Archived Posts
Woodilee Mental Asylum :: 23/01/10 ~14:20 :: Comments: 0
category: random
Yesterday, Sarah and I went out to Lenzie to look at the ruins of Woodilee Hospital. The hospital was once Scotland's largest mental asylum (is it inappropriate to call it 'Home of the Crazies'?), and it was closed back in 2000. It opened in 1875, so god only knows the type of stuff that might have gone on in this place back then. I'd advise reading her blog post on the place, since she actually researched stuff about it. And I apologise for the horrendous timestamping on the photos, I sadly forgot to turn that off.
This is the main building, one of four that remain standing. All four of them do have gates or fences around them to block access, but the fences all either have massive holes in them, or have fallen over altogether. Plus the amount of graffiti plastered all over the place and beer bottles and cans lying around would imply that people are there quite regularly.
The main building itself is all bricked up aside from 2 windows which you can climb through.
There are signs all over the place saying the buildings are dangerous and not to go in (oops!), but they seem pretty stable. I guess the structural integrity of any building that's been demolished up is questionable. Of the four buildings, only one of them actually has a ceiling over most of it. The main building, for the most part, has no ceiling, just bits of metal and edges of rooms above. The two parts of the corridor are intact I suppose, but there's not much risk of anything collapsing there, or being trapped inside it, given that they're probably about 6 feet wide. The fourth building is the most intact of them all, and in my opinion probably the most interesting. Being in there felt like something from the start of a film, we were just waiting til we found a skeleton half-covered by bricks. The fourth building had a lot of rooms full of debris, bits of brick and pipes and rotting doors and the like. I don't think it was demolished in the same way as the others, since so much of it was still intact. It was quite a creepy building, it's very hard to imagine what the place must have been like when it was still functional. It's even harder to believe that this place was only closed roughly 9 years ago, given how overgrown all the weeds and grass around the place are, particularly on the corridors.
This is the first corridor. It stretches pretty far down, I didn't even take that photo from the end of it. The second is a wee bit shorter, but still pretty lengthy. They're also both quite aligned, so they might have actually been connected together at one stage, which you can see from the picture of the place on Google Maps. Maybe not. It'd be interesting to see the original plans for the place to see just how it all looked.
The second corridor has a wee hill at the side of it, which lets you get onto the second floor of the place. I took this from up there at the edge of it. The first corridor is there on the left, and then the main building on the right. The last building is behind the main building, but it's a wee bit further back.
I think this photo sums the place up quite well. I got up to the third floor of the fourth building, up to roof of it. There were still bits and pieces of the place floating around up there, a couple of radiators and some kind of cabinet or other. Every time I moved up there or took a photo I disturbed about 4 million crows, which scared the hell out of me. But it was an awesome place. It was weird to be standing in a completely abandoned place, and there was absolutely nobody else around while we were there. But the ruins were really incredible, and it was awesome to get inside the place and have a look around.
I've put an album of photos I took from the place up on Facebook. Additionally, Artificial Owl is a website devoted to ruins of buildings, shipwrecked boats, crashed planes etc. Well worth a look.
Armor For Sleep - The More You Talk, The Less I Hear
Windows Deleted File Recovery - Part 1 :: 17/01/10 ~02:45 :: Comments: 1
category: tech stuff/random
I think I've somewhat got over the novelty of having a blog at last, which means I'm quite prepared to leave this website without an update for more than 30 minutes at a time. And also post slightly less inane nonsense; I'm not going to even attempt to claim that the details of my somewhat mediocre life are genuinely worth the space they're taking up here. So, onto something of some (perhaps) genuine use! And I warn you, this is a long post.
There are various tools out there for recovering deleted files. This is something I've never actually looked at before, nevermind used. So, I'm going to do a little case study here and compare a bunch of them, just to see what they're really capable of, and whether they're actually of any use.
