Sheets of rain and other liquid cooling...

Well, the weather seens to have turned very quickly. With Autumn having waited all summer for the chance to do its thing, now it's here it's definitely making its presence felt. The sky is all shades from the light "can't really be bothered" grey, to the very dark "I'd better get inside" grey. There's also a lovely patch of blue, of course, and while the rain has temporarily stopped completely, a couple of minutes ago, I was watching rain come down in sheets onto my neighbour's garage (everywhere else as well, but I was watching my neighbour's garage) where the wind blasted them from the roof against the neighbour's house wall. So yeah, summer seems to have had its chance.

Well, five minutes later and that temporary storm seems to have ended. It's all bright sunshine again.

Sooo, yeah.
A few days ago, wednesday or perhaps thursday, at 9:19PM, my computer, having been put in its new case, and fully assembled, booted into Windows for the first time, making it the first official (non testing) time this new computer has booted up. Yay, happy 0th birthday, computer. At this point I'd like to thank my big bro for generously donating many of the components now sitting inside the PC. In the end I used a donated motherboard and power supply (and cpu cooler - see below), new RAM, CPU and Case, and a GPU that I already owned.

I finally managed to grab a Coolit ECO ALC and install it, and for a short time it worked great. Now the pump is making a weird droning noise.
The seller is very apologetic and has promised a refund if that is what I wish, however, I went to check with the manufacturers whether the noise was a symptom of something serious (i.e. possible pump failure) or something beningn (possible trapped air bubble), first. No point going to the trouble of replacing it if it's just something that's going to go away.
The manufacturer for their part have suggested that the pump may be faulty and have "opened a support case". I'm not sure what that means but I guess it will all become clear. If coolit resolve the issue it might just be a case of replacing the defective ECO ALC with a working one. If on the other hand I have to deal with the seller and get a refund, I suppose I can always take the money from the refund and put it towards a shiny Corsair H80 (also made by coolit).

Time will tell. I've gone back to air cooling for a while until it all gets sorted out. I would say that CPU temps are unchanged, but I actually have no way of telling, since Speedfan seems to be a complete mess that doesn't seem to have a clue what it's doing. At least I don't have to worry about the pump exploding and splashing coolant all over my system anymore.

So, what else have I been doing? Well, I've been studying lots, and taking online exams and whatnot. I've also been playing lots of games with all the settings turned up to high, which is always fun.

I've also started looking online for gifts to buy for the end of year present festival that shall not be named yet. Yes, QVC's Endofyearpresentfestivalthatshallnotbenamedyet In July was quite well received by my mum (who loves Endofyearpresentfestivalthatshallnotbenamedyet) and I've heard on the internet that some stores are already stocking Xmas (oops there I go) stuff, including the local store which now stocks 2 varieties of mince pies (If you don't know what they are then go to your specialist food store (I've just had a quick look and they seem really hard to find in the US, which is a shame because they're really nice).

So yeah, I've got a few ideas for things to buy people, but we'll have to see what happens between now and then :-).

Apropos of nothing, I have been spending a hell of a lot of time listening to this album. I'd never heard of the band until a friend recommended them, though I think they're rather good :-).

As an aside, reading about mince pies on that site has lead me to read some more of it, and it seems to be perfect for my sense of humour. Here you go, for all you overseas folks who wondered what weird and awesome things we eat. There's some stuff on there that even i've never heard of.

I leave ye with some pickatures of various computer related things that I have been doing recently :-). Heh, or at least I will try to. The tabling seemed to work out okay this time round :-).

Have fun, I've got loads of revision to do. Meh.

We Have Liftoff... (New computer begins shakedown)...

It's official. As of a couple of seconds past 11pm, a little over 20 minutes ago, my new computer just booted into Windows for the first time.

I'm at the initial "sodding about" phase at the moment, and there's a lot of work to be done. Loads of applications, software, games etc to install, loads of drivers to be added, settings to be changed etc, and all of it is going to wait until my bro has salvaged what data he needs from the rather shiny and lovely primary SATA drive he has promised me.

At the moment, the machine is in a temporary case, using an IDE hard drive from one machine, an IDE CD drive from another, the tower case from a third and a spare cooling fan from a fourth. I suppose you could say I'm temporarily loaning a racehorse the legs from another animal, to see if it can run :-).

Once I get the SATA drive, I'll start from scratch and reinstall everything, and here's why:

The Motherboard I am using uses only one IDE channel, which is fair enough. I mean it's not the 80s anymore, right? The downside is that since I only have two SATA drives, one of which is too small to use as a primary, and the other of which has already been designated a secondary, I have to use two PATA devices on the same channel at the same time, which apparently causes bottlenecking on the PATA bus.

Not only that, but where sata cables are sleek, slim and curvy, IDE "ribbons" are bulky, crumply, ugly, and, let's just face it, they look really bad and attract dust like a magnet. They're difficult to fold around corners of the case, difficult to route round things, and they act like a great big long electronic tarpaulin strung from one side of your case to the other to obstruct air flow.
So the sooner the SATA drive (which uses sleek slim cables) is in there, the better.

Speaking of air flow, my new computer is happily "hooing" (that's the noise it makes, seriously, it's a quiet "Hooooooooo" sound (at 100% RPM and silent at anything less than about 60%) to itself, as I try to see how low I can get the core temp to go.
Considering that the side of the case is off, and the fact that aside from an 80mm fan I balanced on one of the aforementioned IDE cables to cool the chipset (and the PSU fan which has its own job to do), the solitary 120mm fan of my new and sparkly Coolit ECO ALC cooler is the only fan in the case, it is doing a damn good job of holding my CPU at a steady 32 degrees C. The Zalman air cooler in my other (this) computer can only manage 36c, and that's in a cool case surrounded by other fans, on a CPU that is slower by some 400Mhz. Okay, 4 degrees isn't a big difference, but both machines are effectively idling, and apparently it's under heavy load that the ECO struts its stuff.

Of course, my new rig isn't ready to strut its stuff yet. It doesn't have DirectX installed, and it is currently packing a lowly 256mb Geforce 7600GT in its digital pants. A card which would probably not suffice for hardcore gaming these days, even if it weren't damaged, which it is. Having suffered a hefty dose of heat damage a while back, any black screen is now liberally dotted with pretty red, green and blue pixels. I'll replace the 7600 with my GTX260 when I move the machine to its permanent home in the lovely new case I've bought.

Amusingly, the little 50mm (maybe?) fan of the gpu is making far, far noise than the ECO's 120. In fact, since I haven't installed any drivers other than the default, it was only four minutes after the computer booted to desktop for the first time that it lost its bluescreen virginity, with some kind of Nvidia driver error that is apparently popular among later versions of Windows. I don't expect this error to be a problem once the latest drivers are installed of course.

So yeah. I'm not doing anything hugely in depth, but it'd be nice to remember the very first time that my computer went online.

Ciao!

Excuse the dreadful mess, the case is my "It's the only spare case that will take 120mm fans" case.
The camera is my "I'm sorry I've lost my tripod mounting plate" camera.

When the day of the big build comes I will borrow a tripod if needs be and take some better pics :-).

Is this an Autumn I see before me?

