Losing sideburns, losing inches
I couldn't sleep, so I shaved off my sideburns instead. ZOMG. Those things have been with me for about seven years (a third of my life!), for better or for worse. However, I need to lose 'em in order to wear a wig to cosplay Batou for Auchinawa, and after shaving them I realised that now it's gotten this long, my hair looks a lot neater and nicer without them anyway.
I have also made a Resolution to stop buying food and drink in town. It's making me fat, and it's making my wallet thin. So, if anyone sees me doing this, and I don't protest that it's a special occasion, please poke me. Thanks.
Lastly, turns out I've been neglecting my journal so much that I forgot to mention a few things:
Driving
I passed my driving theory test a couple of weeks back - full marks on the multi-choice bit, and 57/75 on hazard perception (which, incidentally, nearly gave me a heart attack: my heart was quite literally pounding by the time I finished the test, from the stress of trying to spot and instantly react to any possible hazard in the videos.)
Job
I've started working in my dad's surgery, filing medical records. It's quite fun, since I work after hours when nobody's in the surgery - I get to play my own music, yay. It pays £6.68 an hour, which ain't bad considering it really isn't difficult work.
Project
I have a working prototype of the most basic type of Agent - it picks a random direction to hop each turn, and eats anything it hops onto, including other Agents. The prototype even shows the map using actual, real graphics, although there's no user interface as such yet. I'm following my usual development schedule: a couple of solid days of intense work, followed by several days of total lethargy. Oh well. At least the work gets done eventually, and I think my supervisor was pleased that I'd got something solid to show so early on (plus, she didn't get too many words in edgeways as I tried to describe a week's worth of ideas all at once... )
Computer
It gets really geeky from here on in, so I've made this the last section...
A couple of months ago, Mum's monitor - one of the ones I rescued when the Uni were throwing them out - went kaput after a year or two of use. So, I bought a new one. Unfortunately, it turned out that when I plugged a working monitor into her PC, the PC wouldn't output any video and simply beeped a few times. A Google search turned up the fact that apparently this particular beep code meant an error in the first 64K of RAM. Swapped the RAM with some known working stuff, no change. Did the monitor blowout damage the motherboard via its onboard graphics?
Given that I didn't have a replacement motherboard, there was only one way to find out - order a new one. Or, as I realised after some thought, I could order myself a new board, swap mine into Mum's computer, and ask Mum to pay part of the cost. She would get a fixed computer, and I would get a faster one that didn't crash after half an hour of any graphically-intensive game (or, in the case of FEAR, before gettings out of the intro.) So I did. A few days later, a very large box arrived with an MSI PCI-E/socket 939 motherboard, Athlon64 3700+ with 1Mb cache, a Sapphire Radeon X1600 Pro 512Mb graphics card, and finally a 480W PSU to power the whole lot.
I began the gutting of the two PCs. Razor was easy enough - I've done enough maintainance on it to know roughly where everything goes. Mum's was another matter - she has a compact case, one of the ones where the PSU sits directly over the motherboard. Just before I removed the PSU, I decided I'd have one last test - plugged it into my monitor and hit the power button. It POSTed, then declared 'CMOS Memory Checksum Failed'. I went into setup, hit Save, and it booted happily. Um ... that means she no longer needs computer parts, which means it looks like I'll be shouldering all the burden of that upgrade. Well, I decided, I'd swap my motherboard and graphics card (my old mobo had no on-board graphics) into her computer anyway - my mobo seemed to have problems under heavy load (which would never happen with Mum at the helm), but my processor was fine and would benefit from being paired with her known good motherboard and used somewhere else.
So I cracked her PC open and begun disassembly. For some reason - mostly that it's been ages since I've stripped down a PC with a stock PSU - I'd forgotten that you normally attach the heatsink before adding the motherboard to the case, and conversely for removing it. So, I was trying to remove the heatsink, without any screwdrivers that both fitted the clip well enough to not slip, and could reach the heatsink without becoming hung up on the side of the case. Eventually, I got stupid and tried poking at it with a closed pair of wire strippers, which had about the right angle. Unfortunately, closed wire strippers are still sharp, as I discovered when they slipped and poked a small hole in the top layer of the motherboard, through which I could see a shine of copper.