To start off, this small set of experiments is going to be run on my old Acer Aspire 6920 laptop - that's an Intel Core 2 Duo T5750 running at 2GHz, with 4GB of RAM, which I'm running 64-bit Windows 7 on. For the sake of completeness of these tests, I'm going to use a fresh install of Win7 for every tool. I realise that that's actually somewhat meaningless, a fresh install doesn't affect where the data is going to be stored on the hard drive or what's already written on there, but it should hopefully eliminate any issues of these tools messing with each other, plus it'll clean up the registry between tools. If I wanted to really push it I'd be running DBAN between installs, but I want to still be under 40 by the time this is done.
So, next, the data! I've got a little set of files that I'll be putting onto the computer and then promptly deleting. I'm going to spread the files through 3 locations: C:, C:\Windows, and an empty folder on the desktop. The files themselves are:
I feel that that's reasonably comprehensive. Sure there's some common filetypes missing, and I could probably have used some more files altogether, but the point of this exercise is really more just to see what the tools can do, and I'm also curious to see if there are any filetypes which are harder to recover than others. Primarily I'm thinking of the .AVI there really; surely any corruption or any missing data will just kill that. Probably the MP3 too. Text files should be fine, I expect to perhaps see some random characters strewn in at worst, but if the integrity of the data hasn't been shot from being deleted, then in theory every single one of these files should be recoverable, entirely intact. And when you consider what actually happens to a file when you delete it, there's no real reason why these files should be affected. Incidentally, the files that are being placed in the 3 locations are all exactly the same, just with changed filenames.
I will point out the immediate flaws in my experiment here: Firstly, I'm doing this on a fresh install, with a good 100gb of free disk space. Highly unlikely that that's the scenario you're likely to use these tools in. Secondly, and certainly more importantly, I'm going to put these files on, delete them, and then place the recovery software on the system, run it, and that's it. There's no opportunity for the disk space that these files are in to be overwritten, except by me copying the tools from my USB drive onto the computer (which is one file, then however many are created from the installation). Again, extremely unlikely that this is what the normal situation for these tools would be; you'll manipulate files and data in some way, certainly. I should also add that the laptop isn't connected to the internet. For the purposes of what I'm doing, that's most likely entirely irrelevant though. Also, none of the files are going to have been opened on the computer. Strictly speaking that's probably irrelevant, but since opening a file creates a trail and leaves temp files strewn everywhere, it's perhaps worth mentioning. Perhaps I should also underpin a few other things that I'm doing which may be of relevance. I'm deleting the files using shift+delete, not through the recycle bin. Also, I'm not rebooting the system between deleting them and installing the programs, or between installing and running the programs, unless the installation calls for it.
Most importantly overall though, is that I've not run DBAN or anything like that on this system, just done a clean install of Windows. So, in theory, I should actually be able to recover files from before I started any of this nonsense. Wonder if any of the programs will find anything!
Now, onto the tools I'm testing. They are:
*EASEUS is the only one of the 7 of these that didn't seem to say anywhere it would run under Win7, if it said what OS's it'd run under at all. So that one might get canned quite early.
Okay, well, to the testing.
Okay, so. Installed EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard (DRW). Haven't created a desktop icon or anything, just run the program straight from the installation. It offers 3 options, Deleted File Recovery, Complete Recovery and Partition Recovery. I'm somewhat curious about the latter two; perhaps they'll quite happily recover parts of my previous install of Windows. I should probably add at this point - that previous install had very, very little on it. A few programs, a few failed attempts at running a certain leaked Microsoft forensics tool, and that was really pretty much it. So there's quite likely very little to actually recover anyway. In fact, this is the 5th or 6th time that Win7 has been installed on this laptop for one reason or another, so it's 6 or 7 installs ago since there was an OS on this system which had proper data on it.
Enough about that though. Sticking to the plan, I'm just going for the Deleted File Recovery option. Select the appropriate partition (one of the listed partitions is my USB drive, which is still connected. Resisting the urge to see what it can find!), and sit and wait for a minute or two while it does its stuff.