I dunno, let me check.
No it's not. But I suspect that as summer occasionally appears early for 24 hours at a time in April, Autumn probably does much the same thing. Last night for example. Very cloudy and quite rainy, for most of the night actually.
And today, weirdly seems to be one of those Autumnal bright-sunshine/cold-breeze days, where the shadows are 10 degrees cooler than the light. I like days like this. They bring back happy memories, though I'm not sure what of. More a memory of a general sensation of happiness perhaps. Not sure why. Oh well.

So yes, computing.Well, my new case arrived a short time ago and I wasted no time in putting my system into it. It feels like a different computer, which is bizarre because the only thing that's changed is the case. But that's not going to be the case for long :-).

I've been on the receiving end of remarkable amounts of generosity from various people actually, where computer hardware is concerned. I guess college was coming up to the end of its budgetary year or something, and wanted to spend what little money they had left so they weren't under-budget, as at one point in the lab they had piles of stuff in what has since become known as "freebie corner".

Among the items which I claimed (I was given first dibs) were a trio of Cisco wireless access points, which I figured would come in useful for my CCNA (though I suspect they might need power over Ethernet which may be a small issue because I might not be able to power them!), an old (it had gone beige!) but fully functioning monochrome laser printer, and a shiny, mint-condition (but apparently obsolete and incompatible with windows 7) 600dpi flatbed CIS Scanner.
Having told my colleages of the bounty available in the lab, they came along and took the two remaining scanners, and I traded one of my wireless access points with a friend in return for a load of goodwill and a clear conscience (I don't need three of them anyway)*.

The laser printer worked flawlessly, and even works over USB so I don't need to sod about with serial cables and whatnot. The scanner on the other hand came with zero windows 7 support, with the manufacturers and Microsoft insisting that the scanner was incompatible with windows 7. It looks like the manufacturers just gave up on the scanner and its owners altogether.
Fortunately, other owners of the scanners weren't so willing to be left high and dry, and eventually with their help I was actually able to get the scanner working properly. Here is an incredible picture to prove it, courtesy of my ickle nephew:

I think he's coming on as an artist - he's certainly good when it comes to attention to detail. So yeah, the scanner now works, which I'm pleased about. I'm pretty happy with the laser printer as well, as it prints pretty fast, and 1200dpi printouts look pretty cool.
The only downside is that it's gone slightly beige, which is a bit annoying, but hey, it didn't cost me anything so I have no moral authority to complain whatsoever hehe. I'm still wondering how I might get it slightly less beige though. Maybe some oven cleanery stuff would work, I don't know. I'm not sure I want to risk destroying the printer to find out, heh.

Finally, the rebuilding of my computer received a huge boost earlier this week when my bro brought over most of an entire system that he had been using before he went over to the dark side. I'm ordering some new shiny bits from ebay, and in the next week or two I hope to rebuild my machine completely. The only thing left in it that's in it now will be the optical drive (one on the "new" machine doesn't work) and the secondary storage drive (which has all my documents on).

Once my bro brings over the sata drive he's combing through for any useful left-over bits, I am going to use it as my primary drive, and I can crack on with reinstalling everything to the new machine, which should be quite a lot of fun. So yeah.

Oh, and as for the spider, I ended up running out of the local shop carrying one of our old friends in my hands, to stop the spider from freaking out/being squished by the hordes of local kids that hang around outside the local shop for no good reason.
Said spider was then dumped around the corner out of sight and last seen wandering indignantly (but 3-dimensionally) off. I then wandered back in and paid for my shopping, as if nothing had happened hehe.
So yeah, revising for exams, rescuing spiders and planning new computers. It's been a fun week :-).

Some pickatures.












*Said friend is apparently keeping the still-unused wireless access point in a box in his cellar, having found out to his disappointment that while on a very superficial level, his wireless internet dongle and a wireless access point could be said to work along the same incredibly broad lines, he would not be able to substitute one for the other, and in fact the wireless access point would be of no use to him whatsoever.

A Frantic Disposition...

23:03 Monday 22nd August - 34 and a half hours before turning up for the exam...

This is just a little placekeeper that another - two or three day older - version of me is going to write an addition to in two or three days time.

Hi older me, I hope you passed the super mega important exam on wednesday.

Yes folks, I'm frantically revising for a very important exam, and to say I'm nervous is an understatement.
Actually it's not.

I am nervous, but I am also quietly confident. It is very very very important that I pass this exam, but I've done the practice test (which is apparently harder) and scored 15% higher than the pass mark, so hopefully I'll have something to celebrate on wednesday. If I do celebrate on wednesday, I may not write an addition to this after all. I might be too busy consuming alcoholic beverages and listening to music. Who can say?

If all goes well I'll get back to you on the thursday, with a hangover, some computer related stuff, and a story about a spider :-).

Wish me luck!

UPDATE: 19:01, the following day. 14 and a half hours before turning up for the exam...

I just finished my second attempt of the practice exam after two nights and a day of revision.
It's not very often I throw my hands in the air and scream "YES, HAHAHAHA!!" at the top of my voice, but after a mock exam score of 98.1%, I have probably crossed the line to "loudly confident", heh.
Still nervous though. But hey, let's see how it goes.

PART TWO - 15:08, 26th August...

Well, the day eventually crept up on me, and off I went. We spent most of the morning going over the questions in the practice test that a lot of people found difficult. After a quick break, we started all working together on one particularly problematic problem that - although I got right in the test exam - was a source of concern for me.

A short time later, we went through who wanted to do the exam that day, and who wanted to leave it until the day after.
Surprisingly only one of us decided to leave it until the day after, and the rest of us cracked on with it.

A cursory initial look over the questions revealed that despite assurances to the contrary, the real exam would be much harder than the practice test. But now I'd said I'd do t, it was a timed exam and I couldn't sit feeling sorry for myself. I ended up really struggling with a couple. You know how it is, the revision materials prepare you to answer any one of a thousand questions, and you just have to hope that the 50 they ask are among the ones you've prepared for.

Fortunately, quite a lot of the ones I got right are indeed ones that I'd studied in the days leading up to the exam, and although I was stumped by a couple of questions for a while and even had a couple of "What is this I don't even?" questions that continued to infuriate me all the way to the end of the exam.

A minute before the timed end of the exam I figured that the two remaining questions that I had guessed answers for had got me for the past hour and a half and wouldn't be solved with a last minute flash of inspiration, so I submitted the exam and resigned myself to the inevitable score that didn't reflect how hard I'd studied over the past couple of days.

Except I guess it did, because I got 90%. A healthy pass :-). So that's okay then. The stuff about the spider will have to wait :P.

Beer Madness

PART 1 - THE START (WHAT ELSE?)

So, Jack's birthday went pretty well. The day before the "do", our tutor says "oh by the way, tomorrow is a catching-up day where you all get together, sit around, read dilbert comics and complain at how unreasonable customers can be".
Actually he didn't, but now he's getting to know us as a class, I have a feeling that's what he will say in future.

PART 1A - BACKGROUNDY BIT OF KNOWLEDGE

You see, as part of our course, alongside our CCNA, we have another couple of, well, sub courses if you like, that we have to do as well.
The problem is, to actually do the coursework for these sub-courses, we need to demonstrate things like; "Using screenshots where appropriate, demonstrate the ability to search for, find, download and rename a software patch". Yes, really. On wednesday we were learning the intricacies of Manchester/Phase Encoding, and on the thursday we progressed to the lofty heights of "and then I clicked on 'rename' on the menu and here is a screenshot to prove it".
I would actually say that correctly creating, editing, saving and inserting a screenshot into a word document requires more skill than renaming a downloaded file, but hey.

