How Do I Blog?

WHOOPS CAPS LOCK

Okay, that’s better. Well I’ve been busy lately, but not with anything terribly interesting. Work is work is work, I’ve had a few pressing deadlines and my two big projects are sort of on the backburner for now, but there’s plenty to keep me busy. Speaking of being kept busy, Evie has continued to be a handful on a regular basis - ah, terrible twos, how I love thee. The last couple of weeks have been a whirlwind of chores and keeping things ticking over. I’ve been playing a fair spot of poker with varying degrees of success (after a week or so on a PLO heater I took a downswong and now I’m playing lots of SNGs with a respectable 27% ROI currently) but I need to tone it down a little, playing too much.

Areas I’ve been remiss with:
- recouping lost data from the great computer meltdown (I need to do that, maybe tonight)
- doing anything like restaurant reviews for the past month (eep! though in fairness I’ve only really missed one review of consequence)
- writing and reading, in any way, shape or form

I’m on a long weekend at the Sunshine Coast from Friday, so I might force myself to take a book and do a little bit of reading again. I’ve been pondering all sorts of things in writing land recently, including doing a lot of internal scriptwork on a GTA adaptation (that evolved from an original game idea then slowly encompassed an old script plot) that’s been fun but not very effective or useful if I do bugger all to actually produce it, I know it’s more or less a waste of time doing that anyway but I’ve made a promise to myself to do something (and on that note, I’ll be producing a post soon that lists my “life goals”) and so I shall.

Stay tuned. Also, it’s our wedding anniversary on Sunday, three years already?

It didn’t get fixed by clearing the CMOS, but that’s because the BIOS needed flashed after its complete meltdown - I got it flashed and then I was still having issues, because it was touching the case and shorting out. Hurrr. Now all is well, except for one overheating issue last night that I suspect was caused by one of the cooler-pins being insecurely attached to the motherboard, hopefully now all is well. If not, I’ll be replacing the stock cooler.

So now I have a monster. The precise specs are a 3Ghz E8400 with 4Gb of dual channel hotshit Kingston RAM running Vista 64-bit home premium on a fast SATA running off the Asus P5K with visuals provided by the BFG8800 (now the oldest component of the computer!).

I look forward to pushing it with Crysis or whatever else comes out… oh! Now I can do Alan Wake in DX10 when it hits. Awesome.

My regular PC died on Monday morning. Upon investigation it seems CPU fan was dying, then after some fiddling some memory caught fire, then after some more fiddling it seemed like the motherboard itself was fried, then I decided I wasn’t going to mess around with it anymore and bought new components.

Note: I don’t usually set stuff on fire, honest.

Having built 4 PCs in the past, I’m quite a dab hand at it all nowadays. Within an hour I had the brand new mobo bedded down with the new Core2Duo, 4G of RAM and SATA hd, bringing my BFG8800 along for the ride and all ready to install a sparkly new 64-bit home premium edition of Vista. I installed it all fine and after some wrangling even got internet to work with their new fandangled FIND INTERNET gizmo. All good.

I tried to attach the older broken drive (with XP still on there) and it all goes to shit. Nothing works. It won’t even power up now! I’m beyond frustrated and pretty much the only option I have left before giving up and a) returning everything and losing 20% on restocking, and b) giving it some “expert” for help, is to reset the CMOS (which I couldn’t figure out how to do because they’ve renamed it to CLEAR RTC-RAM YES, VERY CLEAR THANKS! CHANGE A STANDARDISED NAME THAT’S KNOWN AND UNDERSTOOD BY TECHIES EVERYWHERE THANK YOU ASUS YOU USELESS FUCKS!). Breathe.

Apparently this could be the fixer… if not, I’m sure you’ll hear my scream of pure frustration around the globe… should be around 8am GMT.