So, first thing of note doesn't fill me with optimism. The bottom of the window says it's found 204 files (?!), but only 10.92MB. Which immediately throws stuff like the .AVI and the .MP3 out. There's a few directory paths that it's found:
Now most of the stuff in here is rubbish. It's, as far as I can see, entirely text files, most of which are full of random characters. There's a few bigger files (~800k) which are clearly installation logs of some description; my guess would be temp files created by this software itself, but on the other hand that'd make little sense, surely the program should be able to filter out such completely useless results like that, particularly when it must surely know the name of it's own temp files. I guess it depends where it puts them though. Anyway, there's fragments of text such as 'Installation will now terminate. Cannot apply update:' and lists of filenames including types such as .inx, .cab and .boot, with plenty of references to DLLs floating about in there too. I'd assume most of the logs it actually found were from the Windows installation. So, put simply, that's not the stuff I was looking for!
The next path is a massive one leading into a folder called SystemIndex hidden away miles from anything, which contains a folder called CiFiles which has a few random things in it: some .wid/wsb/ci files. I don't have the slightest clue what those even are, so I'm staying well clear.
The next path is somewhat more promising:
But sadly that's as promising as it gets. It goes into AppData, through to a folder called Temp, and finally into 4 folders, containing stuff like setup.ini, setup.dll, setup.inx. So, nothing there.
The final path, I won't even go into in detail. It's C:\Windows, but then it's away into places like System32 and ServiceProfiles.
So, overall on EASEUS, my thoughts are: Either I'm going incredibly wrong on how I'm doing this test and what to expect from it, or this program is absolutely useless for what I've just tried to do. Working on the latter being correct, this program, well...sucks. I suppose you do have to bear in mind that this one didn't say anything about being usable on Windows 7, but I'm really making excuses for it there.
This just throws you right into it Basically it gives you a list on the left hand side of all the drives it can see, and you just pick which one you want to recover files from. No real options, it's quite a functional looking program, but given my opinion of GUIs, I'm rather happy about that.
The scan on this certainly takes a far bit longer than the EASEUS one did, and it also gives you the option to cancel the scan at any time, which will still return what it's found so far. Which is a nice option to have.
Certainly the list of stuff it find, in this example anyway, is miles more comprehensive than EASEUS. There's a good 40/50 folders that it's recovered, most of which contains multiple files too. Although it does make me wonder, what the hell is all this stuff and where did it all come from? A lot of it is system files, which makes me wonder if it's from a previous proper installation. No way of knowing I suppose. This does give a date modified for a lot of the files, and I'm seeing '7/14/2009' come up very frequently. Which is likely around the time I first got Win7. Possible coincidence, I have no idea. Sadly, unlike on EASEUS, you can't just select a file and view it; you have to mark all the files you want and go to a separate tab for recovery. Wee bit of a pain, but hardly the end of the world.
I don't know what I was really expecting from this one too, but in the process of searching (perhaps I should point out, if it's not already apparent - I'm typing this as I run these) the majority of the stuff it finds just get lumped into folders called 'Lost Folder #
A satisfactory ending to NTFS Undelete, as it crashed to desktop without any error message whatsoever. Stable stuff.
This truly feels like a program that was thrown together quite quickly. I don't even know what it is about it, but on first impressions, I don't much like it. Anyway, it gives you the usual, list of all the drives, pick the one you want, and tell it to scan for deleted files. It can also do for traces of files, which might be interesting, presumably that's going to start looking for headers from files too or something similar. Either way, I'm sticking with deleted files since that's what I'm interested in.
It takes about 10 seconds to run, and it's found 338 deleted files. The files are just displayed in a massive list. There are a few bits of info given, such as date created/modified, size, directory path, but again, it feels a bit hastily chucked together. Not to mention that not a single of the files it's found has a directory path, which means I'm scanning this list for filenames, which of course might not have even been recovered. There's another column titled attributes, which contains 'A' for around half the files, and nothing for the rest. I have no idea at all what that is. Anyway, to the files themselves. The vast majority of them seem to have names like '00000000000000000B5'. I'm assuming the names are all 16 characters, but buggered if I'm counting them, or counting how many 0's I put there.