Further to this, we don't actually have download privileges at college, so we can't demonstrate anything except our failure to l334 h4x a firewall. So instead of getting on with our sub-course courseworkyness, when the CCNA tutor isn't CCNA tutoring us, we sit around, read dilbert, and moan about bad experiences with customers.

Except this time we didn't. Being thursday, we set off to one of the local pubs.
And there we stayed, having a wide variety of interesting drinks including (for me) beer, cider, corvoisier (brandy), and a rather stunning cocktail called a fireball.

50ml of finest cinnamon whisky in a pint glass, topped up with apple juice. The result is an alcoholic drink that tastes (and smells) like raw liquid Christmas :-).

So the night turned out quite well. Lots of alcohol was consumed, lots of pizza was eaten (mine was liberally covered in the hottest chilli sauce I have ever tasted - alcohol seemed to take the edge off the discomfort, and while I don't like hot food, you'll do anything to impress your mates after 4 hours of drinking - so while I was sat there with my hot pizza grinning like a cheshire cat, the other guys were backing away from the table to stop the chilli fumes corroding their drinks glasses), and no one got into trouble despite the fact that one of the elders of our party made the mistake of turning up with an empty stomach after very little sleep, and quickly became the most intoxicated person I've seen outside of a cop show as a result.
To stop him from drunkenly losing them, other members of the party went home with his watch/mobile phone/sunglasses/backpack/expensive multitool/mountain bike, and apparently the poor dude woke up in absolute panic the day after wondering where all his stuff was.
He has it all back now and has promised not to drink on an empty stomach again :-).

PART TWO, OTHER STUFF...

So the course is coming on quite well, though I'd be lying if I said that anyone was finding it easy. I do however, seem to be coping quite well and have already got the practical part of the end of semester exam down to a fine art.

I had wanted this entry to be longer, but I've left it hanging in mid air for so long that I've forgotten most of what I wanted to write about, so busy have I been with college work (no really).

Hopefully, the next entry will include more computery type stuff :-). Let's see how things go hey.

Shuttles, Bikes and Climbing Frames...

PART ONE: BIKEY STUFF

I would yawn, but I'm not that sleepy.

I'm tired, yes, extremely physically tired, my legs, arms and lower back ache from 3 hours of cycling up, down, around, across, over, between, and well, I'm sure you get the idea.
See, one of the things that I like about my job, is that when people are in a nice mood, they give me lovely gifts of money or tips.
These tips go in a Jar (a plastic bag actually), until they accumulate enough to represent a decent amount of money.

Back at the start of the year, or even as late as the end of last year, you may have seen me mention that I was saving up for a new bike, one with suspension, that didn't jiggle me about so much when it came to kerbs and suchlike. But for whatever reason, no sooner would I start saving, than some personal financial crisis would appear and devour my money. Whether college fees or bus fare or whatever, despite the generous and substantial help from my parents, money seems to have been really tight for the past few months.
It's only recently that I've started to have a disposable income again.

Eventually, the tips built up to the right amount, and after weeks of agonising, I chose and ordered a new bike to replace my cool but slightly rusty (with finnicky gears that didn't work properly) and kinda uncomfortable other bike, with something more suited to my style of riding.
I ride on the pavement a fair bit, but I also enjoy riding dirt tracks and whathave you, and so the various potholes, kerbs, tree roots, protuding stones etc made a ride without suspension kinda tough on some sensitive areas.
So I ordered a spangly shiny new one, with suspension, and also with a cool paintjob, and lovely disc brakes instead of standard v brakes.
And today, after putting it together, I went on a lovely zoom around.
After hurting my naughty parts, I carefully rode home, put it together again with a larger spanner, and went on another zoom around, a few hours in length, cycling around all these weird little woodland paths that I've always been curious about.

PART TWO: NEPHEW-Y STUFF

As for the ickle guy, well I managed to see a poster in the local store advertising an Emergency Services Open Day. As the name suggests, lots of police, ambulances and firetrucks in attendance, lots of fun activities for all the family etc, and I even got to sit in the driving seat of a Police 4X4 (It looked like that <--- one, but not a model) which was cool. The fire fighters were doing demonstrations of fighting fires, the drugs dog was doing a demonstration of searching for drugs, morris dancers were doing impressions of dancers, and the speed camera dudes were trying to convince everyone not to hate them. We saw some awesome birds of prey, some cute rabbits, some strange chickens and rather skinny ducks, the biggest horses that I have ever seen, and 1001 dogs. My mum helpfully got me some helpful information about securing my possessions with the police, which she then helpfully tucked away somewhere where I can't get it.
Whereas my sister seems to throw stuff away if she can't immediately justify keeping it, my mum just seems to hide stuff away if she can't immediately justify not doing so. And since she's a compulsive hide-stuff-away-er, the end results of her interactions with items of property are depressingly similar and predictable. Oh well.

Last week, I took the ickle guy to the a park in another part of town. The area was lucky enough to have some money ploughed into it, (which is ironic given that the area's main block of flats is about to be ploughed into rubble), and as it has only been up a short time, the new park is therefore in decent condition, the local kids not having had enough time to smash the stuff up yet.
They have a couple of slides, a weird cross between a swing and, well, a round thing. It's like a huge dinnerplate attached to a swing, and you sit in it and swing.
They also have a rather terrifyingly tall climbing frame with a slide at the top. This thing is huge. I could climb off the roof of our extension onto it with little trouble.
It is made, instead of rungs, of very taut nylon ropes cunningly arranged so as to be a complete devil to climb. Never mind worrying about falling onto the ground, when I was up there I worried just as much about falling from one part of the construction onto another. Shame - I could have climbed to the top and had a nice view of my nephew being weird.

Or I could if I didn't hate heights, which is why while my nephew was busy climbing like a little climbing spider monkey, I was relaxing in the swinging thing, while keeping a careful eye on him :-).
But again, he seemed to like it. He made a new friend, who gave him a muffin for some reason, and I had a nice time walking him round the little alleyways and suchlike.

OTHER STUFF

That's it really. College has been proceeding apace, with the lessons getting harder and harder, we spend the days examining incrementally smaller and smaller parts of the curriculum, trying to nail out the facts in some semblance of order, before moving onto the next mind-warping revelation.
Today, we did subnetting. Next week we will do it as well, and possibly the week after. It's a confuzzling (and yet kinda awesome and clever and interesting) topic. The occasional giddy rush of fulfilment when the pieces suddenly snap into place, makes the grinding through the facts and texts worth it, I think :-).
Today, we also watched the shuttle land, live. I asked the tutor to let me watch it as a favour (the student computers don't have flash), and to my surprise, a crowd gathered pretty quickly, all evidently keen to watch Atlantis land for the last time. And land she did, without incident thankfully. While she goes on display at Kennedy, NASA and other organisations promise that they are working hard to deliver her replacement.

