Blog - September 2005
10:37 - 30/09/2005 - Back to London -
I'm going back to down to London later this afternoon, this means I'm going to have to go pack soon. I thought I would post just so if any of you wonder why I'm not online for a week or maybe two it's because we haven't got the internet set up at our house yet. While I hope to fill this offline time with lots of very exciting social things, knowing myself I have a back up plan to pick up Winter Assault which should be able to fill that video game shaped hole until I get my internet back. Unfortunately there's not much I can do about missing Rachel, except look forward to the 14th when I see her again. Hope all those going back to uni are having a good time and all those that are going for the first time this year that you're settling in okay. Oh, and hope everyone else not included in those two catergories are having a 'peachy' time too.
23:56 - 27/09/2005 - Epic Mount! -
I lied when I said yesterday that I had an epic mount... but no that would no longer be a lie, :D. A big thanks to Aginor who lent me the last 45g out of 800 to buy my [Swift White Steed].
15:12 - 26/09/2005 - I spoke too soon... -
I'd forgotten about this, but when ever I use differnt motherboard drivers than the one's that came in the box my primary DVD+RW drive stops working. On top of that, the computer is still restarting for absolutely no reason, well none that I can find, windows says it was caused by a device driver, thing is with these new motherboard drivers I have the latest drivers for everything in my system, so I'm thinking that something is broken. I ran memtest on my RAM and it didn't give me any errors so that's all good, I've had 4 different hard drives of different makes and sizes in this computer and it has always done this restarting thing to some extent so it's not the HDDs. I don't see how it could be the CD drives & I've replaced the PSU twice.
Sooo it's either the motherboard, or the graphics card. Given that I cannot touch the bios settings without the entire computer refusing to startup until I reset the bois (and then takes me ten attempts to change it to the settings to what I want to use and get it to start up again without having to reset the bios and start again) I think it might be the motherboard. If this is the case, it's not so bad as I could do with a processor upgrade anyway. Thing is my graphics card is AGP, so I'd have a rather limited choice of motherboards as the companies are forcing us onto PCI-express weather we want it or not. If the graphics card is broken as well and I've already bought an AGP motherboard I'll have to buy another AGP card delaying my switch to PCI-express even more. An easy way to solve the problem would be to buy a new processor, motherboard and graphics card, unfortunately I don't really have the cash for that. My Auntie Pip has a couple of hundred pounds saved that she'll give me when I need another comptuer upgrade (what with me being a poor student, and she know how much I love my computer and also Pip's great!), it might cover an upgrade of processor and motherboard, but not of that and a graphics card so I'm a bit stuck as to what to do. [Also there's always the issue that the cash would be better spent in 6 months time, I just don't think I can put up with a broken PC for that long].
As some of you may remember, if you've been reading my blog for any length of time, I had some trouble with my hard drives when I first got World of Warcraft, and had buy two new ones and do quite a lot of messing around. To be perfectly honest I'm not sure that the two hard drives I ended up with are 100% healthy, but they do work. Of course I could buy myself new optical drives, use only my bigger (and faster) hard drive and get some cheap RAM for reconstructing a slightly lower spec (but hopefully healthy) gaming pc that I could sell on for enough cash to help me build my new-improved one. Of course you know me, or then again you might not but anyway, I can't live without a gaming PC for myself while I sell on another, so I'd have to upgrade mine first and then build the lower spec one and sell it on after, this presents a slight cash-flow problem. I could use my student loan as a buffer while I do all this, but then again I might not be able to make a healthy second PC out of salvaged components in which case I'd suddenly be a few hundred pounds worse off and going hungry.
I really should have got a job over summer, I'd have some crazy pimped up PC and cash to spare if I had... instead I spent it playing World of Warcraft... How much do you think an account with a level 60 mage, full magister's set, 300 tailoring, 305 skinning, 300 first aid, epic mount, and one months subscription (plus about 15 alts at various levels, & not mention the mage's name is a main character in the books from which the servers name was taken from :P) would go for on e-bay?
10:04 - 26/09/2005 - Some slightly better news -
As you can probably tell last night I wasn't in the best of moods, possibly because I was up for 18 hours and about 10 hours of those were spend in the car and about 5 of those in traffic jams. That and lack of food and sleep. I installed some new motherboard drivers and amazingly they work, 100%, no errors of any kind, I think that's the first time for a few months that's happened for me. I haven't had chance to see if this results in increased performance because I'm going to be driving my Sis around soon. Positive stuff from yesterday that I didn't mention is that the house is pretty great, I went to ikea in london with dad and got a really nice (& big) desk and a tv stand, so my room looks pretty sweet, I've also got 2 wardrobes, which is interesting but not unpleasant.
