Discovery

One thing I love about being home, I always manage to discover music which I really really like. I’m not sure if it’s because I have nothing better to do, so I’m on the look out, or because I just get lucky here! Yesterday, I came across a track by Armin Van Buuren. I really liked it, and the video so I got my hands on his latest album, called Mirage. Holy crap, it really is a good album! So much so, I have pretty much had the thing on repeat, and I was listening to it instead of listening to the audio from the video games I was playing. As much as I really liked ‘Not Giving up on Love’ ft. Sophie Ellis Bextor who reminds me a lot of Cher Lloyd in the video, after listening to the album there’s a few on there that I really like.

My laptop is long overdue a good old fashioned clear up. I have downloaded so much crap whilst at University (partly due to having unlimited downloads :P) that I have movies, music, videos, images stashed all over the place on my laptop. Tomorrow, I’m going to clear a lot of it up and transfer the majority over to my HDD. Like, theres atleast 3 movies on here that I have watched already, which I probably won’t ever again but can’t warrant deleting them so I will move them over. I have series worth of House, Dexter, Family Guy and A bit of Fry and Laurie. I also need to do a defrag, which takes a while. Tomorrow is going to be a much more productive day. In my road to 50,000GS I didn’t really achieve much since yesterday. I’m currently standing on 49, 685. I know once I whip out Kinect I will easily get what I need, it’s just being bothered to move my ass!

Any ways, I will just leave this here

 

Tactical Nuke Incoming!

Well, yesterday I finally did it. I finally managed to get 10 Nukes in one prestige which gave me the stupid ass Emblem I have been trying to get few a good 3 months now. My total Nuke count now stands on 21. I never have to worry about getting a Nuke again, because I completed my challenge that I set myself which was to get the Emblem by the time Halo Reach is released. The funny thing is, with all the pressure taken off me for getting a Nuke, I have been performing so well. I been using a UMP and got atleast 300 kills with it in one night.

Also, on the talk of tactical nukes.

Getting a shitty old computer to run smooth is really difficult. The guy I work for really hopes that he can get it to run faster, so I did a little bit of maintenance last week and it improved a tiny bit. It wouldn’t really be noticable to normal everyday users. However, as an experiment and as a result of me getting pissed off, I am going to see just what a tactical nuke does. Maybe it will really speed it up?

I did a little bit more shopping yesterday in poundland for University things. I got some Bin Liners and some Anti-Bacterial handwash for my bathroom. My list is still really huge of remaining things to buy, all though they are small items such as vegetable peelers and things.

I also have my new Monitor all ordered for my halls, because there will be plenty of room! I have had to downgrade to a smaller 22″ monitor, but it is LG and it has HDMI too for my PS3 which is a bonus. Only £139.99

I also still have to buy my Freezer which is only £90.00 from Argos. My Mum is going to be all slow in buying it and will then panic when they are all out of stock, mark my words.

Just now, there was the most awesome little Kid I have ever seen. He had a Buz Lightyear toy, and a woody toy! He reminded me of me when I was a kid, except he wasn’t talking English. He was saying the voices in another language, I wan’t to say Bosnian for some reason. Anyway, after a couple minutes his Mum tells him ‘What have I told you about talking infront of people? I know Mummy said speak “I think she said Bosnian”, but that is only with Mummy. It is rude to do it infront of others!”. Anyway, this kid suddenly has this proper Birmingham Accent and it was quality. We were talking about Toy Story 3, and his Mum was really apologetic about him not speaking English for about 3-4 minutes. He was quite impressed that I used to have a Buzz Lightyear toy too!

Fail|Win

Well, this week has been quite good I must say, but there have been a few moments where I have had to think to myself  ‘FML’.

I had a 12 hour shift on Saturday, which after a few phone calls turned into a 10 hour shift. That was a long day, especially with nobody really to talk to.

Then, on Monday I met with the boys to buy the Blues tickets for Saturday. It looked like we all had a chance to meet up but Adz can’t make it, but I am determined before these 4 weeks are up we all have to meet up and do something! I’m going to miss all of them, and it is slowly sinking in that I’m not seeing them on a daily basis anymore which sucks.

This week, Daria and I have been relaxing to the max and we have played a fair bit of Video Games. I ordered Viva Pinata Pre-Owned from Game which cost £14.99. Only a few hours later did I remember Games on Demand. Surely enough it was on there, 4gb to download for the same price, so I cancelled the order with game and waited an hour or so for it to download. Needless to say I secretly love it! It is such a fun game, but I haven’t quite figured (tried) to do the co-op mode yet.