And that's about it really. Next week should be fun. I've booked 2 days off, so we can take the youngest member of our class out to the pub for his 18th birthday. There are about 8 of us going, and Jack (the kid) insists - get this - that he has things to do, the day after [his 18th birthday celebration!]. How irresponsible is that! He should just cancel those activities, instead of performing them with a huge hangover.
We did all agree not to get him too drunk however, as one of us would have to put him up for the night, and no one wants a sickeningly drunk kid falling around their house.

Of course, how reasoned and sensible we are about it after several beers, remains to be seen. Given the fact that the last time we went for "a quick pint", and that the more we drank, the more drinking more seemed like an awesome idea, I think someone is going to have to show extraordinary presence of mind to make sure, at half 11 at night, that ickle Jack doesn't get left to sleep in a skip somewhere, as is traditional birthday celebration activity, apparently.

But hey. Let's see.

And now, that this is over, I'm going to backup some stuff, and then sod off to bed.
I seem to have become more sleepy in the past few minutes. Very tired actually. I will have to have an early night to ensure I have enough energy to zoom around on my bike again tomorrow.

Byeee.

End of an era...

T minus 1:08.
Yep, I'm sitting here with my dad on a what has turned out to be a very rainy day, watching what is officially the last ever launch of the Space Shuttle, and I have to admit, I think it's a sad occasion. The thing has worked pretty damn well for the past 30 years, it and seems a shame to get rid of the shuttle, especially as there's no immediate replacemen for her. As I said to my dad, it's like the retirement of Concorde all over again.

(Launch countdown is paused at 31 seconds, while they check if something or other has retracted properly).
*Countdown resumes, less than 20 seconds to go*

And the engines have started...

And up she goes. The final liftoff of the space shuttle.
An amazing piece of kit, the Shuttle, I've got, somewhere, a huge framed photo of it that my neighbour brought me back from the space center when I was a little kid, so yeah, it's sad for me to know it's her last flight.

16:31 And the boosters have seperated.

Still on her way up, and apparently she's gonna be up there for 12 days.
But yeah,, she's been off the pad for about 5 minutes, and the shuttle's high enough for the curvature of the earth to be pretty visible

16:38 And the tank has just seperated.

Aaaand, the news has moved on to the news of the world scandal.

So yeah, I'm gonna get ready for work and suchlike, but I figured I should take time out to watch Atlantis go up one last time. Call me sentimental, I don't care.

Have fun, all :-).

Summertime! An actual real one...

...Always the way isn't it. You can read a news article two or three times the night before, and when you actually try to find the bloody thing, it's nowhere to be found.

(BING, Formula one is just finishing, 14:43 GMT. No prizes for guessing who wins).

Ah, here it is :-).

Yep, the weather, while not great, has at least avoided being downright crappy recently. Yesterday was actually quite nice, but today, wow. I went outside (as I am wont do do when not interfaced with my computer), and wow, would you believe it, it's one of those "get in the shade because you'll get sunburned otherwise and by the way don't touch anything made of metal or else you'll burn yourself" days.

However I need to adjust the (presently non-existent) brakes on my mountain bike so that isn't really an option for me.

However, on a completely unrelated note, I have found all 219 (including spares) of my ickle magnets that I did get for my brifday, a short while ago. So that's also good.

So yeah, what have I been up to in the past week? Well, not a whole lot.
Working, eating, sleeping, college, running out of money, drinking almost-but-not-quite ice cold cider (difficult when our fridge has stopped working), and lots of 3d stuff.

My level 2 college course has officially finished, which is a relief in one way and a shame in another as I can't really pillage the parts bin for free processors and stuff anymore :P. But hey.

Later this summer I'm hoping to upgrade my computer quite nicely, replacing the motherboard, cpu and ram at the same time. Bizarrely, DDR2 ram seems more expensive than DDR3, which is quite annoying.

But yeah, that's about it really, not a whole lot to report after a week, but I figured the weather was worth commenting on :-).

Here are some shiny shots of my 3d stuff that I've been messing around with. It's been a weird one this one because I've been spending loads of time messing around with textures - probably just as much as I've been spending on the modelling.

But yeah, there we go. I'm off to tighten the brakes on my bike :-).

EPILOGUE: 27th June

Well, it's official, it's summer. How can I tell? Well, the air has that traditional summer smell (a combination of garden fire smoke and the it's-about-to-rain smell). Apparently we're due for some thunder, and it has been trying to rain for the past hour or so.

One part of summer is getting moths flying into my room, attracted by the light. One such creature came in yesterday, and had to be released outside :-). I mention it because it's the biggest moth I've ever seen, and quite an attractive creature it was, too :-).

Apparently, Swallowtailed Moths are quite common, but somehow, they're only seen rarely. I suppose I should feel priveliged that one decided to fly into this very room, hehe.
Anyway, here are the pickatures :-).

Much Ado about Nothing...

Yes, for someone who tends to lead a fairly sedentary lifestyle, I seem to spend a lot of it worrying that I'm running out of time to do things.

My level 2 college course has just about come to an end, and while half of my portfolio work has been marked as accomplishing about 85% of what is needed to pass the course, The other half (that I'm confident will accomplish the other 15% quite handsomely) hasn't yet been marked. So I'm dangling around a little.

Work seems to be picking up too, and the tips are stacking up reasonably well. You can imagine how it is; some nights you make £10, other nights you make nothing whatsoever. There's no way to predict how you'll do, and the weather (including severe snow) seems to have no bearing on it whatsoever.

Earlier this month, my mum decided that we were going to Ripon again. Well we've been there before, but this time we sort of went without the intention of actually going anywhere, which was a bit strange.

As with last time, where we went to Fountains Abbey, we once again popped into the Warehouse for an awesome salad. Now of this salad I remember writing last time:

"This thing was fantastic - I didn't wanna take a photo cos people would have looked at me weird, but it was easily the best salad I've ever had".

Well I took a photo this time :P. I had a quiche salad with a cheese and tomato quiche, and lots of fresh TEGH, with lemon which was quite nice (I bought a lemon when I got back, but it made my tea taste like lemsip), and the meal was fantastic.

Besides the only other family in the place had one guy that was taking photos out of the window and stuff.

So yeah. After wandering aimlessly around Ripon for a while, we went down to Knaresborough, for a quick wander round. I had to giggle because it seemed at the time that the town centers of both towns look pretty similar.

Knaresborough was a pretty nice place too though, nice and scenic and lots of hills and suchlike. They even had a beer and spirits type place near (go to the knaresborough street view and pan left. The place is "Beer Ritz" next to Blind Jack's) the town center that sold mead. Now I've always wanted to try mead, because apparently it was quite popular back in the day, but for some reason the smallest bottle you can get it about the size of a large bottle of wine, and sells for about £13.

Now at the moment, £13 is a little too much to spend on something I may or may not like, so I'll stick to beer for the time being.

But yeah. That's about it for now. I've got work at 5:15 and I'm sure I'll have a whale of a time zooming here there and everywhere, but hey you never know, I might think of something to write about when I get back.

Before I go for now however, this guy's "Pachelbel Rant" has been doing the rounds recently. Now I suspect I'm probably the last out of 100 million squillion to come across it, but if you've not already seen it, have a look. It made me giggle :-).

Scoot-ays, Tiredness, and Cake...