01:58 - 26/09/2005 - I feel you should be informed... -
There has been a certain lack of updates recently and in fact my last one didn't actually mention anything about the world I live in, this is mainly because my grandma died a couple of weeks ago and I 'cope' with death by completely ignoring it because to be quite honest if you don't believe an afterlife (or in my case anything metaphysical at all) there is no way you can cope with death. So I didn't mention it at the time. I did go on a rant about the media but that was more anger diverted from people trying to imply nonna dying was a good thing; saying she wasn't in any pain anymore and other such. As you can guess from me talking about how I cope with death, I don't think death in any circumstance can ever be a good thing.
Yeah well anyway... We've sorted a house for university in farm lane in fulham, a nice 30-40 minute walk from campus (we will be walking in what with the tube being a bit expensive and possibly explosive too :/) , we are having trouble paying the rent in an organised manner at the moment, the rent and the bills actually. Hopefully we'll be able to overcome that once we're actually all down in london though. Something else a little annoying was, George said he'd take the smallest room for a certain amount cash from each of us a month, we all agreed that we'd all pay the same no matter who got the largest room, then I got the largest room, now (surprise surprise) it's been suggested that I should pay it all, or alternatively that my room is a guest bedroom for george's friends / family when they need to come stay. Both of which, I think understandbly, wouldn't be happy with. To be perfectly honest I think it's completely within my rights to say we made a deal we're going to stick with it. Instead I've been nice and I've offered to pay over a double share of the money we agreed to pay geogre. This however has had no response (except for support from Tom R. *hugs*), I think however if there any suggestions that require me to surrender more cash than this or privacy, my response will be something along the lines of "bite me".
In other news, my computer is slowly dying, games crash for no reason and the computer just restarts... and it's getting more frequent, that and it's taking longer and longer to do stuff. This isn't very good as I can't afford to replace my PC right now, especially when I also want a shiney PSP, a snowboard, a new pair of trainers (well I actually need a new pair, mine are falling apart) and also a motorbike. Ignoring the trainers, they are in order of likelyhood, with me buying myself a PSP being better than 50:50 and me getting a motorbike only slightly more likely than me winning the lottery, and I don't play the lottery. I think I'm going to buy an external USB hard drive back up all my files (backing up on DVD+Rs every time I want to format is getting tiresome) and attempt to make it better by formatting, then installing the newest & best drivers straight away and installing no more than absolutely necessary.
I've done very little productive this summer, in fact pretty much nothing, and I've been addicted to World of Warcraft again, partly just because World of Warcraft runs with minimal problems and can cope with wi-fi lag, everything else crashes &/or is sensitive to the quality of your net connection so it's pretty much all I can play. I'm really looking forward to going back to london because I'll have things to do. I'll miss having Rachel for company but I'm probably going to be far more sociable than if I stuck around at home. Oh and I'll be off wifi, once we actually get boardband installed that is... Yeah well, unfortunately my sister hurt her leg doing netball so I have to be her personal taxi tomorrow and I got up about 18 hours ago and started writing this about 2 hours ago before I decide to go talk to Groomy and Chesh on teamspeak. So I'm just going to post this now and go to bed, unfortunately it'll probably not make much sense.
13:54 - 09/09/2005 - Reporting -
I was just reading a couple of threads on TSR, something I normally try and avoid because forums, especially that one, annoy the hell out of me. One of the threads was about dyslexia. While I don't think I am dyslexic, I do have trouble with spelling and making my thoughts clear in writing. Whenever I think about this it makes me want to try and communicate one of my many (often random) thoughts to other people, as I'm all by myself at home at the moment the only way I can is here.
What I'm going to try tell you about is my frustration with media, not 'the media' as if it's some huge machine trying to give us one misguided view of the world, but more my frustration at bad reporters that twist everything just to make it seem more news worthy. Some examples; The whole 'the myth that is dyslexia' thing that's going round at the moment for example, really all the people that did the study wanted to say was that there is a lot of misdiagnosis, not to refute the existence of the condition as whoever is reporting it seem to want to imply.
The other TSR thread was something about a study of how apparently the ratio of heights of 1:1.09 between a female:male is on average the most likely to cause attraction. While why anyone would devote time and energy to this or how they came up with it is a little beyond me, but it seems reasonable except whoever was reporting had twisted it to 'your perfect partner has to be such and such a height' / 'that relationship isn't going to work because they aren't the right heights' like somehow height had a bearing on the relationship after initial attraction.
I remember from while back the BBC local news implying some company was making dangerous toys that would endanger your children, when actually some kids had been playing with a petrol powered remote control car (which all say 16+ on the box) and thought it would be funny to put a match into the fuel tank... While these stories don't really matter they are clear examples of how many reporters write their reports, which doesn't give me a great deal of confidence about their stories about important issues.
Sometimes you read a report that is clear, cuts to the issues involved and doesn't go twisting the story into more than it is or to conclusions that aren't valid, but more often not there's such obvious bias I stop taking anything the report is saying seriously and sometimes just stop reading it altogether. The most depressing thing is some people just lap it up. There's nothing that can be done about it really but it is still very irritating.