On the basis of the preview pane, pretty much every file this thing has recovered is an XML file. Which I don't really understand in the slightest!
Ok, I have to take it back. This program has done it. There's no directory path given, but at the end of the search results is every single file I just deleted. Some of the files are apparently too corrupt to be recovered, namely all the .jpg photos, but pretty much everything else is there. Even the .AVI and .MP3 are fully recoverable. It's not managed to pull anything out from older installs on the system that's recognisable in the slightest, and it's also found probably less files than any other of the programs I've used here, but it's found the stuff I want.
So ok, I judged this one too early. It still feels a wee bit shoddy and it's looks match that. But this one clearly does the job.
Err. Well, this one will only work on logical and not physical drive. So if you want to do file recovery on a USB drive, as I have just found out, this thing is pretty superb. Found deleted MP3s on my USB drive! Not bad going. But it won't even attempt to look at the hard drive, it seems to have some weird option to try to read a physical drive into a logical drive to examine it, but I can't get it to work. So...yeah. Nope!
Recuva seems a not bad tool. Installed quickly, as usual it has a list of options, one of which (this one is quite commonly occuring seemingly) is a deep scan option, which will check for headers etc I imagine, but will take forever. So I'm just sticking with the standard one. Recuva also prompts you for what kind of files you are actually looking for; stuff like images, or audio files, or documents etc. It allows an option for all files too, which is what I'm using, but it's nice that it can narrow it down like that for you.
It runs in a matter of seconds. Results, well, they're quite interesting. It has found a few of the files; a handful from the directory in C:\Windows and all the files from the 2 directories which were within it. It's found no trace of the ones in C: or on the desktop. I did specify C: for it to search in, but it clearly has done subdirectories too (it's also found some stuff in AppData etc), so this seems a slightly common problem, I can't seem to find any of the stuff on my desktop with these tools.
Recoverability is pretty much non-existant here though. I can recover the files to my desktop, but they're all unreadable. What is probably most interesting about this program, and this is the only one that's shown this, is that it tells you about the state of the file. For example, the majority of them show state as 'Excellent' and comment as 'No overwritten clusters detected.', but there are a few which have the state 'Unrecoverable' (and one with 'Poor'), and they actually state the exact file that's overwritten a part of the file I'm interested in. Which is interesting from my perspective of doing this, because I can see that the files that are overwriting my stuff are strange system files, but most interestingly I suppose is that the PNG file from the C:\Windows folder has been overwritten, at least in part, by Recuva64.exe. So even installing these programs is a bit of a risk!
Otherwise, this program hasn't really helped at all. It's found a few files, but it can recover nothing. Interesting from the perspective of writing this, but that's all.
The first thing of note here is the massive, massive warning before you even install it, which reads "DO NOT INSTALL THIS SOFTWARE ON A DRIVE YOU WANT TO RECOVER DATA FROM!". It then advises you to install the program on a working Windows system and connect the problem drive as a second drive.
Well, Runtime Software, I'm going to ignore your instructions and see what happens.
On first look, this program is horrific. Loads of options, I have pretty much no idea what I'm doing. They've made the GUI extremely busy, and while I think it is quite intuitive, I don't really know, I might be about to press a button that makes my CPU fan stop and my RAM explode. I have no idea. Although it turns out that it's done what I wanted to. Again, very very quickly too.
So, the style of output is similar to most of the other ones, two panes, left one has a tree-like directory structure, right one shows the current directory contents.