14:26 Thursday: Eek, I'm tired.

Yep, another bumper week at college, where I've been able to have plenty of fun zooming around with computers and whatnot. More on this later.

In 20 minutes or so I have to zoom down to Pizza hut to have a little riding assessment, so that they can make sure I can be trusted to ride a scooter without mowing down hordes of people. Hopefully I'll be doing this little assessment thing on one of their two stroke scooters (that I'm used to) instead of their new spangly four-stroke ones (that I'm not).

Actually, I suppose I'd best get moving. I'm due down there at three!
More later!

21:53: Minor excuse making and teeny update...

Right, um, I'm back, and have been so for a while.
However, I'm absolutely incredibly tired, so I'm going to have an early night soon and I'll probably pick this up tomorrow :-).

16:59: Saturday...

Ahem. Well, a solid day's sleep, and a solid night's sleep later, and I don't actually feel any less tired.
So yeah, the ride.
I turned up at work to notice that the riding instructor was conspicuous by his absence. Half an hour later and I was in a severely bad mood. It seems that this place say they'll call me, don't call me, ask me to come down to meet someone, and then when I get there, there's no one there.

After a short time of being in a nasty mood though, in walks the riding instructor, having turned up on his rather lovely and shiny bike. A short chat and whatnot later, and off I go one one of the shiny new (<1000 miles) 2011 plate four-stroke scoots. Time to try something new I guess. Off for a couple of hours of riding.

And would you know, despite the scooter's miserable lack of power (artificially restricted to exactly 30mph, whether uphill or down), I had quite a nice time. The scooter's engine, while tiny, provided sufficient uh, [I don't want to say "grunt" or "power" because that implies that the engine has some amount of performance] uh, force to ride happily up hills in the bottom end of the rev range. The engine idled happily without threatening to cut out, like the two-stroke bikes do, and the automatic transmission had enough finesse to allow me to ride at much less than walking pace, without being jerked backwards or forwards. So yes, an absolutely puny 50cc engine, but quite a pleasant and relaxing ride, nevertheless.

Halfway through, we stopped at a local bike dealers, where I saw one bike I'd quite like to buy (£3,200), and one that, though weird-looking (or perhaps because it was weird looking), I'd really like to buy because it looks fun (£5,500). Of course, that sort of thing will have to wait a year or so.

A quick ride back, and I got all my paperwork signed. Out of 30 road-riding-competency criteria, I scored an A in 25, and a B in 5, so I guess I haven't forgotten too much in my time on two feet.

OTHER STUFF:

So what else has been going on? Well, not a lot. The financial tide of unstoppable brokeness is beginning to recede, and I'm no longer hugely overdrawn which is a big plus. My dad's on the mend from his rather worrying time in hospital, though we'll be keeping an eye on him for the duration just to be on the safe side. The dog continues to be cute and playful, and her behavior might actually be beginning to calm down. Time will tell as far as that's concerned I guess.

College is proceeding pretty much as expected, and I'm learning some fun stuff.

TECHY BIT (that's not really funny unless you're techy so I'll make it small so you don't have to read it if you're not interested)

At college, we're now using the systems there to create virtual servers and clients, so we can practice setting servers up and getting the two systems talking to each other. This week, as with last week, we've been focusing on DHCP servers, so we've been setting a DHCP server up (with a static IP), and using it to assign a dynamic IP address to the client.

Of course, when we set the virtual machines up, we have to configure them to "Host Only", so they don't attempt to interact with anything except other virtual machines.

Except, one guy didn't set his DHCP server to host only, he left it at the default setting, which allows the virtual machines to interact with physical machines across the network.

As a result, this guy's virtual DHCP server went onto the college network and started assigning dynamic IP addresses to any college PCs that asked for one, which produced a certain amount of mirth.
Oh well, I suppose you had to be there. Ahem...

SO YEAH:

That's about it really. I haven't been to Manchester for aaages, though apparently I am due to go with Nick soon, as there's some new (to us) big stuff operating there now.

And that's about it. Having spent a while playing F1 2010, I seem to have become into it enough to actually sit and watch it on the TV. An amusing side effect of playing is that as I watch the cars race round I can now go "ohh yeah, I know that track". The next one up is Monaco, which is a favourite of mine. Especially since I have a shiny souvenir from there, which my lovely brother and wife (his wife not mine) brought me back. I also have a rather loony looking Bull to go with it.

Other than that, I've been looking after the dog, looking after my ickle nephew, so he can play walking legs, castlevania, and watch his favourite show, and sitting around, hoping that we'll have a really hot summer.

So yeah :-). Here's a picture of my not-so-small puppy.
And another, to show you how lazy she can be :-).

Money Money Money...

PART ONE: DEPRESSING FINANCIAL BIT

I don't have any. Money, that is.

Yep, those were the original lyrics until someone pointed out that they didn't rhyme. Either that, or it's my financial situation in a nutshell.

Argh, I suppose I should explain why I have been putting off writing this one for a while.

Over the past few months, my financial circumstances have gone from bad to worse. Predictably, it started when I left the Army. I lived on my savings for a while, and as these dwindled, I then went to claim unemployment benefit while I searched for a new job. During this time, the lovely people at the job center suggested that I go on a course or two to improve my employment prospects. So I did. New start and all that lot. Of course, when I told the guys at the job center that I was now on a course, their response (in summary) was "If you're on a course you can't be looking for a job (therefore you get no money, haha sucker, you fail etc)". And I've basically been bouncing about ever since looking for another job, trying to carry on with my courses, and trying to get on with life without having one of those "Arrgh sod it I'm pissed off!!!" moments.

A few "Arrgh sod it I'm pissed off!!!" moments, lots of hassle, and plenty of help later, and I'm on the very verge of being able to support myself again. Yep folks, I seem to have finally succeeded in getting my old pizza scoot-ay riding job back. Hopefully this will be the last time I apply for a job there, as when I finish my courses, I may be qualified to apply for other jobs in other industries.
But hey, now I can concentrate on my courses now.

PART TWO: MY COURSE(S)

Yeah, courses plural. I remember a while ago talking about going on Cisco's CCNA course in a sort of weird abstract way, expecting it to be something that I could look forward to in the medium-term future. Well, apparently not. For some reason, the lads on the City and Guilds Level 2 course (the ones that signed up for it anyway), myself included, have now been started on the City and Guilds Level 3 course.
Now the guys at the college seem to be cramming as much as possible into the course, so while it's officially a City and Guilds course, the courses I am now on (including the other one) actually include:

• Cisco CCNA (minus final exam which has to be taken at an official examination center) - four seperate certificates for each semester and a fifth for passing the exam, which results in an official CCNA qualification.
  
• Windows Server 2008 (minus final exam also, same as above), which then leads to either MCP or MCITP qualification.
  
• City and Guilds Level 2 Diploma in ICT Professional Competence
• City and Guilds Level 3 Diploma in ICT Professional Competence
• Cisco I.T. Essentials
• Customer Care Level 3 (a vague name for a course, hey?!)

So that's a rather boggling six seperate certificates I'm studying for at the minute! If I get every certificate on offer, and there's no pressing reason why I wouldn't, I'd be at least vaguely qualified to start looking for jobs in the IT sector. In addition, [Our tutor tells us that] the IT Essentials course includes about 80% of the course material that is required study for the CompTIA+ exam, which is potentially an extra (and valuable) qualification I can get.

