Category: Life: Personal

Well, I think I may have sorted the technical difficulties I’ve been suffering with my home Windows 2000 Professional PC. After burning off over 20 CDs worth of data (leaving my main hard drive nearly half cleared or half full: whichever way you look at it), running scan disc, disabling services, re-installing and de-installing device drivers, removing programs, attempting a defrag of the hard drive (it had 40% free space at the point – Defrag wasn’t showing an ounce of “white free space” though) and many many many other things: my machine now seems to be stablish. It’s working, I’m connected to the Internet and it hasn’t yet crashed.

Hopefully when I watch the 300th episode of The Simpsons it’ll be able to play the entire episode for me instead of totally freezing at arbitrary points. Fingers crossed! Of course, if it does work, I won’t have too much of a clue about what the problem is (I had to reset every single log file I could find to try and help the diagnostics) – but as I’m considering buying a second PC and making it dualboot with Windows and Linux (which variant of Linux though is still undecided) it may be a moot point.

In other news: I’m not feeling too good. Yesterday, I was in bed practically shivering even though the heating was on maximum – had a “head cold” all day at work and kept on feeling faint. I talked to both my parents this evening: my Dad is currently off work with the flu/cold and my Mother has Tonsillitis – I was with them both for 3.5hours on Monday for my sister’s 18th birthday… Co-incidence? Hmmm – we’ll see. I’m just going to have another Lemsip before I take a nice long relaxing soaking hot bath: thank deity it’s the weekend tomorrow. Time for me to recover!

As previously mentioned, I’ve been performing a number of upgrades to my machines recently. All of my server ones went without a hitch (and the upgrade to Movable Type 2.6 went perfectly: I even took the time to update few other things in the config, move a few files around, implement ‘close comments’ in my templates and fix a small number of things that have been bugging me: amendment: I’ve just discovered I failed to make updates to a couple of custom MT scripts I’ve created – now fixed) – but the upgrades I performed on my home machine (from OS patches to BIOS upgrades) didn’t quite have the desired affect.

Basically, all this week I’ve been trying to watch series 2 episode 9 (A Bicyclops Built for Two) of Futurama, but every time I tried to do so my computer totally crashed (4 times). Blarg – luckily I only lost unsaved work once. I ended up downloading a copy of the episode of the episode off the computer and playing it through WinAmp3 (which I was using for the original episode) and it worked.

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).

Like the Roger Hargreaves’ Mr.Men character “Mr. Busy” , I’ve been extremely busy the last week and a bit and just haven’t had much time to my self – let alone enough spare time to make any blog entries. My “to do” list currently has “Redesign 4 websites, Design 1 website, Launch another website, convert a complex Perl+XML based script to PHP” and many other things on it – and that’s all in addition to my “normal” work load. It doesn’t help with it being so frigging cold at the moment – it’s currently -5^° outside at the moment – that’s in Celsius/Centigrade (where 0 degrees is water freezing). If you are more used to to other scales – -5 C is approximately 268.1^° Kelvin or even 23^° F (Fahrenheit) if you are one of those strange people still using that temperature scale. It’s expected to rise to a maximum of +5 tomorrow (278.1 K/41 F) – but when I’ve got to walk to work, it’ll be more like 2^° (again that’s 35.6^°F or 275.1^°K). We are having snow on a every-other-day to daily basis at the moment: there’s just a very light covering outside at this point, but Monday night it was really belting it down!

It didn’t really help when I got home from work today (I actually finished bang-on-time: yesterday I worked an extra 40 minutes to try and clear some of my backlog) and discovered that a ghost had turned my central heating thermostat down from 25 to around 8 (I think it’s in celsius, but I’ve never really checked). Ok – it was probably me turning it down sometime during the night (I actually was asleep at 7pm, woke up again around 11pm and then back to sleep around 11.30pm – hence why there were no blog entries for Tuesday) – but the house was still freezing! I ended up sticking the heating on high and sitting downstairs in front of the gas fire trying to keep warm (whilst reading 3 magazines that have arrived for me in the last 2 days and a 3 day old newspaper: hey, I’m trying to catch up with things!).

At one point my parents rang and I had a chat with them – I did initially think it was my GESF (green eyed southern friend), but it wasn’t to be. I haven’t spoken to her in ages: it’s not been intentional, but I just haven’t had the time to do so. I’ll try and call her tomorrow evening though (even though she’s dancing after work) as I really do miss her voice a bit and I just want to see how things are looking for a certain date next week. I’m currently in a half-mind whether or not to get her anything for Valentines Day: yes, I like her quite a bit, but I’m not sure how she feels about me and I don’t want to lose a good friend either… Decisions decisions. I suppose it doesn’t help having only spoken to her a couple of times this year so far – during December we were speaking to each other practically every other day!

Oh – I actually had a recruitment agency call me up yesterday (Tuesday) and leave a message for me: but I didn’t get a chance to call them back until today. They’ve found me a job. I can work at home (the company in question is, in fact, based in the North East of England, but allow telecommuting) and it’s a job as a search engine optimiser…

Yep, I’m already doing that exact same job and I only started 3 weeks ago – I like the job, the company, my co-workers (hell – even some of those people that pay our wages – ‘customers’ is the polite term I think) and I’m really getting into the swing of things so much that I’ve got no intentions to leave at all! Even though the job offer I received from the agency was quite a bit more than my current base salary (the offer was £25,000 per year – I’m on a bit less than that but with commission/bonus scheme). But if any body else is interested in it though, leave a comment (or send an email to seovacancy@[insert the URL of this blog – blog.beebware…. – here]: this email address will be deactivated on Saturday though) – and I’ll either give the agency your details or give you theirs. They are looking for someone really quick though so hurry. No, I don’t know which company it is but I know the techy jobmarket is only just making a come back so if anybody is interested…

I also know there’s a PHP programmer’s job available in the West Midlands (Dudley area) – again, drop a comment or email phpvacancy@[see above] and I’ll sort something out.

Blarg flibblepenguin! Is it really 1.41am on Thursday? Bed time for moi I think! ALLO!