And this one is over as quickly as that. There's no sign of any of the 3 main folders I deleted. The program gives some information at the bottom right, saying there's 14.3GB in this recovery. I don't even know what it means by that, it's recovered 14.3GB of data is the obvious assumption, but...where? Every other program I've used in this experiment has created a folder or something similar which has contained at least a list of all the recovered files. Nothing like that here, so if there are recovered files, I'm going to have to dig for them. And since I honestly don't know what it's recovered, I'm not willing to even attempt to look to see what's there. Certainly there's nothing on my desktop though, and I've used no profile name for this account, which is the same as it's always been on this laptop prior to the first install of Win7 I did when I got it.
So, this one's pretty much useless. I also don't see how you're meant to recover files from this either. There's no 'recover' or 'export' button. At the top it says 'Select and copy the files you want to recover'. But I've also learnt, through warnings on pretty much every single program I've tried here, that you're not meant to copy files from these programs onto the same partition. That's kind of obvious when you think about it, because you risk overwriting the data you're actually trying to recover in the process, which will just kill it. But I've got no idea how you're meant to take the data out of this thing, unless you're actually meant to select the files, right click and hit copy. In fact, a quick test and it would seem that yeah, that's exactly what you're meant to do. It's a bit picky of me, but that's the worst recover method of any of the tools I've used here, just because it involves a little more manual input than the rest. And also given that it didn't find the damn files, this one is pretty much no use here.
Well, this one certainly looks impressive. The GUI mimics the Vista/Win7 view you get of folders/My Computer. And it seems quite intuitive. And it's been scanning for files, by signature, for about 25 minutes now, and the progress bar is perhaps a fifth of the way there. If this doesn't find anything, I assume nothing wil.
This program was recommended by my mate Sam who said he's used the full version and it was excellent. He also said he'd whinge if I didn't mention him by name. So we'll see what this actually recovers. It's certainly the one I have the most faith in out of the ones listed, on the basis of how it's running thus far anyway, but the results are all that matters. And hopefully I'll get them before next year.
Okay, this has been running for roughly 2 hours now and I'm at about 4/5 of the way there. It's searching by file signatures, which is interesting enough, but so far it's found in excess of 410,000 files. Now, it did pop up a box specifying what I wanted it to look for, and I can't even remember what I picked now, but I'm really at a loss for just what the hell this thing is doing. I'll be really quite annoyed if it doesn't actually manage to recover the files though, since it's rendered my laptop absolutely unusable for the past while. Still, I'm more curious to see just what it recovers. A fresh install of Windows 7 is roughly 4gb in size, but I have no idea at all how many files are contained within it. I'd have thought a few hundred thousand would be about right, but if this is just going to return every single file that's from the present install, then that's just a massive waste of time.
Approaching around 2 and a half hours now. It's very nearly done, and has found close on 550,000 files. I'm very interested to see what they are, because surely I'm going to find some decent stuff in this. And yeah, I'm more pleading with myself here now, this is getting ridiculous.
Well, i think it's finally winding down. We're at 569,893 files, and that number doesn't seem to be going up. It's very nearly at the end of it's progress bar, so I'm assuming that that's it. Time to see what it's actually found!
Well first off, that's an interesting way to return results. It's sorted everything by filetypes and placed them in folders, so for instance I have a folder of .7zs and a folder of .gifs. Now, as to what it's found, well that's pretty bloody impressive. At the moment I'm browsing through the .gif folder, and I've found images which are clearly from my temporary internet files, from websites I used in December. So this has recovered stuff from at least 3 installations back. In fact, this is pretty awesome. It's found stuff I didn't even think was cached. Looking through the .pdf folder, I see an awful lot of corruption, which I'd expect. One thing I don't see however, are any of the 3 copies of the .pdf I deleted. In fact, there were 2 .pdfs in the dataset I deleted, so that's 6 files I'd expect to see here. Hm. And the method by which it outputs stuff isn't terribly useful either - I can't find any filepaths or locations, and the files are all simply named as an integer, which I imagine increments with each file found. However, the .xls folder does indeed contain the spreadsheet that was included in the data! Plus a large array of .xls files that I simply have absolutely no idea what they are. I can't even tell you what they look like they're from, they're weird news bulletin looking things that have no reason to even be in a .xls format.
