Day: 10 February 2003

WHY am I so blinking tired? I got home from work today (after deviating to the shops for around 5 minutes to grab some essentials such as Milk, Bread and Pepsi), booted my computer up (it failed last night so I left it off), waited five minutes, reset, waited another five minutes, reset, waited another five minutes, reset, went into the BIOS and made a very very minor change (turned AGP off), reset, waited two minutes and it worked.

I dunno why, when my computer fails to boot into Windows 2000 Professional (failing three quarters of the way through the ‘flag’ startup screen), a small minor BIOS change should do anything (especially since it came up from a hard reset), but it’s extremely low on my list of things to investigate. I suspect when I make a BIOS change it just changes a status somewhere in the machine’s RAM or BIOS that Windows really likes but…

The development of the new “Guess That Movie” website is coming along quite nicely now – I originally mocked-up the front page over a week ago and I’ve just been working on a few other things concerning it in my spare time, but finally I’ve got something that works!

Yipee! Well, when I say “works”…. It can now automatically select the latest unguessed picture, display it and allow people to guess. Just enter in a partial movie name and it’ll scan it’s already massive database of movie names (over 150,000 of them) and present you with a list of possible matches – just pick the one that you want to guess at and… Well, that’s as far as I’ve currently got with the working system, but it’s cleared up a few database design issues (the main one was actually getting all the movie names into the system) and things are coming along in leaps and bounds. Hopefully by round 27 of the current “Guess That Movie” game, I’ll be ready to switch it all to the new system: so that’s anywhere between 24 hours from now and several weeks (I’ve noticed that the “quick guesses” have actually stopped at the moment – have I really made the recent images that hard to guess?).

I spoke to my GESF for the first time in ages today – she’s doing ok and, by sounds of things, is just about as exhausted as I’ve been recently. As soon as I’ve been getting home from work, I’ve usually been asleep within two hours – and I’m still not quite sure how work could have tired me out that much. Like myself, she hasn’t been to Karaoke for a while, but she has been doing other activities she loves – I must make a note to actually get away from the computer(s) a bit more and do something more lively (I work on a computer for 8 hours a day, then come home and go straight back on my home machine). I’m still in half minds whether or not to get her something for Valentines Day (I did half bring the issue up with her), but have you seen the cost for Valentines Day flowers and stuff? £16 upwards for a single rose! Yes, I like her a hell of a lot (and we do get on extremely well), but I’ve got a feeling it’s still very early in our friendship to push the boat out like that… But I’ll think about it.

Apart from that, my life’s been rather boring as of late. I’ve got plenty to do, just not enough waking hours to do it all in! I’m beginning to run low on food (haven’t been “major food shopping” in over a month) so I best make a shopping list soon, website stats seem to be up over the board (this blog is currently generating between 550 and 600 visitors a day!) and I still haven’t worked out what the flaw in my idea of a new energy source could be (I suspect it’s efficiency related, but if my thinking’s correct, that can be easily scaled over).

Anyway, I’m going to have a nice long relaxing bath now and then go to sleep! Byeess! (oh – expect my blogging activity to return back to normal – I’ve got a few games and things I can blog about now – hopefully I might be able to get back up to 5 posts a day).