So I seem to be moving rather rapidly in a new direction.
As for my technical skills, they're coming on pretty well too. I can disassemble a PC down to its screws, and reassemble it in less time than it takes to watch an episode of star trek (about 45 minutes without adverts) and it always works afterwards.

In addition, and rather awesomely, my college tutor now seems to have gotten into the habit of bringing broken computers into class and saying "Hey andy, have a look at this" (not because he can't fix it himself (because otherwise he wouldn't be a tutor!), but because he has other stuff to do, and apparently I "can be trusted to do it properly" (!)).

Ahem, I've gone all red now.

But I'm pleased to have found something that I seem naturally good at. I make the odd mistake like everyone I guess, but by and large I'm enthusiastic and cheerful, I like to think I do a thorough, neat and tidy job, and everything I do is written up and put in shiny plastic wallets, to go in my portfolio, which is beginning to fill out nicely, considering that we have another 8 weeks to go on the course.

My only quirk is that I attach value to everything. "An old 2.8ghz pentium 4 processor? someone will want that!" Eager to clear out their stock of "worthless" stuff, the dudes at college have given me everything from old hard drives to unwanted LCDs, which has resulted in my new nickname "Magpie". Apparently magpies are unable to resist collecting shiny things. It makes everyone giggle, me included, so hey. And at the end of the day, selling stuff that was going to go in the bin has three advantages.

• Someone who needs a working part gets one.
• I could always do with the extra money.
• It's a huge shame to bin something that still works - this way it gets diverted to a new user instead of the landfill.

And all that aside, College still benefit from the freed-up space. So hey :-).

I'm now at college three days a week, which is pretty cool, and when I actually start work (monday, I believe) I'll be working two/three days a week also, so my time gets divided pretty evenly between the two. As I've said before too, there's a lot of hands on "doing" stuff, as well as theory, which I think is awesome. We spent most of thursday morning installing Server 2008 and configuring our machines to act as DHCP Servers, and learning about default gateways and subnetting, so it's fun and educational at the same time which is pretty cool.

I grip my wooden (well, wobblywood (it's like monkey metal, it's a new word I've invented for wood of unknown provenance)) desk when I say, "things might be beginning to look up for me".

PART THREE: OTHER STUFF

One thing about being incredibly broke is that I've had to find other ways of enjoying myself without spending money. Now this hasn't turned out to be as hard as it sounds, and I've been spending some time in town before/after college walking round the winter gardens/local galleries etc looking at cool things/interesting and weird plants. Also, I've been spending plenty of time with the family, especially my ickle nephew who seems to enjoy going to the park to take his remote control boat for a spin. I think I'm going to have to get one at some point as they look pretty cool, and they're certainly not as easy to damage as RC helicopters.

My ickle nephew continues to love playing Walking Legs (UT3), and seems to enjoy watching me play Silent Hunter 4 as well, so it's all good fun.

So yeah. Things were substantially crappy at one point, and while I'm still terminally short of cash at the moment, things might start to begin looking up in the near future.

here's hoping eh?

EPILOGUE: ADDED AS AN EXTRA, AFTERWARDS...

I never did say why it had been such a long time since my last Blog entry. Well, with all this various unpleasant financial stuff happening to me, I've been stressing about how I'm going to pay for things, how I'm going to pay bills etc etc, and just been having a generally unpleasant and stressy time of it all. I didn't want to dwell on it, as that would have made me more stressed and stuff. Now the crappy bit is (hopefully) on the wane, I can write about it in detail without getting hugely worried and depressed and whatnot :-).

Here are some shiny pictures. One is my ickle nephew's boat, the other is our secret clay mine. For good measure I'll throw in a nice picture of two doves that seem to enjoy staring through my window every summer.

Have fun!

Oops...

...Yikes, the longer I leave this, the more stuff I have to write to catch up with things.

Yep, it's been a month to the day (more or less (which completely defeats the object of saying "to the day". Oh well)) since I last posted anything up, however, inbetween the big bits of nothing that have been happening, other various events and things were experienced, and so I shall try to remember some to write about.

Hmm. Current affairs. Bloody hell. Coalition warplanes flying over Libya, the Libyan airforce now in tatters, consisting entirely of half a dozen trainee pilots with a handful of rubber bands to twang between them, Gadaffi running off into the middle of the desert with 40/50 however many virgins (isn't he supposed to wait until after death for all that lot?), and he still pops up out of his burning hole in the ground every few days with his megaphone, to proclaim "We are winning ze var!" before ducking back underground to deplete his supply of (either blind, or very rich, by now) virgins.
Still, it'll give your average student activist something to protest about, which is good. Activists are easier to identify as assholes when they're visibly protesting about something.

In other news, the past week or two have been filled with news stories about tsunamis and earthquakes and exploding nuclear reactors, all happening, completely unfairly, to the same country at the same time.
Yep, things aren't all that great in Japan. Let's hope the folks get back on their feet sooner rather than later.

Ever remember when you were little, and you thought that the future was this golden thing full of awesomeness and light and fun?

Sooooo...

In computer land, things are going pretty well.

I went to college one day and asked if I could borrow a surplus motherboard to use in a test rig I was building at the time. of course, being a dell motherbouard, it only fits in Dell systems. So to use the board I had to borrow everything attached to it.

Before I knew it, I was lugging a 15 kilo Dell tower PC through the rather pleasant studenty part of town.

"OMG No wai!" I hear you cry, no, I did not get given a fully working system.
The tutor's rather liberal interpretation of recycling and sales policy seemed to go along the lines of:

"We shouldn't give working systems away. We can give scrap away. If that computer is fully complete, minus a power supply, it's classed as not working. Therefore take it home and put a power supply in it".

Which was done.

In the past few weeks I've now upgraded every bit of the computer that I can upgrade, and it's not a bad little system. If only I could figure out what to do with a completely functioning but completely surplus computer.

I guess it's fun to take to bits and reassemble every now and again. Either way, I managed to turn a halfhearted arsing around 10 minutes fitting a power supply, into a full-blown in-depth 7 and a half hour reconditioning the system completely, rebuilding it from the ground up, and writing up in great detail, all my work in the process.

Look. See? Shiny! I was pretty pleased with the way that it turned out, and it seems to have been almost universally complimented on its content and layout. Both my tutors had a little chat with each other and then with me, after agreeing that I should consider looking into a carreer as a technical documentation writer.
I'll think about that maybe, but at the minute my priority is getting on with this course. I'm also going to see if I can get my name on the waiting list for the course subsequent to this one, which again, is two certificates, each worth £££.

Finance wise, I'm now broke. I have no source of income whatsoever. The job center have decided that since I'm studying on a (2 day a week) part time course, I'm not looking for a job, and therefore am not eligible for financial support. But all the terms and conditions I signed up to at the start still apply as long as I'm on their books.

In actual fact, I am still looking for a job, and tomorrow I intend to explain to these lovely people that if I'm not eligible for financial support anyway, they can shove their terms and conditions where the sun doesn't shine.
I'm not going to word it like that obviously, cos I'm a nice person.

