»10th August 2005
Dry Season
You may have noticed that there hasn't been many blog updates recently. What blog updates there have been haven't been of the standard set when I was hanging around in my flat at Dev after the exams. Even the LJ has been getting increasingly poor updates, but that's the LJ and no one really likes that anyway. So, determined to write a new blog entry (with as few typos as possible), I have set about creating what you are reading right now.
Seeing as I've been running low on interesting, seemingly noteworthy things to record on this I have resorted now to the most cardinal of blog sins. Copy-pasting IM conversations. This excerpt is what I believe to be a particularly entertaining example however.
It should now be clear how great the difference between chainmail and chain mail is. One is useful for protecting against blows from medieval weapons, the other is an annoying web trend perpetuated by idiots and spam-demons.
So, I bet you're
Yesterday
Around 3am on monday morning Sam popped online and started talking about getting guitar lessons. I said 'I could give you guitar lessons', then after a little planning and a few hours it was 7:20pm and Sam was sat in my kitchen expecting me to teach her guitar. Having benefitted from my own guitar teacher's lessons about how to teach guitar, I had a vague idea what the hell I was going to do. Over the course of the next few hours I proceeded to try and conduct a guitar lesson where I explained basic music theory for guitar, the fretboard, pick-ups, string names etc. Quickly it boiled down into painful attempts at making very small hands fret rather large chords and some nursery-rhyme style single string work. Sam left the lesson knowing more about guitar than two hours previous and with painful finger-tips. I left with my walkman and Sam in tow ready to make the ascent to Staincliffe. Once at Staincliffe Sam bought me some Lucozade, went off to the crazy place where Sam goes and I walked back down the hill listening to 'With Teeth'.
Today was quite productive and reassured me that ideas thought up at 3am shoudln't necessarily be classed as '3am ideas' (see Blog 26th January 2005, Mono Devices).
Last week, the week before?
Sometime around the beginning of August, Rory hosted his now annual barbeque. Despite quite a few people been invited the only people to turn up apart from Rory was Abz, Eddie, JK and me. This was fortunate really as no one ran around Rory's back garden wearing only Rory's mother's underwear, plus it meant there was more food and drink to go round. The first half of the event, the barbeque went fairly well, I cooked sausages, JK cooked burgers, everyone ate everything. Though one of the micro barbeque things took a while to get going and the other burst into flames after I had been wafting it with a bit of cardboard and not paying attention, the food was all fairly well cooked and burgers didn't melt through the grate after been left under my supervision. I am proud to say that I lived up to my reputation of being someone who 'looks like he could run a good barbeque'. The burger melting incident last year was a real black eye for me, the sausages this year were most definitely a feather in my cap.
The second half of the evening followed the tried and tested formula of getting drunk and watching DVDs, Eddie left around this time because
Along the way we stopped in several corner shops. At the first one at around 7am, both Original and Orange Lucozade was purchased. At the second one water, highly suspicious whole milk and a single jelly bear was purchased. I got back at around 8am, watched about 30 seconds of the cheery 8 o' clock news on BBC 1 and then fell asleep, JK got back and went for a bike ride or something.
The walk home and the lengthy sleep allowed the evasion of a hang over. Score!
About two hours ago
Dettermined to change the splash screen on my old computer running Windows 2000, I managed to screw up windows by copying one copy of an .exe from the windows directory on one hard-drive to the windows directory on the other hard-drive. This resulted in Windows 2000 refusing to boot and forced me to access the mysterious second installation of 2000 which appeared to be on my system. This turned out to be some strange partially completed installation which allowed me to delete both files which were promptly replaced by Windows upon restarting, seemingly returning my old computer to it's previous un-fucked state. I have discovered, however, that a new problem has arose, probably related to the previous one. 3D applications are as slow as shit and reinstalling nVidia drivers and DirectX haven't solved matters. I am now faced with an old computer approaching uselessness and the prospect of having to tit around on it for ages to make things work again or simply perform a format and conduct the arduous ritual of backing up important stuff and reinstalling less important stuff. I'm not going to do jack shit right now though because it's nearly 3am and I'm updating the Cube.
The one good thing that has come from this disaster is that I found out how to change all the start-up and shutdown screens on 98SE. Needless to say I promptly replaced every ugly Microshaft Windows 98SE screen with a fetching NIN logo.
No, I'm not completely retarded when it comes to graphic editing. Windows 98SE however is a mastery of asstardery, hence the strange 320x400 resolution on the start-up screen graphics.
This blog update is refreshingly large, I am gratingly hungry and it is inconveniently late. So now I will go.
Extar, over, out.
TCP/IP, it's fucking me off. Other protocols doing little more. Definitely got worse. Now making me curse. Removing IPX. Will it ever work? Never!