Playing so many games this week has made me realise how badly I need a new game, which is partly the reason for getting Viva Pinata. Kane and Lynch is released tomorrow, and I really didn’t feel comfortable in ordering it after the mediocre demo. I added it to my Boomerang rental list, but I wasn’t expecting anything. In fact I had completely forgot about it. This morning I received an email that it has been sent to me! Sweet!

Anyway, on Monday Adam gave us a link to a Youtube video in which he ate 7 Weetabix, to beat his uncles 6. I knew I could better his 7, so I said I would try for 8 the day after. The next morning I woke up nice and early so I was in a breakfasty mood, and placed 8 Weetabix into the bowl whilst recording on Darias Mac. I didn’t want to use my Laptop because the battery is fubarred and didn’t trust it not to Blue Screen or something.

Anyway, Daria’s Mac was positioned to video record me eating 8 Weetabix, and it took me roughly 12 minutes. When I pressed stop, Daria went to watch it again and the video was 2 minutes long. For some stupid reason, when the screen saver is triggered (in turns black) the video stops recording. BUT, Photo Booth (Some piece of shit software Apple put on their Piece of shit hardware) says it is still recording. I was really disappointed, because there is no way they will believe that I actually ate 8 Weetabix. The video stops just after I poured the milk into the bowl. I am tempted to try again tomorrow, but go for 9.

Today, I had to travel all the way to Kingsheath on the 50 bus to work on some computers Andrew has here. They are really slow, run windows XP and have 512mb Ram and the processor in a kitchen blender is undoubtedly better than this. He still thinks he can make the system faster than what it is (Shit slow). So, I have disabled about 15 start up programs, used CCleaner and I’m now defragging. I know for a fact this will not improve anything. He just needs a completely new computer in my opinion.

FFS V.2.0

Well, Avatar STILL hasn’t arrived, so I decided to call them because HMV responded with a computer generated response to my email I sent the other day.

Basically asked if it was returnable when it ‘does end up arriving’. She asked why I would want to return and I said ‘Because it’s been in the shops for 2 days already, it still hasn’t arrived and I have borrowed my friends copy’.

She then apologised for the delay and gave me £5 worth of HMV Pure points for the shit service, and promised me it would arrive tomorrow. My god, heads will roll if it doesn’t.

Also, this morning I noticed my glasses were on the floor. I don’t wear them in the mornings, just get ready and then put my lenses in before I leave. I got home and knew my glasses were halfway under my bed on the floor, and grabbed them. I put my hands right onto my TV remote. It was under my bed all along. The worrying thing is, I looked there 3 times already. Someone is seriously playing tricks on me.

Today, we finished super early AGAIN. I decided I would go home whilst the others went to fix Adams broken internet. As I left, I asked myself exactly what I would do when I got home. Nothing. So, I turned around and caught up with the lads and we went to Adams. Good job, because it turned out to be hilarious. I haven’t had one of those laughing moments with tears for ages. When we realised Adams ‘M’ key on his keyboard doesn’t work, and that he has to copy and paste an M from previous work we all burst into laughter. Poor kid has had no internet on his computer for 2 years, and only now does he decide to tell us and get it fixed. The first thing we did to ensure it working, was, well, porn. It was like some sort of celebration.

Note: I just spell checked my post, and was super happy to have this pop-up for the first time since starting my blog!

Ah!

In my last post, I mentioned I changed the drive letter from D: to F: to solve my Safari issue.

Well, it should be noted, if theres anything remotely important on there then you should probably remember to change it back, because I nearly had a heart attack.

A bit of everything

Well, today is off to a strange start already.

Yesterday, a friend asked me if I knew anything about Safari because she was having problems with it, me being the Windows fanboy said no, but I would try to help anyway. I asked her if it could wait untill tomorrow because I have all day to help, with me being at work for 12 hours.

I come to install Safari, and it would not let me install. It kept trying to install on the F: drive, which is a virtual drive. The best part is, it says that the drive does not have sufficient space so the installer asks if you would like to install it on any others that are available. So, I click C: and no response. It would not let me click on any other drive I have available. When I click OK, it would say it could not be installed and to try again.

The next step was to eliminate the drive all together, by disabling it. When I did that, it said that the F: drive could not be found. Safari insisted on wanting to be installed on this drive.

