DEFAULT IS BEST
You know, sod all of these cool addons, and pictures. From now on, I’m going to go back to the good old, traditional, cool look.
April Fool! Baaaahahahah!
….. OK, that was shite. Sorry about that.
Archive for March, 2008
Life Laundry 2008
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!
Wordpress 2.5 is out…
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….
By popular demand
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.
Tentatively, I opened it up. There it was. A big, white piece of A4 paper, with “Jury Summons” printed on it, in magenta text. Now, there’s probably some law against posting in a public place when and where this is happening, so I’ll refrain from doing that. And no, I won’t post details on the cases either, so don’t even ask.
Um. Earlier, I went to Middlesbrough, for a bit of a test run of my afore mentioned jury duty. I wanted to find out, approximately, how long it would take for me to get from Mercuryvapour Towers, to the appropriate court where I shall be performing my duty to Queen and Country.
I arrived home from work at approximately 8:30 AM. I wasn’t tired, and decided that I would go to Middlesbrough so I knew exactly where I was going. I had an idea where they were, but I didn’t really fancy going there and then finding out that I didn’t have a clue where the courts were. I got sent a map with the information they send you, and obviously, the times you have to be there. I have only ever travelled to Middlesbrough by public transport a handful of times. I wanted to know how long it took to get from Hartlepool, to the law courts. The time? Around an hour, and another 10 minutes to walk from the bus station to the court house.
I took the time out, however to “admire” the new fountain that has been installed nearby.
Seems a bit of a waste, installing that impressive feature, when in the background, you’ve got the nastiest looking shopping centre in the whole history of the planet.
I walked along the road, and obtained some of the local foods… namely, a Greggs Pastie. Just as I was munching my last bite, a strange woman approached me, and took some of the crappest looking yo-yos and assorted toys I’ve ever seen.
“I’m a gypsy, would you like to buy them?” she said in an accent which I couldn’t place.
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
Along with that, I also bought a new keyboard, and 2Gb SD card (yes, another one!)
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.
Captain Birdseye’s dead. Arrr!
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