Panicking, I plugged the PSU back in and tried to boot - no luck, it didn't even get to POST. Crap - her motherboard had turned out to be actually alive, but now I'd killed it for real. I swapped her processor for mine - same result. Tried her processor in my motherboard - no dice. It was when I tried my own processor in my own motherboard that I started to despair - had I been too hasty when swapping parts and fried multiple components with static?
It was about then that I noticed the small pile of RAM sticks off to one side, that I'd removed and forgotten to re-insert. Most motherboards won't POST (or, in fact, do anything) without processor or RAM... d'oh.
So, in the end, once I'd calmed down from my incipient heart attack and swapped things around, I ended up with one rather nifty computer (mine), one fixed computer (Mum's), and one AthlonXP 2100+, Zalman Flower cooler and motherboard (the first two from my old system, and the latter from Mum's). I'm taking the currently unused processor and mainboard up to Nate's this Tuesday to replace his aging PC's innards - his motherboard doesn't even have USB 2, so he's long overdue an upgrade.
I also noticed that the fan on my old graphics card was hardly spinning when I booted up Mum's new setup, despite the horrendous whine from the motor. Hm, so much for blaming all the overheating troubles on the motherboard. That's the third or fourth fan I've seen with that problem.
Anyway, everything assembled, I did the usual two days' worth of installing WinXP and getting all my programs and files in running order. Razor, having accreted over the years rather than built, had ended up with three HDs: a 10Gb system drive which was bursting at the seams, a 40Gb and a 120Gb, with the latter two having quite a lot of data duplicated. Of course, being terminally disorganised, I never remembered which duplicate was meant to be the 'active' one, so both versions ended up being out of synch with each other. The 250Gb USB HD I bought a while back came in utterly invaluable here - I just dumped all three disks to it, removed the 10Gb, and used the 120Gb as the new system drive.
I wasn't going to use the 40Gb, until I realised that I now had the perfect machine on which to try Vista. So, one long download and slow-as-hell installation later, I ended up with a Vista/XP dual-boot. I have one word to describe Vista: shiny. Aero Glass is really nifty, and I spent the first half hour or so in Vista just playing with it with an 'Ooooh!' expression on my face. The OS itself is hit-and-miss. There are some things I really like, some which just feel right, some I'm ambivelant about, and some that kinda suck. There's the shadow copy system, which automatically makes backups of your documents folder and allows you to restore files to previous versions. The Sidebar is cool on a large screen (at least 1280x960) - cool enough that although I normally run everything maximised if I can, I've ended up not doing so under Vista solely so I can see the sidebar - but there aren't enough gadgets yet. I love the sound of SideShow. I don't know if I like User Account Control - it's a good idea, asking users to confirm root privileges, but the dialog pops up way too often and it's too easy to become accustomed to clicking through it. Third-party drivers are still buggy - the ATI driver sometimes resets the resolution to 1024x768 (which is just Too Small to run Aero nicely), the Realtek audio drivers won't work after the PC resumes from standby, my M-Audio recording and MIDI gear is totally unsupported, and all drivers are required to be signed. The Vista icons for HDs and suchlike are nice, but the desktop icons for My Computer and various folders are horrible. The new Start Menu is a bit odd, and the change from nested menus to an expanding-hierarchy menu feels strange. The new Control Panel seems well-done and logical at first, until you realise you can't figure out where the option you're looking for is. The new Explorer reminds me of the bad bits of Konqueror - it's interestingly thought out, but far too cluttered, and whoever decided to hide the menubar by default without providing any way to access it solely with the mouse (nor any intuitive way to figure out that Alt displays it) should be poked hard. IE7's new design actually makes a lot of sense in the context of Aero, and I've found myself using it instead of Firefox for mundane tasks, although I still use Firefox when I venture out onto the wider web - actually very like I used Konqueror/Firefox in KDE. And lots of other stuff I've forgotten about.
