the hard drive in Beastbits, my “main” machine. It worked itself out, after a complete “boot ‘n’ nuke” of the drive, but I always wondered if I could actually trust that drive with long-term storage. Now the only thing that kept me from getting a new HDD was the fact that my ebuyer account was inaccessible. I’d either changed the username, password, or email address, and I didn’t remember what I’d changed it to, plus you used to only be able to have one account registered to one address. Eventually, I got this all sorted, naturally, and purchased the drive

It also works out now, because I have a proper, useful backup strategy too, but I’m sure I’ve bored you enough with tales of my computery… things.

… Yes, Jamie, you did. I seem to remember almost dozing off while I typed that load of complete and utter bollocks, which is one of the reasons you didn’t get to see it until now.

And, that’s it. I shall close by saying we actually had our first splattering of snow (or rather hail and snow) this week. Hopefully, it’ll be our last for a while as I’m desperate to go out and actually do stuff worth typing about. I’m now going to go and stick some chilli wedges in the oven, and curl up in front of the telly and watch some Countryfile.

EDIT: This will be the last update for a couple of days, as WordPress 2.5 is due out within that time. This is apparently, a major release, so instead of risking losing posts, I won’t post anything until it’s out. This will allow me to “lock down” the site, and create a nice, stable backup so I can go back, just in case it messes up. You all know what I’m like for breaking stuff.

The actor who played Captain Birdseye in the old fish finger commercials (John Hewer) has pegged out.

Bootiful!

Oh, wait. Wrong advert.

(source) – Cheers Marko

Well, it starts off with the trip home from Newcastle. Carrying a bag full of singles around the place wasn’t really that entertaining.

After taking more photos of broken lamp posts, we headed off to Fenwicks. There was a reason for this. Chris wanted to check out the price of new tellies, and I desperately needed the toilet. I had spent most of the previous post so desperate for the loo that my back teeth were floating. I’d cinsidered taking a leak behind one of the abandoned buildings I’d photographed, but with the onslaught of CCTV and the like, I thought it was probably for the best that I’d hold it.

We arrived in Fenwicks, and as we rode the escalators through the random flooras until we reached the televeision section. As we passed the third floor, I cried out “Oooh! Toilets!”

Now, I’m not a big public toilet user. In fact, I’d normally rather use a drain than a public toilet, but considering these were on the third floor of a large department store, I assumed they’d be clean. Thankfully, they were. They even had motion sensors to detect when you moved away from the urinal so it would flush. The only other place I’ve seen those was Germany. Actually, it didn’t really matter, as I was so desperate, I caused the sensor to “time out”, and it flushed while I was still in mid flow.

Not that you needed to know anything of the previous paragraph, but I thought I’d share anyway.

After pricing up new TVs, and being amazed how much they’d came down in price, we moved to the peripherals section. I laughed like a drain at the sight of one single HD DVD player placed on top of a pile of Blu-Ray players. I wish I’d got a photo of it, as it was so ironically placed. I laughed at the prices of said equipment, and we left the store.

It was getting towards the time that the “big match”, between Newcastle (at home, naturally) and Manchester United was taking place, therefore, most of the city was filled with black and white shirts. And goths.

Actually, this reminds me of something that happened earlier in the day, which I should have documented.

I had a good laugh at the cashpoint. There were two cashpoints, near where we were at the time. Chris joined the queue to use one, and I sort of loitered in the middle. Half way through the loitering, I decided that I also needed money, mainly thanks to my vinyl buying exploits… but which queue to join?

Answer… I didn’t. I sort of slid my way to the right, and “joined the queue”. Technically, I was in both queues. That was my opinion anyway. This was to the dissatisfaction of the (really quite attractive) boilers who happened to have their cashpoint raided by myself. To be honest, I knew I was in the wrong, but they’d let their mouths go before I had chance to have any compassion for them… “Eeee, Yeeeza shudda been in the queue, like?”, the ‘blonde’ one said, as I shuffled towards the hole-in-the-wall. I think there was more to it. Either way, they said stuff between themselves which made me remember I needed to do unnecessary things such as check my balance, and get a receipt.

Right, anyway, after Fenwicks, we looked in a few shops such as HMV. It was truly a pointless excersise. Something has happened to me in the last year or so. I no longer need the new record shops. Yes, I shall still trawl the old ones, like the one I mentioned before, but the likes of HMV just don’t do it for me any more.

After that, we headed back to the station. I continued my 28-year tradition of not-getting-anything-from-a-fast-food-place-except-fries by ordering fries, while Chris knocked back three cheeseburgers.

It was then time to head towards the platform and the train home. I was gobsmacked by the addition of another photo to my “broken things” collection, namely the destination board…

What’s even worse is that I can understand most of what it’s displaying, apart from the random mess in the bottom corner.

Either way, we got the train home, despite the destination board being broken (not that it would have made a difference anyway).

As we boarded, someone at random, asked me if I liked coke. He appeared to have a bottle of Diet Coke going spare. I refused, and so did everyone else on the train. He, and his bottle of coke, left a station or two later.

This is one of the things that gets me about society nowadays, one of my bug-bears, and I must admit to being as guilty as everyone else… nobody can be generous without suspicion. This guy could have bought a bottle of coke, and decided he didn’t want it. Instead of it going to waste, he decides to ask if anyone nearby wants it. Instead of his generiousity, he’s left with me leaving this paragraph, and a bottle of coke he didn’t really want. Take it home, put it in the fridge, etc. That’s what he should have done.

Er.

That was Newcastle over with. Chris came back to mine, and we worked our way through a box of Carlsberg cans.

That was the end of the excitement until… THE EARTHQUAKE!!!

I cannot believe that it’s still getting talked about, and still a small percentage of press coverage.

Let me, once and for all, document my earthquake experience.

I was at work. It was 00:57. Not a lot was going on. There were three of us talking together. Suddenly, the building shook. It’s hard to describe, as it was nothing special. It felt a bit like someone jumping up and down on the floor. I was the first to notice, or at least comment…

“Right, I might be going mad, but did anyone else just feel that?”

We looked at each other. Apparently, I turned white when the other two people agreed with me.

Within seconds, we were all googling “earthquake”. As we all know, it did turn out to be an earthquake. It was weak, no-one died. Chimneys fell down. Some glasses of water may have resembled *that* scene from Jurassic Park. It will be forgotten eventually, but I can claim I felt an earthquake.

OK, so that was pretty amazing. My morning was about to get a whole lot more interesting. Now, I was lying in bed, and I’m sure that I felt the bed shake. A similar side-to-side motion like I felt during TEH MAJ0R QUAKE! There is no report of an aftershock,so I reckon I was just imagining it.

Unfortunately, by going to bed as soon as I got in, this denied me the chance of being a media whore again, as I’d missed works attempts to contact me and appear on the ITV news. Instead, this chance was given to other employees. Never mind.