After 30 minutes of scratching my head, I decided the easiest thing to do would be to create a F: drive, with space and then it should ask if I want to change it. Instead of creating a partition, I just renamed my D: to F: and sure enough, it worked. It let me change the installation destination to the C: drive without no problems. It’s the weirdest glitch I have ever seen, and sure enough it could only come from a piece of Apple software.

On Thursday morning, upon returning from London, I was handed these when exiting the station. They made me LOL, but they didn’t taste to great. Hell, I’m still voting Labour!

I also decided, after downing 500ml of Lucozade to wake me up, that I should probably start entering the competition to win an “Amazing Adventure” every day. So far, I have entered twice, and so far lost on both occasions. However, I still remain hopefull.It isn’t as good as the Cokezone points, because with Cokezone, you always win. Well, I say always because you win if you manage to read the code thats on the bottle, even when it is printed so badly. Of the 7 codes I have collected and put them as notes on my iPhone to redeem later, I was able to actually redeem one of them.

I have been thinking about University again, and I find myself still getting excited at the thought of it. However, it turns out that EVERYBODY is applying for halls at Cutty Sark. Apparently, theres quite a few parties there and it made me laugh to read that someone posted on the forums ‘Oh, PARTIES? I didn’t sign up for that’. Well, hello? You are going to University.

However, the good news is that Avery Hill has a much more ‘Studenty’ feel to it, has a better SU bar (apparently) but it is quite far out in terms of location, about 35 minutes from campus. This annoys me on two levels. Firstly, because every morning I will have to travel to get to University, instead of literally walking over the road. Secondly, it means I am 35 minutes further away from Cutty Sark, which means I am therefore roughly an hour away from Daria. This could be taken two ways. It means if I should stay in my Halls for a night, it will take me an hour to get to Darias. On the other hand, if I’m at Darias, it will mean I am much more inclined to stay at hers because I can’t be arsed to travel for an hour late at night.(atleast, I now have an excuse)

Also, after reading the forums, theres tonnes of people moving from all over the place, including Ireland and Italy. Also found one person moving from Birmingham too!

This week, college stepped up the game and decided to block people who use laptops off the network completely. Nice one BMET. What they didn’t realise is they have (atleast) two people who go batshit crazy when they are cut off the internet. I mean, I can go maybe a day, at max. I decided to cut my losses and just accept that they had cut us off. I decided to download an App called ‘PdaNet’ off Cydia which uses your 3G or 3GS iPhone as a Modem to connect your laptop to the internet. (I will provide a how to later on this week probably). The speeds were average, and meant I could access internet sites, and watch youtube videos (Yes I had to wait roughly 5 minutes for an 8 minute video to fully buffer) and receive email.

Adz on the other hand, took it to the next level. I suppose it is what I would have done if I didn’t have a back up. He decided to find a way round the blocks that had been put in place, and it took him not even a day in total. To put it simply, clone the MAC address of the computer next to you. (Adz coded a program on VB especially to do this, because we cannot get this information from CMD on the college computers). Use the same ethernet port that the computer used to connect your laptop. Use the cloned MAC address on your laptop to trick the network into thinking you are using a college computer. The next thing is to then access the internet without being filtered, and Adz found a great piece of software called ‘Hotspot Shield’. Basically, a VPN. By the beginning of second lesson, we had unfiltered internet.

Take that BMET.

Yesterday, I ordered the super duper sexy edition of Avatar on BluRay, and I paid £2.50 for it. Yepp, that’s all. I decided to redeem £22.50 worth of HMV Pure points and that left just £2.50 to pay. They posted it yesterday and I got excited that it might have got here this morning so I could watch it tonight. Well, no such luck. I should have known that from the Video Games that I order online. It will arrive on Monday, no doubt, just in time for release day.

Well, today, I intend to complete my Game for college because it is in short, broke. It generated half the map, and my character does not move from where it spawns. This is going to be fun.

Musings

So, once again I find myself at work, bored as usual so I thought why not update?!

Considering the circumstances, I’m actually in quite a good mood today. I got up at 6.30, and caught the 07.26 train from my station. I had to be in work for 8, or, that’s what the Dr. asked.

When I get here, the newsagents who keeps our keys (I know, the idea of keeping keys to a business in somebody elses hands) didn’t turn up at 8.00. So, by 8.15 I got bored and decided to go for a small walk. I somehow ended up with a Greggs Sausage roll which was suprisingly enjoyable, but I only like them when they are warm.

