Drive and Computer Woes (again)

Friday 27 August 2010 - Filed under Life

We’ve been having the drive at our house redone. We had what was essentially a long concrete slab with holes and cracks all the way through it which could fit one car onto, meaning we’d have to put the other in the street. The gateposts were too close together so reversing on was a nightmare. That was no good, so we had the whole front ripped out, drive gone, tiny bit of garden gone, sinking front step gone and the gateposts widened. We had the whole front paved over with blocks so it looks a lot better and we can fit both cars on, possibly a third when I get mine in (hopefully) a couple of years time, that all got finished yesterday. I’ve got a few pics of it being done so I might put those up.

I wrote a lengthy post awhile ago about how my computer wouldn’t boot and that I fixed it by replugging everything inside. The problem started again and this time I couldn’t sort it. Occasionally it would boot but would crash within 10 minutes so as a last resort I took it down to the computer place near me. Payed them £40 to tell me what was ring with it and they rang back saying it was the graphics card. They were gonna go ahead and put a 8400GS saying it would be just as good as my 8600GT because it had the same amount of memory. Told them no and went and collected it yesterday. Got it set up and amazingly it started working again, I’m guessing it started working out of the blue when they put a different gfx card so I’m not 100% convinced that’s the problem. Still haven’t decided what to do with it, tempted to go down the route of building my own in the near future (learned the lesson about buying prebuilds).

2 comments  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-08-27  ::  James Irwin

Noise

Monday 23 August 2010 - Filed under Life

The first house I lived in was semi-detached and the build quality was good. The only time we could ever hear anything was when the parents went away and the kids decided to have a party. When I was about seven we moved to a detached house. The neighbors weren’t noisy but even if they were we wouldn’t be able to hear anything, we had our own four walls. That was good. Then when I was 8 and coming up to 9 we moved again to the house we’re in now. It’s semi-detached but the build quality isn’t brilliant. The wall separating us and next door is paper thin. We can hear every single conversation going on, I could talk to them through the wall if I wanted to.

So aright, not a massive problem. Any loud noise just happens through the day. However, occasionally their young granddaughter comes to stay. She’s canny, in fact she was telling my Mam the other day about her boyfriend who she’s broken up with five times and how I can go play with her whenever I’m bored. :3 (she’s six) Only thing is she’s getting lessons or something through the summer holidays, so whenever I wake up on a weekday morning I’ve been hearing screaming since she doesn’t want to go. (Can you blame her? Work? In the summer holidays? Pah.)

Then it goes on through the day, wherever I am in the house I can hear running around, arguing, occasionally toys. Ah it’s aright, she’s only staying for a bit it’ll all stop soon. Nope, they’re moving in. And so is the dog. The dog which has stayed over there before and woke me up quite a few nights.

So soon we’re getting a bed put in the old guest bedroom which isn’t on the dividing wall and I’ll start sleeping in there. I can wake up normally, no screaming, no being woken up by a dog. Bliss.

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-08-23  ::  James Irwin

My site.

Wednesday 18 August 2010 - Filed under Site

I think I’ve had this site about a year and a half. I remember setting it up in about December 2008 when VS-HS were offering free hosting for a year to generate more interest. The first thing I did was set up a WordPress blog and from then on I blogged about the odd thing. The problem was at the time I was the average, over-enthusiastic 13 year old geek who was desperate to tell the internet about his holiday in the lakes or about how his Dad attached a massive TV aerial to the side of the garden summerhouse. A few months later the novelty began to wear off and I would just post the odd YouTube video. I think eventually I was starting to see the thing as an embarrassment, looking back at previous posts I was facepalming quite a bit. I was tempted to take it down, and after one of my role-models in life made a rather sarcastic comment which essentially said the blog was shit I did.

After this I think I must of just left the site standing empty for quite awhile, then I set this blog up a few months ago hoping that the quality of my posts would have improved. I enjoy blogging, I enjoy writing about current shit which is going on, be it something personal to me or something major which has just happened but the issue I face is no one reads this blog. That doesn’t bother me massively, but say if I was to put to together a rather thorough article on, say, antennagate it’s just likely to get buried along with every other tiny blemish on the face of the internet.

