Googe is dead. Gone. Faulty. Every result says “this site may harm your computer”, and you can’t actually visit the sites.

It’s like I’ve lost a limb or something.

UPDATE: Fixed about 30 minutes after I posted that. Slashdot posted an article on it. That’s the first, and porbably last time I’ll mention Slashdot in one of these postings.

I’ve not posted much over the last month or so. I really have had nothing worthwhile to blog about. Nothing at all has inspired me. Nothing has stirred my enthusiasm enough to blog about.

Work is dominant in my thoughts, and as you know, I don’t talk about that place.

In second place is my bed. It seems that when I’m not in work, all I want to do is sleep, and that’s what I have been doing recently in great quantities. Probably more than what is natural.

My place of employment is, once again, getting me down. I guess I’m one of the lucky ones, as I still have a job in this time of economic turmoil. There have been no redundancies, or even talk about them.

But, for how long….

(P.S. I can almost picture Chad’s comment now. Three words… Please don’t bother.)

Imagine the scene. I got bored earlier this morning, after another shitty day at work, and begin to clear my C drive up. It’s a bit of a mess, and I like to keep it as clean as possible. Therefore, when I noticed that my system restore data was taking up over 3Gb (wow, count ‘em!), I thought I’d get rid of these by turning off system restore, and back on again.

I smiled to myself, and thought that it would be rather funny to have technical problems after this…

Time passes. A couple of hours to be precise. I slap a DVD in my drive, hoping to retrieve some ancient data from its purple surface. I click on Start, then Run, and type E:

Nothing. Not a sausage.

Had the drive letters become screwed up again? This occasionally happens when I’m pricking about with USB drives, like I’ve been doing recently. I go into the Computer Management section, to see if the drive had a letter assigned to it. Ummmm, no drive. This was looking odd.

Sigh. I headed into Device manager, and there it was. The big yellow exclamation mark, with the happy little message…

“Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware. The driver may be corrupted or missing. (Code 39)”

I felt repulsed. How could this happen? Why me? WHY ME OF ALL PEOPLE? I walked away from my computer, clutching my forehead, and shedding a slight tear as I tried to ignore the torment that was cutting me up inside.

Eventually, I dragged myself back to the computer chair, a shadow of the man I once was. I tried uninstalling the device, and reinstalling. Still nothing. The big, yellow exclamation mark stood out like a spare dick in a porno. What was I to do? The answer, as you’ve probably guessed, is to turn to the big, multicoloured tech support centre known as Google. Within minutes, I had a solution, but it took a bit of translating. Hopefully, if you ever come across the same issue, then the following should help you. It certainly helped me! (copyright some advert circa 1991)

Ooooh-kay. Here goes.

Click on Start > Run, type regedit
If you don’t know how to use regedit, get an adult to help you. If you’re a pussy winnet that thinks altering the registry in any way, shape and form, will cause planes to fall out of the sky, then feel free to back it up.
Browse to the following key…
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
In there, look for 2 keys on the right called “UpperFilters” and “LowerFilters”. Delete both of those. Fuck knows that they do.
Go into the Device manager, and right-click your ailing drive, and select the option for “Uninstall”. It’ll then disappear from your list. Click on “Action” and select “Scan for Hardware Changes”. Within seconds, your drive will be redetected, good as new. Hopefully.

Your mileage may vary. It worked for me. And, if it doesn’t, then I really couldn’t care less. Please don’t leave comments asking for my other suggestions. I don’t really have any, except for reformatting your machine. Look, I’ve had a shit day at work. I can’t believe I put this much effort in diagnosing my own problems.

Oh, one thing that has cheered me up immensely, is that I have once again become addicted to Google Streetview, despite the concerns about “privacy”… er, do we actually have such a thing as privacy anymore anyway?

Either way, whilst the multi-camera’d Google har has yet to reach the rural location of Mercuryvapour Towers, it has, in great detail, captured Paris city centre, including the exact hotel in which I stayed at…

I must admit I’ve been a bit slack when it comes to doing my regular walks. I think it’s my first one for several months. Still this one was needed. And needless to say, I took my camera. If that makes sense.