But yes, at the minute, my income comes solely from scavenging spare parts from broken systems and selling them on the eBays. Difficult when my spare stuff comes from only one source, and of course I'm careful not to monopolise the scrap pile - other people want extra bits too. So hey.

In other news, We've all been spending a lot of time with my nephew, in fact it was his birthday not long after the last blog entry. Off we went to laser quest, and we had 2 awesome games of running around, zapping each other with lasers, and generally having lots of fun.

I got the awesome score, coming in first place, with an extra bonus for "stupendous accuracy", which was 12%. Okay I spose, considering that ammo conservation doesn't apply, and especially considering that the average accuracy is 6%.

The second round, I came in 8th out of 9. Even my ickle nephew beat me heh.
I'm not sure what went wrong there. Whether it was cos everyone ganged up on me, whether I wasn't able to use mobility to great effect (in the first game everyone else was walking round slowly while I was ninja-ing all around the mezzanine (heh!), which we decided we weren't going to include in the play area for the second game), or whether I was simply unlucky, I dunno. It was good fun either way.

Later on, we had a beautiful spring day, so my nephew got suited up in his finest Armouron armour and off we went to the park for some questing. This basically consisted of him running around fighting trees while I stood close to make sure he didn't do anything dangerous or whatever. A nice time was had by all.
Later on, his parents brought his remote control boat around, and we spent an hour or two sailing round the lake...

WE INTERRUPT YOUR PROGRAMMING...

Bugger I have (what is probably the first of many over the summer) a huge moth in my room. A grand moth even. I shall call him Tarkin.
BRB getting moth out of room.
There. Now Grand Moth Tarkin is sat on my window waving his little antennae in gratitude.

So yeah.

...

My sister brought her PC monitor round so I could use it to set up her computer which I was getting ready for her, and for a short and kinda cool time, I actually had two PCs working at the same time in my room, which was fun. The whole place looked a bit like a workshop at times, I have to admit. But it was cool. I spent the evening at her house the other day setting the computer up and getting it all working together, and it works like a treat.

So yeah. To summarise:

• I got more free computer stuff.
• The weather is turning nice.
• I am rotten stinking stoning stinking broke and selling my possessions to stay afloat.

Here is a picture of my cute little CPU collection. I haven't included the AMD X2 64 in there because my computer needs it to function.
I was going to put in another bunch of pictures, but they're just more computery ones of computers in various stages of disassembly :-).

Oh well, have fun. I'll try to report in when stuff gets interesting :-).

EDIT: There was a post following on from this entitled "Heads up".
I've deleted it because it's a load of rubbish :-).

I'm getting dizzy...

...the number of times I've been on a roll this week!

But first, february.

PART ONE: FEBRUARY

Well, so far this month we've had rain, frost, very cold biting winds, and snow, all topped off with today, which is actually a lovely spring day.

Everyone is doing stuff outside, whether packing caravans, cleaning cars, taking their dogs for a walk, taking their kids to the park etc. The birds are singing, the ducks are quacking, the sun is beaming down on everything, the grass is green, the water is wet, even some flowers are starting to come out, adding a splash of colour (to compete with the frequent splashes of muddy puddles) to the local park.
And in addition to it all, the local kids have been attending the "Sheffield Parks and Countryside Rangers' Minibeast Safari".

And, with a loud buzzing of wings, I think the first wasp/bee of the year has just flown into my room! Seems to have buzzed off now (They're a bugger to get out of the house again, since I refuse to kill them, the only solution is to kinda guide them through the house to the nearest open window).

Anyway, the safari. I can't remember the poster word for word, but it gave the local kids (the little ones who are interested in such things - the older ones are interested in getting drunk and fighting each other, obviously) the opportunity to wander around the woods and grass in the park, finding stuff like centipedes and spiders and millipedes and oligochaeta etc, and look at them with magnifying glasses and things, and even "help the rangers set up 'minibeast hotels' for them". Which presumably took the form of plastic containers with leaves and twigs and stuff for the creatures to crawl around in and eat and stuff. The kids were also invited to draw pictures or make models of their favourite minibeasts.
The rangers had set up a little marquee with tables and stuff in the park, and there were plenty of kids wandering around with butterfly nets and bits of paper and everything, and to say that we had an inch of snow a week ago, watching everyone out in the sunshine enjoying themselves made me smile. For my part, I was bimbling around on my (very muddy, but it works just fine) bike, and generally being cheerful. The air seems to have that odd slightly spicy peaty smell that it tends to have on lovely spring days like this, so it's all nice and seasonal.

I would have taken my ickle nephew to the safari, but he's with his parents and my mum on a trip to the coast. Not to worry, I've got some cool birthday presents for him for this weekend :-).

PART TWO: COMPUTERYNESS

Well, things have been proceeding apace at College (depending on who I talk to, where I go seems to change. To friends, it's College, to close friends it's Skool, to Americans it's Tech College etc etc, Tech College sounds best I spose. Maybe I should start calling it that). We've been storming through the modules to the tune of one or two a week, and so far my lowest end-of-module-test score was 91%. I could be doing better, but not much. With two test scores at 100% and two over 96%, I'm not doing too badly.

One of the awesome things that I love about my course is that it's hands-on. The last one was all theory, which I hated, so I left. This one actually puts theory into practice, and putting together machines properly and getting everything just right, is starting to become a source of personal pride for me; as an example, while I was installing an OS on a system yesterday, I spent the free time removing blanking plates off nonfunctioning computers, fitting them to mine, and making the machine physically look as good and as appealing as possible :-).
The note on the bottom of the spec sheet that I taped to the case, warned "Do NOT disassemble. I spent ages making this box look leet". I think Tech college would probably be the only place in the city where everyone got the joke.
It got a better laugh than I expected actually!

One awesome side-benefit of studying there is that as I've already mentioned, due to whatever agreement they have with whoever supplies them with their systems, they don't seem too hung-up on donating bits to needy people, i.e. students who ask for them nicely. This week, I came home with an Intel Celeron 2.4 CPU, a special blanking plate for the back of my computer, and a 40gb 2.5" laptop hard drive.

The Celeron came in useful for my side project...

PART THREE: SIDE PROJECT

Back in the good old days you see, before I built the lovely shiny computer that I'm using at the minute, I used one that I bought from PC world. A sparkly shiny silver and white Packard Bell that at the time was a pretty cool machine. It had a Celeron 1.8 processor and 256mb of ram.

Of course, when I built my new computer, it went up in the loft, saved from the bin only by my stubborn habit of keeping things with sentimental value. And there, it stayed, on its side, in the cold loft, for the next 5 years.

Of course, I figured that I may as well get some hands on skills in my own time, so down it came. Initially I was just going to take it to bits for the hell of it, but partway through I figured it'd be just as much fun to see if I could get it working again.

I started by stripping the computer down to its last screw, to a completely bare chassis. Every part was cleaned of dust, including the CPU fan and heatsink which were fairly icky, and every part was carefully put back together. I found an old hard drive in a plastic bag, in the drive bay, and figured I'd fit it properly and use it as a primary drive.

And what do you know, the computer works. It runs windows just fine, even a couple of older games with its cute little ATI Radeon 9000 graphics card (which at the time cost me about £120, and now costs £6.50!!! Talk about depreciation!!!).