I’ve thought it’s probably pointless continuing with this on a few occasions (which to be honest it probably is), but whether it’s a blog or not I still want to have some kind of site, some kind of online identity. I’ve been coding a very simple site in PHP which will mainly just have the generic About, Projects, Interact, etc. pages. I’ll do the odd casual blog with tumblr. This seems a decent option because I’ll learn PHP and web-design, which I’ve wanted to do but never really got round to doing. Also with tumblr I can more connected with friends because it’s gaining popularity.

I could always just continue the way I’m going but I aint sure about that one.

Anyway, ideas/comments/opinions appreciated.

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-08-18  ::  James Irwin

Time To Get Classy

Saturday 3 July 2010 - Filed under Cool Stuff

Some guy on FP called DaNoob posted this after finding it on Reddit and I thought it was pretty cool:

1. Get out your drink of choice.
2. Open three tabs in your browser.
3. Open this in the first…
4. …this in another…
5. … and this in the last.

Enjoy your evening.

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-07-03  ::  James Irwin

Science

Friday 25 June 2010 - Filed under Life

Sup. I’m in science on a netbook. Someone next to me (he’s called Daniel by the way) thought this would be a good idea.

I’m probably going to get whitelisted now.

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-06-25  ::  James Irwin

English Speaking Germans

Monday 21 June 2010 - Filed under Random

I just noticed the other day when watching a film that most of the time any German character will often say ‘und’ instead of ‘and’ when speaking English, the most common connective, no matter how good their English is. It’s understandable because that is the German word for ‘and’, but how could you make such a basic error when the rest of your vocabulary is good?

This must just be something that happens in entertainment, because I’ve never seen a German in real life do this, but then again I haven’t actually met that many Germans.

Oh well, nothing important. Just something I noticed and felt like sharing.

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-06-21  ::  James Irwin

Computer Woes

Sunday 20 June 2010 - Filed under Life

For about the past month or so my computer has had unusually high CPU temperatures. The fans would kick in at full speed quite a bit especially when playing games. The first thing that sprung to mind was that the computer was probably very dusty inside; someone on Twitter confirmed this was probably the issue. So I took my computer apart and found this was the case, the CPU heatsink was clogged with the stuff and so was the GPU fan. So off I popped the next day to Maplin to buy some compressed air. Took it home and sat on my DVD shelf for weeks because we were all too busy getting ready to go on holiday.

Anyway yesterday we finally got round to cleaning it. Me and Dad took it out into the back garden and gave the inside a good blasting out so it was all nice and clean. I then took it back upstairs, wired it all back up and turned it on. The power light came on, but nothing else happened. No HDD indicator, no POST beeps and nothing on the screen. Tried it again, nothing. So I did the obvious thing, unplugged everything and left it for a bit. Tried again after 10 minutes. Nothing.

At this point I’d started to wonder if there was something up with the graphics card, so I took that out and tried the integrated graphics, still nothing. Put the graphics card back in to see if that would solve anything and, as expected, still nothing.

After this I asked around on Facepunch and someone gave me the really obvious solution of replugging everything inside the case. I tried that, connected it all back up and hooray! Problem solved and the core temparatures were much much lower after cleaning.

tl;dr: cleaned computer out with air, wouldn’t turn on after that and it turned out I’d knocked as cable loose somewhere.

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-06-20  ::  James Irwin

Stuff

Saturday 19 June 2010 - Filed under Life

Not updated in awhile, here’s a few things that have been happening.

Holiday

I went to Portugal for the half term which was pretty cool as my aunty has a little holiday bungalow over there. We drove all the way down from Stockton to Heathrow which took about 4 hours (we could have gone from Teesside via Amsterdam with KLM but the last time we did that it was a complete and utter disaster on the way back). British Airways were striking on that day but we still managed to fly to Lisbon because we got put on a flight with Air Finland (not to be confused with Finn Air). After about 3 hours we landed in Lisbon where we hired our car. The drive to my Aunty’s place took about two hours.