At 9.45 I returned to the building and there was about 8 people waiting outside, and I had no key to get in. I assumed they were waiting for me, because half of them had crutches.  At 9.50, the people who hold our keys turn up, so I let everybody in. Turns out, he has 4 people to see at 9.00! Sheesh.

This weeks been somewhat confusing. It’s strange, because I actually managed to complete a full week without skipping lessons. In other words, £30 in my account! At first, the new timetable infuriated me. I really enjoyed having Fridays off. Well, this week wasn’t too bad. Even staying in college untill 4.30 on a Friday didn’t bother me, partly because I was having a hilarious day, and was in a general ‘I really can’t be arsed’ mood.

Another thing that day which should have infuriated me to the point of smashing my laptop, was my Whatpulse file. Yep, that huge 230,000 key press record? Gone. No idea why. Am I bothered? A little bit, but really not as much as I should be. That took me absolutely ages to get to, and I don’t see myself getting there anytime soon. Oh well.

Also, somethings happened to my Hotfile Account. I know for sure it was valid untill sometime in June/July, but Adz tried to use it and it says something along the lines of Bad Username/Password’. This means one of two things, either 1 of the 3 people I let use my account have changed the password, or for some reason my account has been de-activated. I trust implicitly two of the three people. I see one every day at college, the other person wouldn’t know how to change the password if they had the instructions infront of them. The 3rd person however, I’m not so sure. I will have to take a look a bit later, because in all honesty I haven’t even checked myself to see if the password is incorrect, but Adz isn’t stupid. Sort out Hotfile Account is number one on my to-do list.

Secondly, Trevor has finally decided to tell us that half of our work is rubbish-once again. The best part is, when I handed in my Amendments I explicitly asked him ‘Do you want the old marked work?’. He said ‘NO’, so I took it out, even if this was different to every other unit I have submitted.

Turns out, the pre-marked work should have stayed inside. What a numpty. I had to go looking around my room yesterday for it, ready for next week. Turns out I still have it, luckily.

I remembered yesterday that Just Cause 2 is out, and I remembered how awesome that game was! I really would like it, but I don’t really have anything to trade towards it now. When I am confronted with such dilemmas, I usually give myself a situation in which I should buy the game. This one is

“If I have to drop the key off for Hazel on Monday morning (My day off), I will get Just Cause 2. If I don’t, and I can leave it with Andrew this evening, then I won’t need to come into town and buy it.”

I think that’s a fair ultimatum. If I do have to buy it, I have a £15.00 gift voucher I can use towards it, and I might trade in Unchartered 2, or/and Halo Wars.

Yesterday, I had a feeling that I really was scared of. It was regret, but it was only for a few minutes. Luckily, after a while I asked myself what I was thinking and shook it off. I regretted accepting my firm and insurance so early into the game. Yep, for a few minutes, I was regretting going to Greenwich University. Just the whole thing of leaving my family who love me and look after me, and how much I will miss Birmingham even if it is full of chavs and old people. Then, I thought of how cold and miserable London is, how nobody gives a damn about you. Nobody has any basic manners, or smile. That depressed me. But, then I just forgot about it and decided to play some Video Games.

I’m going to be here for quite a while, so I will probably end up in nipping out for quite a few McFlurrys today. Yum.

Maintenance

So, today I realised that my computer was in need of some maintenance. I was about to install a game, when Adz pointed out I had less than 10Gb free on my C: drive. How did that happen?

I backed everything up onto my external, and removed everything off my laptop. It’s got to the point where I can’t treat it like a desktop anymore. In the process, I managed to find 30Gb on my C drive.

I also arranged all my software, movies, tv shows into the appropriate folders. I then removed all un-neccesary software and stupid games I had installed, played once and forgot about.

Then I installed System Care and defragged and cleaned my system.

Then I organised Firefox, including my bookmarks. Deleting old ones, and sorting the remainder into categories.

I’m exhausted 😛

Now, I need to update my Album Artwork, that I vowed to keep on top of months ago but completely forgot about.

Probe away

When I have previously had that bittersweet feeling about something, it’s always a strange feeling. But this time, it’s a feeling that kind of hurts deep down.

NB: This post does contain some spoilers on Mass Effect 2

‘Ave It

I starting writing a post on my iPhone using my WordPress App on the way home this evening. I had the intentions of returning to finish it off later in the evening. When I come back to my drafts, it isn’t there and there is no record of the 15 minutes I spent writing part of my update on the commute home. Oh well, here goes.