On Tuesday night, after another night at the club, and before knocking back a chinese takeaway from… er, that place in Church Street I can’t remember the name of, I commented to Daddykins that I may be going out early to take photos.

A quick look at my flickr profile shows that I’m a fan of taking sunrise pictures, and as there’s been a few mighty sunrises recently, I thought I’d go out and take one.

Now I’d woken up at exactly my planned time, 7AM. This gave me enough time to get my stuff together, and head out of the door for 7:20. The sky was just turning blue. There was a wisp of cloud in the sky, and the moon was still shining bright through the clouds. The sky had been clear, therefore the temperatures had plummeted through the night. There was a good covering of frost on the ground, and any small puddle which had formed, had now turned into solid ice.

Although I’d planned to walk somewhere, I actually had no idea where I wanted to go. I had no idea how long it would take for the sun to be in the sky fully. I guess it was a race against time to get somewhere high up. And, because Hartlepool slopes down towards the sea, the highest point is on the Hart Road, leading to Hart Village. I began to walk up the incline leading towards Hart Village.

A small horse seemed to take interest in what I was doing…

Part of the route to Hart Village leads along a section of old road. At some point, several years ago, a bypass was built, meaning that this old road had became unused. Because of this, the hedgerows either side of this road have became overgrown, and at that time on a morning, it’s a particularly creepy place.

That wasn’t the least of my worries, the black ice was. Imagine my horror, as I touched a portion of frozen water, and before I know it, I was on my back, looking up at the stars. I’d went down like a bag of spanners. It certainly wasn’t graceful. In fact, what made it even less graceful would have been the sight of me (successfully) trying to keep my camera off the ground. It does mean that my left side of my body managed to take the full force of it. My left hand is (slightly) grazed, and my left shoulder feels like it’s fallen off. In fact, typing this is difficult, but hell, I’ll fight through it for both of my readers.

So, anyway, after the slip, I continued the walk. In fact, the ice only affected me one more time as I crossed the road, known on Google Maps as “The Fens”. It is also the road where I have yet to see one car travel down.

It’s so quiet, it’s one of the few places in Hartlepool you can get a shot like this…

As can be seen by that photo, it was starting to get pretty light by this point. The redness in the trees suggested to me that the sunrise wasn’t far away, however, I still wasn’t in the ideal spot. Would I make it in time to the prime location to see the sun rise? Well, er… yes and no.

The prime location for me, is halfway along the Hart road. There’s an entrance to a field, giving great views over Hartlepool and Teesside. I was hoping to recreate this shot, but this was the best I could do.

Obviously, the sunrise wasn’t quite as explosive as I’d hoped. Still, it got me out of the house, and it (partially) burned off the chinese from the night before. And my shoulder injury will give me something to whinge at for a couple of days.

Ironically, I left the house at 7:20… no less than 10 minutes later, Chad had left a comment on my site, asking, as he usually does, if I was “getting out more”. What are the chances of this happening?

In other, totally uneventful news, I cancelled my Lovefilm account. I decided that £12.99 per month for DVDs I wasn’t really watching, wasn’t worth it, and so I cancelled. For those of you who have a lovefilm account, you can’t cancel them through the website, you have to phone them. This was more than annoying, seeing as one of the disks I’d sent them hadn’t been cleared off the system, despite the fact I’d sent two back in the same envelope. I’m the worst person on the telephone, which is a little bit disconcerting considering the job I do.

Two (count ‘em!) phone calls later, and my account was cleared without a problem. I would like to think I’ll miss using them. I probably won’t, but that’s nothing against the company. I have less interest in films and stuff than I did when I first joined them. Plus, the money is probably more important to me at this point.

Oh, and you know I lost my bank card a few months ago? I’ve just put my hand on the floor down the side of my chair, and there it was. Grrrr.

I’ve just realised it’s over a year since I last did any type of video log. I shall now consider them as outdated and worthless. Therefore, I’ll shortly be taking them off Youtube.

I will, however, keep the Berlin and PAris videos up. There’ll be more videos from Paris coming shortly, even though it’s 6 months since I was there. I realised that I didn’t lose the original video files during the Big HDD crash of 2008.

The vlogs sucked anyway, and I can’t stand looking at them.