Richy B. – Page 139 – Richy's Random Ramblings

Personal: Xtremely Addictive

May 5, 2003

Drat and double drat: here in the UK we have just had a public holiday (called a “bank holiday” as the banks are closed on what would be a normal trading day) – it’s also called the “May Day Bank Holiday” as it’s on the first Monday after or on May 1st. Anyway, I had the day off work and I planned to get so much done over the extended weekend, but on Saturday I made a mistake.

A big mistake.

I came across a site showing how to get Sim Theme Park World working on Windows XP and 2000 machines. I’ve had Theme Park World for around 2 years now, but never been able to properly play it because of various bugs with Win 2k, but I came across that site: installed the font patch file supplied, set the game to run in Windows 95 compatibility mode and away I went.

I started playing around 4pm on Saturday afternoon: I didn’t leave the computer until 7am on Sunday morning! Yep – practically playing the same game continuously (it did crash a far few times though). I haven’t done that since I got ThemePark for an old Sega Megadrive (in fact, I actually brought the Megadrive from the game as a local store had the game available for £10 and a Megadrive for an extra £20 IIRC).

So, 7.30am on Sunday I went back to sleep, 10am – woke up, played until it crashed again at 11.30am, went back to sleep, 2pm woke up and played it until 8pm…. I didn’t get anything I wanted to do this weekend done in otherwords 🙁 It’s not like I said to my boss I’ll try and get a new site up and running, along with having the GTM site to finish bugtracking and … 🙁

I must delete it from my hard drive or else I’ll never get any work done: but I just love that style of simulation game so much (Lemmings, Theme Hospital, Theme Park – but I’ve never actually got into The Sims though).

Blarg 🙁 Must get next “Guess That Movie” image ready though….

But I’ve just got the “Space Zone” level to complete and and….

Blog: Welcome Back!

May 4, 2003

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Well two days later, but still – Welcome back to Richy’s Random Ramblings!

Yep, I’m going to try and make at least one entry every single day of the following month to this blog: at one point, I was blogging at around 5 posts a day – but lately I’ve been “running on dry” and not had much to ramble about: but hopefully things should go a bit more smoothly this month.

What have I been doing with my time the last few days? Mainly playing Blogshares where I am currently the 110th richest player (I made a hefty amount when Bookmoz floated: the shares instantly shot up to somewhere around $27.55 each!) currently with a projected worth of $128,568 ! Wow: I wish that was real money!

I’ve currently brought all available shares in a wide range of blogs: such as the CurryBet one about the BBC Websearch system, OneFineJay (which I’ve been reading for a while but not extensively enough to put on my blogroll yet), the Leicestershire based blogs (Blatherblog, SensitiveLight and in Bookmoz’s rival site Bibliblog (which is run by Kymberlie who is number 200 in the charts at the moment). Only bad choices I think I’ve made recently are ones like Exordium where I’m currently making a loss of over $2k!

Anyway: normal service is being resumed – I’m going to preload the blog database with a few “standby” posts so if I am short of content on anyday, at least I’ll be able to get _something_ live within 4 clicks or so.

Snippet: Very Annoying!

April 30, 2003

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*snippet* Aaargghhh! Luuuseerrs!

Yep, it’s been “one of those days” where I’m just going to be using this blog as a “location for letting off steam”. And the fact that my job would be so much easier if we didn’t have customers to worry about *grr* Unfortunately, they pay the wages so 🙁

Basically, we’ve had to make a few configuration changes in anticipation of a major systems upgrade across our network of servers: nowt too bad you would think. Except, as with any major computer changes, there are bound to be a few minor hiccups (even Slashdot suffers from them when they move/upgrade servers: and they are “techy techys”!). Of the 400+ customers which were affected by this weeks changes, less than a dozen of them noticed the changes (I was actually aiming for none of them).

However, whilst most of that few dozen were content just to let things “reset” themselves (the .uk zone file seems to be delayed with making its updates: hence has caused us a few problems), we’ve got a couple of “vocal customers” that are reporting “major problems: critical: fix now” type messages. I’m extremely good on customer support (I’ve often been told I’m “too good”), but we run a very tight budget and hence I have to be careful how I regulate my time and try not to “over service” customers too much. However, I’m more than willing to go out of my way to people paying £50, £100, £1,000 per year to help them.

But those aren’t the people that are complaining. Oh no. The people that are complaining are the ones that got totally free webhosting with their domain name registration (I’ve seen our rivals selling “webhosting+domain name” for £40 a year: we do domain name registrations for less than £20 and “throw in” a free webhosting account). Yep: the customers which we don’t make any money from are the ones that are complaining especially “the web is important to my business so the site needs to be running”: in that case, spend more than £20 on your website hosting! If it is “really critical”, then find someone offer a Service Level Agreement (SLA) etc: but you will have to pay – several hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds for that level of guaranteed service!

Aaargh!

(rant over)

Snippet: Unplanned Time Off

April 27, 2003

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*snippet* As you may have noticed, there haven’t been that many blog entries from myself the past few days : just been waay too tired. I’m actually planning on taking some time off until May (that’s on Thursday) to try and hopefully give me time to “recover” from whatever is wearing me down. If I’m still feeling as s**t as I am at the moment (not really hungry, extremely tired) at that point, I think I’ll have to consult a doctor to find out exact what’s up 🙁

Snippet: Too Technical Tonight