Right, so I have been a World of Warcraft convert for nigh on six months now, add to that my nerdiness when it comes to Star Trek and my love of computer games etc and you would think that I am already somewhat of a geek. You would be wrong!
This last week has seen me introduced to a trading card game called Magic: The Gathering. I have never been a huge TGC fan, though I did get quite into the Star Wars one several years back. However, I am hooked on Magic now. I bought myself my own deck on Saturday and have already started yoinking cards from Si and MC to put together my very first home made deck. So I am currently playing a Black/Red pre-made deck and am trying to balance out my zombie heavy Black deck. I am looking to try and put together a wierd ass Green/Black or Red/Blue deck next – they look like fun.
Will update on my finalised decks soon.
Bah!
Having had some serious issues with my PC recently I have had to format and reinstall my OS onto my computer. Now nothing works! I actually hate Dell, they send little or no driver cd’s out so I have had to trawl the web to get all the drivers I need, all except my onboard sound, my onboard video and my thrid party video/graphics card. Dell kindly told me today that they no longer supply drivers for the (now obselete) motherboard (P/N OJ8885) and that they can transfer me to their advanced software team for a nominal fee of £35!! I can buy a new motherboard for that!!
My big problem is that Dell don’t want their customers to do anything with their computers so they don’t actually label their components, so it has taken me over a week to find out the part number for the motherboard and I still cannot get the part number for the Dell installed (but definitely ATI Radeon) video card….grrrrrrrrrrrrrr!
Anyone any ideas?
I recently purchased a Seagate external hard drive as I was looking to extend my storage capacity but allowing me to maintain a degree of mobility and hopefully allow shared storage when I get round to buying a laptop. I went for the 320GB version as it was on offer at eBuyer and also they have a good reputation and a decent warranty. The customer reviews were also pretty useful.
Having now used it for a week I can agree. It is virtually silent for all but the most strenuous search tasks and even then it’s not exactly a rock concert! The search time is pretty quick too, not found any difference between it and my internal hard drives. It looks pretty smart too, is small enough to hide away on my desk without cluttering it up.
I have yet to test the mobility and ease of use on other machines, but that will come soon enough I think. My only real bone is the location of the cables. From the design there really wasn’t much choice, but it basically means that the cables are on show. Fine if you are not like me and have a certain amount of OCD about stuff like that, I guess.
I would recommend one, especially at the offer price of around fifty quid including postage and VAT. I got an extra bargain as Google Checkout were offering a further £10 off if I used thier checkout service! So £40 cannot be sniffed at!
It has been ages since the group has eaten at the Llama, a few weeks probably, so today I tried to organise a minor gathering for s spot of lunch. In the end it was just Kara and I who graced the Llama with our presence. In Kara’s words, a lovely romantic meal for two! It was actually quite nice to be back in the old haunt, pound-a-pint John Smiths and 2-4-1 meals just cannot be beaten!
Ended up in DEC10 again after lunch, messing about on computers whilst Si and Dan do some project or other and Kara does something to her laptop. I really am going to have to pay more attention to what people say.
Managed to get round to doing a spot of gardening this morning, trimmed the hedge and sorted out the front yard. Then headed down Kirkstall Road to see if I could find a cheap car wash, ended up using the jet wash at Morrison’s – 35p a minute and you can use whatever combination of programmes you like!! It wa s bargain, so £3.50 later I had a lovely washed, shampooed and waxed car.
Off to cinema later with the gang to catch the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle film.
Seeing as I am getting four brand new housemates from the 1st July and I am moving rooms I now have the perfect excuse for thinking up some new toys, gadgets, space savers etc for next academic year.
We have big plans for a home network, 3.5 of us will be computing students next year, so I am acquiring a new computer so that I can a) have a linux machine that I can practice on and b) there is going to be some spare space for extra hard drives and other network paraphenalia. To this end I need to put together a list of stuff for my new computer – I have a case, PSU, fan, motherboard and a hodge podge of hard drives, optical drives and other bits and bats. The computer I have acquired was originally an AMD 688Mhz, with 20Gb hard drive, 128MB RAM, I seem to remember my brother putting a 64MB nVidia graphics card in there and on board sound. There is a prob a network card in it. I was planning on putting one or two new, larger hard drives in there, but apart from that I don’t know where to start to get it up to some sort of spec. I basically need it for running linux and as a storage system. Any ideas or suggestions welcome.