Now, it's almost 5am, and perhaps I should try and get some sleep, or I'll end up hitting Snooze too many times and missing breakfast, and the whole spiel about not buying food in town will turn out to be for naught as I stumble into Gregg's for a Pastry of Dispel Crushing Tiredness. Or, of course, just sleep in and miss class entirely - which I really need to stop doing.
I have also made a Resolution to stop buying food and drink in town. It's making me fat, and it's making my wallet thin. So, if anyone sees me doing this, and I don't protest that it's a special occasion, please poke me. Thanks.
Lastly, turns out I've been neglecting my journal so much that I forgot to mention a few things:
Driving
I passed my driving theory test a couple of weeks back - full marks on the multi-choice bit, and 57/75 on hazard perception (which, incidentally, nearly gave me a heart attack: my heart was quite literally pounding by the time I finished the test, from the stress of trying to spot and instantly react to any possible hazard in the videos.)
Job
I've started working in my dad's surgery, filing medical records. It's quite fun, since I work after hours when nobody's in the surgery - I get to play my own music, yay. It pays £6.68 an hour, which ain't bad considering it really isn't difficult work.
Project
I have a working prototype of the most basic type of Agent - it picks a random direction to hop each turn, and eats anything it hops onto, including other Agents. The prototype even shows the map using actual, real graphics, although there's no user interface as such yet. I'm following my usual development schedule: a couple of solid days of intense work, followed by several days of total lethargy. Oh well. At least the work gets done eventually, and I think my supervisor was pleased that I'd got something solid to show so early on (plus, she didn't get too many words in edgeways as I tried to describe a week's worth of ideas all at once... )
Computer
It gets really geeky from here on in, so I've made this the last section...
A couple of months ago, Mum's monitor - one of the ones I rescued when the Uni were throwing them out - went kaput after a year or two of use. So, I bought a new one. Unfortunately, it turned out that when I plugged a working monitor into her PC, the PC wouldn't output any video and simply beeped a few times. A Google search turned up the fact that apparently this particular beep code meant an error in the first 64K of RAM. Swapped the RAM with some known working stuff, no change. Did the monitor blowout damage the motherboard via its onboard graphics?
Given that I didn't have a replacement motherboard, there was only one way to find out - order a new one. Or, as I realised after some thought, I could order myself a new board, swap mine into Mum's computer, and ask Mum to pay part of the cost. She would get a fixed computer, and I would get a faster one that didn't crash after half an hour of any graphically-intensive game (or, in the case of FEAR, before gettings out of the intro.) So I did. A few days later, a very large box arrived with an MSI PCI-E/socket 939 motherboard, Athlon64 3700+ with 1Mb cache, a Sapphire Radeon X1600 Pro 512Mb graphics card, and finally a 480W PSU to power the whole lot.
I began the gutting of the two PCs. Razor was easy enough - I've done enough maintainance on it to know roughly where everything goes. Mum's was another matter - she has a compact case, one of the ones where the PSU sits directly over the motherboard. Just before I removed the PSU, I decided I'd have one last test - plugged it into my monitor and hit the power button. It POSTed, then declared 'CMOS Memory Checksum Failed'. I went into setup, hit Save, and it booted happily. Um ... that means she no longer needs computer parts, which means it looks like I'll be shouldering all the burden of that upgrade. Well, I decided, I'd swap my motherboard and graphics card (my old mobo had no on-board graphics) into her computer anyway - my mobo seemed to have problems under heavy load (which would never happen with Mum at the helm), but my processor was fine and would benefit from being paired with her known good motherboard and used somewhere else.
So I cracked her PC open and begun disassembly. For some reason - mostly that it's been ages since I've stripped down a PC with a stock PSU - I'd forgotten that you normally attach the heatsink before adding the motherboard to the case, and conversely for removing it. So, I was trying to remove the heatsink, without any screwdrivers that both fitted the clip well enough to not slip, and could reach the heatsink without becoming hung up on the side of the case. Eventually, I got stupid and tried poking at it with a closed pair of wire strippers, which had about the right angle. Unfortunately, closed wire strippers are still sharp, as I discovered when they slipped and poked a small hole in the top layer of the motherboard, through which I could see a shine of copper.