I started getting a bit carried away, upgrading the computer's RAM, taking it from 256 to 1024MB, and I replaced the old 1.8 Celeron with the aforementioned 2.4.

And it still works! In fact, it now officially works better than it ever did. I'm hoping to pass it onto my sister :-).

So there we go!

Here are some shiny pickatures.

Peripheral Vision (also, Happy Birthday To Meee)

Also, Happy 250th Blog Post :-).

Yep, it's me again. I mean it's my blog, come on, who else would it be?

Well, as you can see, I'm kinda running dangerously low on space on my desk. Even at the best of times it's always been a bit of a squeeze, and my lovely shiny briffday present (the wheel) means that if I want to chat AND race at the same time, I have to lean over to use my keyboard. Bad ergonomics.

How long this situation continues however, is of course, ever open to debate: My desk might have been reasonably solidly built when it was new, but years and years of continual daily use (14,600 hours in the past 5 years, at a rough guess) means that the desk is held together more with wood filler and rawlplugs, than with screws and dowels. Three sets of runners are knackered on it, so the pullout shelf, the drawer, and one of the CD trays all do their best to dump their contents on the floor if I'm not careful. Not to worry, I want to rebuild it sometime this year anyway. This is another "I'll do it when...(I have some money)" project that sits on my mental "I'll do it when..." shelf, next to the big shiny new computer that I haven't yet started saving up for.

But yes, the wheel. It's a thrustmaster Ferrari GT, and taking into account the gift voucher I used to pay for part of it, plus the money I was given to buy it, and the loyalty card points I got for buying it, it cost me -£19. It seems that "the best things in life are free" only applies to other people while for me, I actually get paid to take them. Which brings me neatly around to my course.

Yep, I've now finished week 2 of the course, and while tuesday's "theory/revision" lesson consisted entirely of 4 hours of revision and end-of-module-test taking (I have access to all the course materials including the ability to take the tests at home, so theoretically I could do the first of the two courses that I'm on without ever setting foot in a classroom), the practical on wednesday was much more interesting.
Again, the day started with doing a clean-sweep of some systems and installing an OS on them so they could be resold, but the lesson was much more hardware oriented. Having been expecting to be sitting watching progress bars all day, I was pleasantly surprised by the end of the day to have swapped out a malfunctioning DVD drive, as well as installing two CPU assemblies, and about half a dozen sticks of RAM.

Highlights of that lesson included one of our new classmates (the 17yo kid, Liam, seems to be wavering as to whether he's really bothered about the course at all) opening a system up, and finding the CPU sat loose on the motherboard, and the heat sink rattling around in one of the drive bays (!), a second new dude's system beeping at him and refusing to boot, but only until I opened it up and put a stick of RAM in there (everyone starts somewhere, I know, but even I find it funny when someone puts a computer with no PSU on the workbench, and then complains that he can't find where to plug the power lead), and weirdly, a malfunctioning CD drive that the first dude fixed, turned out to have a coin rattling about inside the mechanism!

The second set of highlights was cooler though, since we restore these machines to factory spec, things like firewire/usb cards, graphics cards, and sound cards, tend to be taken out and given to the students, on the basis that "the computers cost us nothing, why not spread the love?" or something like that.
I set off home on wednesday with a new (to me) fairly old, (but very shiny and much better than the on-board realtec sound chip I was using) Sound Blaster Audigy ZS Platinum sound card, as well as a front-mounted USB/SATA/Firewire/Audio/SD/CF Card reader all-in-one thingumabob. Like this, but better.

Aside from some driver issues with the sound card (now fixed, mostly) and the fact that the card reader doesn't like SDHC cards, (I just plug the card into a USB adaptor and plug that into the reader), they're both now happily sitting in the computer doing stuff.

As for my wheel and pedals, They come in very handy when playing one of my favourite driving games. I didn't realise quite how handy until I plugged them in for the first time. Let's just say that using a wheel instead of the keyboard has made a slight difference to my lap times, heh.

And finally, we come to my birthday. Yep, I never writing this thing in order, but hey. My sister was the first to come bearing yummy gifts, including a box of yummy sweets from my ickle nephew, a huge pack of yummy pork crunch just like my Christmas one, and a cardboard thingie with lots of yummy beef jerky on it. Now someone (Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams, I can't remember) commented on the fact that they print lovely ladies on the cardboard backdrop, to inspire customers to keep buying peanuts/beef jerky etc on the off chance they might eventually get a look at a cardboard nipple. I'd always considered it unlikely that the women on any of these backdrops had nipples on display because pubs were, well, still public places. Nevertheless, after eating 7 of the packets, the woman was more er, exposed so I had a quick look.
There are no nipples. See, I was right. Though to look, there may well have been not only nipples, but full blown boobs, if her arms and hair weren't in the way. But using that logic, any woman walking on the street could be said to be showing her private parts off, her modesty protected only by clothing (!).
What was I talking about? I don't know. But the beef jerky is yummy.

From my mum and dad, I got a signed (from my mum and dad?) book, "Healthy Family Recipes". This was due to me expressing enjoyment of cooking, and a wish to cook more often (I really AM turning into my father's son. That or I'm just getting domesticated). I'm loathe to admit it lest I sound like I'm 46 instead of 26, but some of the recipes in there actually look really yummy. Provided I don't burn them like I burned my last attempt at cooking a family meal.

After lots of hinting and outright asking on my part, and after playing an awesome game of UT3 where I got an epic score (see pic), I went to the lovely local restaurant, where I had not one but two of their lovely milkshakes, followed by a couple of pints of very slightly flavoured golden fizzy water called Becks. At this point I was presented with a lovely magnetic gift from my Brother and his wife, a set of 216 (I still have all 216 of them, despite struggling to retreive 6 that got stuck - literally - down the back of my radiator (EDIT: I now have 211. Bugger!!!)) spherical magnets.
So far, I have learned to make several interesting shapes with them. I can make: A line, a strip, a square, a hexagon, a triangle and a tube :-). I can also make a long chain of them and wear them around my neck, which is probably fun. They're quite annoyingly fun to play with. Annoying because they encourage you to play with them for half an hour at a time when you should be doing other stuff.

We were sat at a table, where I had some balloons tied to my chair to mark me out to everyone, and I was handed a rather elaborate and colourful balloon hat to wear, to add to the festivity.

I had nachos, of course, because TGI's only serves the best nachos, cooked in-house I believe instead of the other places that seem to cheet (haha see what I did there? :P) and use doritos. After my burger and just before I was able to escape, I was cornered against the table and had a song sung to me wishing me happy birthday, which raised a lot of cheering and clapping from a (possibly drunk) work's party on the next table.
In leiu of a birthday cake (I just realised! I didn't get a cake this year!!!!) I was then presented with a bowl of yummy ice cream with chocolate bits in, and strangely, a fork to eat it with, heh.

After getting home, I hastily completed the TGI satisfaction survey (I promised the staff member I'd do it, as she seemed very friendly and she mentioned she could get a bottle of champagne if we said we liked our service - I'm a sucker for people being nice to me heh), which apparently entitles her to a bottle of champagne, and me to some free nachos.
I then went and drank my traditional birthday alcohol before having a very late night.

And now I think I'm off to do the same. Might hit the roads again later :-).

Have fun folks!