There’s very little improvement in how I’m feeling. Still absolutely exhausted, head is still sore. I’m glad the weekend is approaching and I can spend a good proportion of it in bed.
Spent the night trying to throw cards into a hat. I don’t know what that means.
I shouldn’t sleep for 8 or 9 hours at night, but still get up the next morning feeling like I haven’t slept at all. I shouldn’t have biting pains in my temple which last all afternoon and night and pass out on the couch every evening.
I don’t think I’m very well.
This is some fun right here.
It’s nice to have an outlet for this sort of thing again.
I feel sorry for the dog being stuck in the kitchen all day long. I’m sure she’d much rather be dancing among the tall grass, meeting boy dogs and running off to Vegas.
So today I took her to work, where she doesn’t get to live out any of those fantasies, but where she gets to see me type on a keyboard in a different room!
I quite often think about doing this, but I wonder how she’ll react. As quite a large dog, with a look of wolf about her, it would be easy for people there to get scared. Especially when she starts barking at them like a crazed maniac. But I need not have worried, for she was as quiet as a mouse, simply because she herself was terrified. She was sick in the car on the way there and then didn’t really know where she was, her normally comforting stuffed toy wasn’t touched and instead she cried like, well like a little lost puppy.
In the end I brought her home at lunchtime so she could be back in familiar surroundings. I guess it’s simple prison mentality, once you’re out, you’ll do anything just to get back inside.
Now that was a great nights sleep. The dog was good to me last night and kept her mouth shut, allowing me almost 9 hours of uninterrupted tiredness quashing nectar from the gods.
Although I still had to nap for an hour this evening.
Needing a break from the punishing schedule of Blogbear (and more truthfully, the soul crushing boredom of writing an admin system), I made some updates to What Interest. It’s been kinda neglected for the last couple of months, which all started when I began the next phase of the project (the "let’s compete with half the net" phase). At the time it seemed like that would be quite quick and article writing could then continue, but instead I switched focus to getting Blogbear out the door (because frankly, it’s about time Bearscript was amongst the people) and the cobwebs set in.
So it’s had some spit and polish, merging the three seperate content sites into one, applying a spruced up design, and adding the first of what will hopefully be a veritable barrage of new articles.
Yes, the motherboard change seems to have worked. I torrent’d and video’d with much success and spent all of tonight playing with Ubuntu (I removed Fedora). This is all good.
But as if to remind us all that things must balance out, there’s been plenty bad today to go along with the good. There’s the fact that I did all this while trying not to pass out from lack of sleep, since I managed last night to get none of the regenerative goodness. Every time I came close to drifting off the dog started crying, or even barking, waking me up again.
And then there was me breaking my tooth this morning while eating breakfast, allowing me to pick more than just cornflakes out of my mouth.
There is a chance that this weekend I’ll get a good chunk more of Blogbear done, but there’s also a chance I’ll be nailing the dog to the kitchen door if she keeps me awake again tonight.
I finally got around to replacing the motherboard tonight and so far things seem to have gone without a hitch. I ran a torrent for a while without any problems and then I did a succesful Fedora install (which I’m writing this from now). That’s two things I was unable to do before.
I’ve yet to test video, but I’ll do that tomorrow once I’ve treated myself to some sleep. Then I’ll celebrate success.
If you want to see what Bearscript is like, head over to the temporary site I just put up. Over there you’ll find a nice quick start guide to Bearscript that should at least let you see what I’ve been up to for the past 18 months.
Blogbear is launching for real this summer (computer issues and an underestimation of exactly how much still needed to be done are going to stop it appearing at the end of the month) so at least this way you can begin to see what fun you’ll be able to have.
I picked up some thermal material from PC World this afternoon, and almost couldn’t hold back my surprise they even sold such a thing. Took the opportunity while there to check out both the Powermac G5 and Mac mini, which I hadn’t actually seen in person until now. The G5 is decidedly massive, far larger than I would have imagined simply from looking at photographs. The mini is of course, mini, but I wasn’t shocked by it’s size like I was with the iPod shuffle.
Didn’t quite have the will to actually rip open the PC and lay the new board in there however, between the heat, cleaning and writing introductory documentation to Bearscript, scrabbling about on the floor with tiny screws wasn’t quite in my game plan.
Maybe tomorrow.
Balloons should have fallen from the ceiling today when the project reached another significant milestone, the ability to create a new Bearscript component, enter some source code and compile it (with proper display of error messages if required) into executable code.
Up until now this has been a manual process, with me editing files and using the command line to run the compiler, but finally it’s completely available through the webbrowser via a user-friendly admin system.
Afterwards my brain pretty much shutdown from the shock of getting this completed and I stared at further code with the sound of tumbleweed rolling by in my head.
A replacement motherboard arrived for my PC on Friday, but it occurred to me afterwards that the removal of the CPU will result in the removal of the artic silver, something I don’t have a replacement for. So I’ll need to see if I can get some of that before I tackle the project.
I did download Fedora Core 4 today (probably the nicest looking Linux I’ve seen yet, complete with apt rip off). I’d tried to install Ubuntu before as a test of whether it was a hardware or XP issue and didn’t have much success (further enhancing my hardware leanings) but I thought I’d have another go with a different distro. It got through most of the install before resetting the machine when it came to the actual copying files to the hard disk stage, which ties up with my theory that heavy disk use causes all my issues and is therefore most likely the IDE controller on the board.
Which is good, because I don’t have any more money to try a different part should the motherboard replacement fail.
Today it was a little family celebration of my brother and nephews birthdays over in Burntisland, and as always the Danish birthday cake with the cream and the fruit tasted better than the store bought chocolate one, but that’s to be expected.