There is also a new stereo system, a new television, possibly Sky TV and i am definitely looking at some kind of back-up storage system. I don’t know whether a couple of large external hard drives are the way forward, or just use DVD’s – again advice would be useful.
I am also seriously looking into a new laptop, as portable as possible but with adequate specs so that I can use it for a variety of things like media, uni work and the odd bit of WoW/mobile blogging.
I spent most of yesterday helping the School of Computing at the University of Leeds celebrate its 50th anniversary. There was a whole programme of events, starting with a formal lunch and the unveiling of a statue to Geoff Cook. This was followed by a lecture, given by Andrew Herbert – a Leeds SoC alumnus and currently director of Microsoft research at Cambridge – and then a reception in the School of Computing’s “Long Room”.
I attended the lecture, which was surprisingly good fun and very informative, even for a relative layman like myself. I didn’t think that a Microsoft employee would be quite so self deprecating and ‘tongue-in-cheek’ about the failings and quirks of Microsoft products and services. Andrew was a good speaker and his enthusiasm for the subject was obvious. His talk was entitled “Why everything I learned at Leeds is now useless.” It focussed on how the subject has changed over the thrity years since he graduated with a degree in computational science. The punchline to the piece was that although the technology has improved byseveral orders of magnitude, the underlying principles and purpose of academic computing are still relavant today.
The reception afterwards was amazing. Free food and a free bar which sported four rebranded ales from the Elland Brewery. In the four hours it was available, the bar was drunk dry – all four firkins were emptied! I have to admit some responsibility for that.
Maths Chris and I left the “Long Room” at about 8.20 and headed to B’s for some dinner (and more drinking seeing as we had managed to acquire 4 bottles of wine…). I was most disappointed to note that most of the circle had bailed the reception – some people didn’t even go to the lecture first!! After some korma at B’s, her friend Ian appeared and we set about the task of getting drunk!
**Blur – twister, cards, trip to Co-op, pizza and red wine. face painting and general tom-foolery.**
I woke up this morning next to Michelle with a raging headache and the phrase, “porn babies” stuck in my head. Fun.
I am currently sat at my computer at 4am listening to music. This is likely to be a recurring theme in my blog posts. I am an insomniac. I just don’t seem to sleep. Sometimes I can go for days with only an hour or two of sleep each night. My average bedtime for the last seven or eight days has been about 6am, with me getting up by 8 or 9am.
What is bizarre, though, is that I was exhausted at about 10pm this evening. I was sat at Kat’s with tea and chocolate hobnobs waiting for George to come round so we could watch a film and I could barely keep my eyes open. By the end of Terminator, I was wide awake again. I don’t think the twenty minute walk home through the cold air of Leeds helped with either.
I have been spending increasing amounts of time with Kat recently, I must have been seen her about five times in the last week alone. This does not sound a lot, but I have never really been that close to her, we just have never really gotten to know each other. I am really glad that we have started to remedy that though, she is a really cool person. Very opinionated, but then I like someone who has their own thoughts. More importantly, she is prepared to fight for those ideas! Kat also makes one of the meanest cups of tea around. In fact, it is now almost impossible to decide on who makes the best tea – Kat or Sarann! I will have to put them to the test this week when Kat and I head over to The Lakes to visit Sarann.
The first week of the Easter break is now over and as George mentioned to me earlier it has both flown by and dragged. It seems over so quickly because I have not really achieved anything, but it has also dragged as it feels a life time ago that we were all in the pub celebrating St Patrick’s Day and Wendy House!
Here is to a more productive three weeks coming up. I am not holding my breath though as I am off to Cumbria on Tuesday, going to see Barenaked Ladies on Thursday and then Jon gets back from the Falklands in 10 days! So much to do, no time or money to do it!