Chaos-23

I’m going to attempt to write more often, it’s part of my to-do list. We’ll just have to see how it goes…

I have a new obsession, staring into my lavatory. I can’t help it. It’s fascinating. I bought some of those Toilet Duck Fresh Discs that you fire onto the inside of the loo and they work like those hideous old rim-block things that my Dad’s always had a vendetta against as they can easily get flushed and clog up the pipes. They’re also a haven for germs and how anyone could touch one to clean/replace it, well… eugh! These things, though, are fantastic! You push the tube towards the bowl, press the button and push. SPLAT! It leaves a jewel like disk of fresh smelling disinfectant in the bowl. It lasts about a week, you don’t have to touch it to replace it, just zap another disk on, and there’s no risk of it clogging up the plumbing. Such a wonderful idea. (I am easily pleased.)

I recently found a place on eBay selling PSUs for old SFF PCs like my old Shuttle SpaceWalker SV25. I bought one and although the dimensions are perfect, it’s not set out in the same way as the original meaning I’ll have to cut a hole in the side of the case which is not ideal.

I really thought that once I’d plugged the PSU in it’d just be a case of sticking an OS on and away I’d go. I never envisaged the nightmares! I’ve built so many machines now I’ve lost count. Both for work and home. I just wanted a nice lightweight OS like FreeBSD or Fluxbuntu. Nothing would install! FreeBSD gives me a Fatal Trap 12 and reboots every time. All Ubuntu variants have kernel panic at installing files. DSL ran fine from CD but refused to install yesterday.

Today I managed a frugal install, but it wouldn’t boot without the CD. I’ve just given up and tried Windows 2000 (which was on the machine previously) and it did get to the configuration which is further than anything else, but then it crashed. I tried about 4 times. Same outcome. I’m giving XP a go now, more for a laugh than anything else. I’m not even sure it could run XP without the hardware problems! I’ve narrowed the issue down to the HDD, but sadly it’s the only spare IDE HDD I have. I’m not buying another as it completely ruins the whole point of rebuilding this out of spares.

As for my OU Coursework, I was 3 chapters behind due to being ill, playing some time-consuming 360 games(!) and general apathy. I finished reading all about Faraday last night and went though the DVD on him today. So now I’m only 2 chapters behind, but I reckon I can get the Stalin chapter read tonight as there aren’t any other exercises for that one. Then I’m on to ‘The Diva’ from Monday getting me right back up to date again. Phew!

I got a message the other week on my BlackBerry about google sync. So now I have my Google calendar synchronizing with my BlackBerry calendar and it totally rocks! Cos I’m now using it a lot more I have my Outlook synchronizing with the google calendar too and also added my FaceBook events to my google calendar, I also used an application to enter all my facebook friends’ birthdays onto my google calendar.

So now everything is to hand on my BlackBerry. I love that thing soooo much. Screw Nokia and their shitty CS department. Though it will be nice to upgrade my Pearl in December. Looking forward to getting one with GPS, only thing mine is really missing.

With things still not back to normal on TV with the writer’s strike (Bones is only 15 episodes this season) and everything (Bones & NCIS anyway) ending next week, I was looking to new things to watch. IRC people kept on at me so a couple of weeks ago I gave in and started watching BSG.

Haven’t done too badly as tonight I’ll be up to date with the current episodes of series 4. I watched the Razor mini episodes last night and the Razor special. I can blast my way through stuff so quickly when I put my mind to it. I pretty much just replace sleep with watching the screen.
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I’ve been playing around with FriendFeed for a few weeks now and I have to say I really like it. I know Facebook has just added similar features, letting you incorporate your latest Flickr/Picasa/Yelp/del.icio.us/digg entries into your mini-feed, but I think it has a long way to go before it topples FriendFeed.

A couple of things I’d like to see on FriendFeed though would be a neater way of adding my Facebook status updates. I’ve currently added them as an rss feed to the blog section and while it works, it’s a bit messy. It would also rock if MySpace would make my friend’s mood/status updates available as an rss feed so I could add this to my FriendFeed.

The best thing by far about FriendFeed for me is the ability to create Imaginary Friends. This means I can set up feeds for friends who have blogs, etc. but would never get around to creating their own FriendFeed.

Aaaaaages ago I saw this site and thought it was really cool. Sadly the only console I had that was on-line was my Wii so no chance of anything fun like that for me

Well since finding myself very single, very alone and with no friends and nothing and no-one to do, I bought myself a 360 (I got the Premium in the end). His one drove me insane with trying to make his off-line account link to his on-line one (had to delete the off-line one and start from scratch in the end), but so far mine has been good. Bought some 2nd hand and cheap games. Trying to 100% Assassin’s Creed if I can, just because samey & boring though it is, it’s single player. Managed to lessen my Viva Piñata addiction a little too, that was getting scary.

360Voice is very cool, I’m enjoying seeing what my console has to say about me Only real issue I have with it is the site updates so slowly. I know it has to wait a while to update, but the rss feed updates so much quicker. You’d think they’d both be the same.

Anyhoo, this post is a list of all the 360 type things I’m on, feel free to add me so I can pretend I have friends:

I was pleasantly surprised by a UPS man arriving yesterday with my fixed n800. I bought it back in January when they first came out over here, then I suffered early adopter syndrome and it died in February. Well, less died, more sort of had repeated bouts of something near-fatal. I signed up to some forums and it turned out to be very common amongst the first batches. The touch-screen would die completely, sometimes turning it off and on again would work, but often you just had to wait. While it wasn’t working the buttons would spazz making it unusable. Then it’d come back, but the right-side of the screen would be about as sensitive as a brick.
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I’m not sure what it is, but right now everyone seems to be on about web-hosting. I’ve had countless conversations lately about which hosts are good (Site5) and which are bad (34sp).
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I really want one of these for Christmas… *hint* *hint*

Meant to post this ages ago, but I’m fairly rubbish, so I didn’t. I decided against going with UKFSN in the end.

I thought I’d give Be a go seeing as my exchange is enabled. I was well aware I’d never get 24meg as UKFSN indicated I could only get 0.5meg and I was on <1meg with Eclipse.

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Awesome video, this is the result of geeks being allowed to have children.