Panicking, I plugged the PSU back in and tried to boot - no luck, it didn't even get to POST. Crap - her motherboard had turned out to be actually alive, but now I'd killed it for real. I swapped her processor for mine - same result. Tried her processor in my motherboard - no dice. It was when I tried my own processor in my own motherboard that I started to despair - had I been too hasty when swapping parts and fried multiple components with static?
It was about then that I noticed the small pile of RAM sticks off to one side, that I'd removed and forgotten to re-insert. Most motherboards won't POST (or, in fact, do anything) without processor or RAM... d'oh.
So, in the end, once I'd calmed down from my incipient heart attack and swapped things around, I ended up with one rather nifty computer (mine), one fixed computer (Mum's), and one AthlonXP 2100+, Zalman Flower cooler and motherboard (the first two from my old system, and the latter from Mum's). I'm taking the currently unused processor and mainboard up to Nate's this Tuesday to replace his aging PC's innards - his motherboard doesn't even have USB 2, so he's long overdue an upgrade.
I also noticed that the fan on my old graphics card was hardly spinning when I booted up Mum's new setup, despite the horrendous whine from the motor. Hm, so much for blaming all the overheating troubles on the motherboard. That's the third or fourth fan I've seen with that problem.
Anyway, everything assembled, I did the usual two days' worth of installing WinXP and getting all my programs and files in running order. Razor, having accreted over the years rather than built, had ended up with three HDs: a 10Gb system drive which was bursting at the seams, a 40Gb and a 120Gb, with the latter two having quite a lot of data duplicated. Of course, being terminally disorganised, I never remembered which duplicate was meant to be the 'active' one, so both versions ended up being out of synch with each other. The 250Gb USB HD I bought a while back came in utterly invaluable here - I just dumped all three disks to it, removed the 10Gb, and used the 120Gb as the new system drive.
I wasn't going to use the 40Gb, until I realised that I now had the perfect machine on which to try Vista. So, one long download and slow-as-hell installation later, I ended up with a Vista/XP dual-boot. I have one word to describe Vista: shiny. Aero Glass is really nifty, and I spent the first half hour or so in Vista just playing with it with an 'Ooooh!' expression on my face. The OS itself is hit-and-miss. There are some things I really like, some which just feel right, some I'm ambivelant about, and some that kinda suck. There's the shadow copy system, which automatically makes backups of your documents folder and allows you to restore files to previous versions. The Sidebar is cool on a large screen (at least 1280x960) - cool enough that although I normally run everything maximised if I can, I've ended up not doing so under Vista solely so I can see the sidebar - but there aren't enough gadgets yet. I love the sound of SideShow. I don't know if I like User Account Control - it's a good idea, asking users to confirm root privileges, but the dialog pops up way too often and it's too easy to become accustomed to clicking through it. Third-party drivers are still buggy - the ATI driver sometimes resets the resolution to 1024x768 (which is just Too Small to run Aero nicely), the Realtek audio drivers won't work after the PC resumes from standby, my M-Audio recording and MIDI gear is totally unsupported, and all drivers are required to be signed. The Vista icons for HDs and suchlike are nice, but the desktop icons for My Computer and various folders are horrible. The new Start Menu is a bit odd, and the change from nested menus to an expanding-hierarchy menu feels strange. The new Control Panel seems well-done and logical at first, until you realise you can't figure out where the option you're looking for is. The new Explorer reminds me of the bad bits of Konqueror - it's interestingly thought out, but far too cluttered, and whoever decided to hide the menubar by default without providing any way to access it solely with the mouse (nor any intuitive way to figure out that Alt displays it) should be poked hard. IE7's new design actually makes a lot of sense in the context of Aero, and I've found myself using it instead of Firefox for mundane tasks, although I still use Firefox when I venture out onto the wider web - actually very like I used Konqueror/Firefox in KDE. And lots of other stuff I've forgotten about.
Now, it's almost 5am, and perhaps I should try and get some sleep, or I'll end up hitting Snooze too many times and missing breakfast, and the whole spiel about not buying food in town will turn out to be for naught as I stumble into Gregg's for a Pastry of Dispel Crushing Tiredness. Or, of course, just sleep in and miss class entirely - which I really need to stop doing.