We didn’t manage to do too much because it wasn’t really a tourist place, it was on a golf resort but none of can play golf. We went to a town called Óbidos a few times and an old monastery called Alcobaça among other things. Aside from that I watched Frasier DVDs while I supposed to be revising (but can you really revise on holiday? :V).

On the drive to Lisbon Airport on the way back we needed to fill the car back because the hire company would only take it back with a full tank, so we stopped at a filling station were the pumps didn’t work. A woman in the shop spoke a load of Portuguese over a tanoy. She didn’t speak English but it turned out we couldn’t pay by cash, but my Dad persuaded her and that was all sorted. We got to the airport and noticed our return flight wasn’t to be seen; turned out it had been cancelled and they tried to contact my Dad but his phone had been on voicemail all week. Luckily we got on a flight with TAP and we actually got back earlier than we were supposed to, which was oright.

All in all it was a good holiday.

Exams

This is probably the main reason I haven’t updated in awhile. I’m in Year 10 at the moment, but before the old government got voted out they decided that schools would be able to do GCSE exams at the end of Year 10, to ease the pressure next year. My school decided to do this for History and Geography so I was revising them like mad because I didn’t do any work in the half term.

I sat them this week, I think History went OK but Geography was a bit of a disaster. However we were told afterwards that it was unusually difficult so the grade boundaries should be lower. I hope.

I have Biology and Chemistry exams a week on Monday though, but there’s a lot less to learn for them and they’re multiple choice so I’m hoping they go OK.

Computer

My computer hasn’t been running brilliantly lately. I’ve reformatted it a few of times but it hasn’t helped help a great deal. It’s also struggling a bit on newer and more demanding games. As a result of all this I’ve started putting together a list for my first home build. The final cost has come to something quite out of my price range so I’m gonna start looking at where I can make cuts.

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-06-19  ::  James Irwin

The British Airways Nightmare, Part 2

Wednesday 26 May 2010 - Filed under Life

Sorry for pretending any of you give a shit about this, but this is what’s happened since the last post:

After getting told the flights were “subject to disruption” we were starting to get tired of the uncertainty of whether things would go to plan or if we’d be wondering around airports for hours, and we’re not after a repeat of Summer 2008 (being stuck in a departure lounge in Schipol airport when you’ve been up for well over 24 hours and you don’t know when your flight’s going to be isn’t fun). We were starting to wonder whether we should go ahead with the holiday or just cancel everything and get the money back through the insurance company. If we didn’t do that we’d have to re-arrange car hire, extend the travel insurance and shiz so we could stay the extra day. We rang the companies and they said it can be sorted out, so we’ve talked about it and decided to just go ahead and stay the extra day.

We’ve decided not to use BA again though.

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-05-26  ::  James Irwin

The British Airways Nightmare

Wednesday 26 May 2010 - Filed under Life

Now then.

If you’re reading this from the UK then no doubt you’ve probably heard that the BA Cabin Crew have striked a few times and are planning a few more. I’ve mentioned on Twitter a few times about how I’m suposed to be going on holiday to Portugal in a few days. Well guess what, we heard there’s going to be a strike on the day we’re supposed to be flying. Luckily we got an email saying we’d been moved onto a flight with Air Finland, however that’s now showing up as “Subject to disruption”.

It’s not so much the getting there I’m concerned about, it’s the getting back. My friend is having a party I was looking forward to the day after we’re due to be back, but surprise surprise the return flight’s been cancelled (odd that the flight when there are strikes is going sort of fine but the flight when there are no strikes is screwed). There’s a flight on the morning of his party so hopefully I’ll still get back in time (my sleeping patterns are gonna get pretty screwed cos we’re pulling an all nighter though) but that’s now also “subject to disruption”.

My Dad tried to phone to see if we could sort the mess out, but he got stuck in a queue getting fobbed off with “Our systems are not responding” while listening to music that sounded like it was played on a Fisher Price keyboard, so we’ve just booked that morning flight and are hoping everything goes fine. If I get back late I can always turn up to my mate’s at midnght absolutely shattered.

4 comments  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-05-26  ::  James Irwin