On the way home me and Graham discussed the finer points of MMO’s and whether or not the best approach is just to remove levelling up completely, and instead base a players skill on well, their actual skill, rather than how long they’ve waited for a bar to go up or how many times they’ve pressed a button. It is remarkable that 2 million people are now subscribed to a game which involves pressing a button an increasing number of times until they get to press it more times in another area.
The design of online worlds is definitely something I’d like to visit later in the year.
It’s Graham’s birthday today, escaping the teenage years. I’ve got a card for him around here somewhere…
Watched two new films tonight, Bad Santa and Pi, and I’m not sure you could find two more different films.
Bad Santa, assuming you like swearing, is incredibly funny. It’s not a Christmas film in the true sense, with a bit of a skewed message, but it actually earns extra points for not trying to be sentimental, preachy or judgemental, but still coming across as sad and great fun to watch.
Not one to watch with the family however, and disappointed that Bill Murray had to drop out of the main role to go do Lost in Translation. He would have really raised the movie up another notch.
On the other end of the spectrum completely is Pi, a black and white movie about a genius mathematician searching for the key to unlock patterns found throughout nature, while battling with extreme headaches and hallucinations that are slowly driving him insane. Being persued by Wall Street traders and a Hasidic cabalistic sect, both of whom want to use his abilities, Pi is a freaky, freaky movie which is strangely compulsive viewing.
And I guarantee you’ll be the only one of your friends to have seen it.
It looks as though I’m going to have to bite the bullet and just buy some sort of computer hardware in an attempt to fix this thing. Since I don’t actually know what the problem is, it’s a tough buying decision, but I’ll probably go for a new motherboard first. It’s the cheapest part, covers a lot of bases, and gets the hardest to replace piece out of the way first.
The mere suggestion of spending money just disgusts me though.
You may have noticed I’ve missed a few days over the past week or so. This is a deliberate decision to stop trying to shoehorn in any old crap just to fill another square at the top of the page. I’ll now and try and keep posts until I actually have something meaningful to say.
Actually, scratch that, I’ll post whenever I just have something to say. Meaningful is probably a bit of a stretch at this late stage.
Computer issues still continue to put a dampner on development. I reinstalled XP today, but it’s made no difference. I have narrowed down the cause to something that occurs when playing video or using Bittorrent (since it seems quite stable until I do either of those things), but I can’t quite see the connection.
Technically things are nice and stable with just IE and Editplus running, but the sheer annoyance of the things around them not being right is enough to thwart any motivation I have for banging out the Perl.
I’m not sure where to go from here. Gathering up the evidence of error codes points towards some sort of hardware failure, most likely a CPU or motherboard issue, but replacing either is an expense I’d like to avoid right now. In the meantime I guess I’ve got to learn to ignore the problems and keeping typing regardless.
My PC has now taken it upon itself to blue screen and reset itself at random intervals, making the development of this months launch project somewhat of a painful affair, especially since I’ve lost code twice now.
At first I thought it was overheating, but further analysis leads me to believe that’s not the issue. So I removed a couple of PCI cards to not much success, upgraded graphics card drivers, scanned for spyware and virii, and uninstalled some stuff I wasn’t using any more anyway. The result is more blue screens.
One of the not red or green error displays mentioned a file that turned out to be part of the sound card drivers, so I upgraded them as well. Turns out that file wasn’t changed during the upgrade, but it was worth a shot nontheless.
The last thing I did was uninstall Quicktime 7, which I installed eariler this week. The problems started a couple of days after that, but really at this point I’m getting desperate.
So desperate last night in fact that I actually wanted the machine to be virus infected. Come on the virii!
Apple owners crying foul over todays announcement of the switch to Intel processors are missing the point, it’s not the processor that makes a Mac a Mac, it’s the software stupid.
If your decision to buy a Mac was purely based on the fact it had a PowerPC processor inside, then you have to reevaluate your buying decisions. The switch to Intel is not going to dilute the Apple experience, since it’s going to the same industrial design and same operating system that it’s going to be paired with.
And with Apple already making clear that they’re not going to be selling the OS on its own, or suddenly re-entering the clone market, this isn’t the end of Apple as a hardware company either. This is nothing more than a change of chip, there’s no new direction for the company or a sudden decision to compete with Microsoft.
If anything, Apple users should be rejoicing. No longer will potential customers look at the processor speeds and be put off by the Mhz gap, and no longer will product refreshes be constrained by a company unable to ramp up production or keep to a schedule (ok, Intel aren’t perfect in this regard either, but they’re still better than IBM). Intel chips are also cooler and use less power, which means faster laptops wih longer battery life and as for Virtual PC, well there’s no doubt it’s going to get a whole load faster.
Ultimately these are all things to bring more people to the platform, lower costs, faster speeds, a recognisable brand, these all mean more users, more developers, more software. All coming together for when they do want to compete with MS head on.
I watched Team America for the second time tonight, and enjoyed it even more than I did the first time. It’s not quite up there with the South Park movie, but it further advances my theory that Trey Parker is some sort of cyborg genius, just waiting for the right moment to enslave us all.
It’s a real shame therefore how badly it did at the box office. In the US it only just scraped back the budget, which is a surprise considering the kind of rubbish that people usually go and see.
GR commented on how being able to summon a montage at any time would be a useful skill. Just think, you’d no longer have to do anything tedious and boring, just summon a montage, fade the music out appropriately, and a new skill is learned. You’d be a genius in no time.
All content is (c) Copyright 2003-2008 Richard Smith. This is where it ends.
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