I think the biggest problem with this is that it puts everything into one folder. I'm currently trying to see if it's recovered my .JPG files, of which there were I think 18 altogether deleted, and I'm waiting for it to generate thumbnails so I can view what it's found. Trouble is, it's trying to generate thumbnails for a folder containing in excess of 11,000 images. I'm going to be here all night waiting.
Okay, so giving up on that, and going into checking the original locations for the folders. The one that was on the desktop, no sign of that at all. So that's gone. The one located in C:\Windows however, well it's there in it's entirety. Not all recoverable though, the .TXT file is utterly corrupted beyond any recognition. Unfortunately, this trial version of the program doesn't actually allow you to recover the files you find, although it guarantees that if it can preview them it can recover them. The preview of the .AVI is simply a still image, and the preview of the .MP3, which is meant to play the file back (or perhaps a clip? I don't actually know) does absolutely nothing.
From the five .JPG files in their own directory, the first picture has been recovered perfectly. The second has kind of worked, the top half of the picture is there but the bottom half is a big grey block. The other 3, I can't even see a preview for them, so evidently the files have been located but not enough of them is there to recreate them. Which I find very surprising, given how little data should have been manipulated between the files being deleted and me running the software. Again, the .zip file is there, but it gives me no information about the content or any kind of previewing options, I would have to recover the file to open it, which I can't do.
The .PDF in it's own directory is even more corrupt than the first one. The first one was pretty useless, the program recovered the header of the file (same for the .HTML file) but none of the content. This .PDF is just completely random characters though.
Finally, the folder placed in C:, like the one on the desktop, hasn't been recovered at all.
So overall, that's quite a nifty program, and it has a degree of success to it too. It's gotten some of the files back, although only from one of the 3 locations, and it's recovered some stuff that's been deleted for quite a long time. It has to be taken into account that this laptop I'm testing this stuff on is really seldom used, so a lot of the information on the hard drive from a year or so ago, back when I had Vista on it, is quite probably still there. But the fact that this program has recovered a lot of this stuff is pretty damn impressive.
You have all skipped to this bit without reading what I said about any of them, didn't you. Well anyway. So from the 7 programs I tried here, I'd say only 2 were any real use. One free, one not. The best of the bunch by some distance was DiskDigger. It might not look like much, and it isn't perfect, but it got the files I deleted back, and it was very quick to run.
Diskinternals did the job to a reasonable degree too. It didn't recover everything I deleted, in fact it didn't even find it all, but it pulled out stuff that I really hadn't honestly expected it to find. If you just want to browse old deleted files out of curiosity, this is a good choice. But it took FOREVER to run, probably longer than the rest of this whole thing combined.
Aside from the 7 clean installs of Windows 7 anyway, which is why all in all this has taken me in the region of 9-10 hours.
PC Inspector File Recovery is good if you have a logical drive you want to recover stuff from. Did the job very well on my USB drive, even if that was an accidental find. So also worth keeping that one in mind.
As for the rest? Well, they're interesting, but none of them managed to do what I needed of them. And that's the main point; I've tested 7 pieces of freely available file recovery software, only one did what I wanted it to do. I'm sure there are many millions of other tools like these out there, I'm sure some of them are as good as what I've tried (well, better I'd hope), and I'm sure some are worse. I do have to stress that this isn't a clinical test here with entirely accurate results; not least my results with regards to the recovery of files. Some of the tools I tested which found the files but couldn't recover them, well maybe that's cause I just overwrote the files in the process of the recovery. I will hasten to add that I think that's unlikely though, because every one of these programs that I tried had a preview option, and the files that I recovered which were knackered didn't work in the previews either. Additionally, like I said above, this is a clean install of a system with nothing else on it. This doesn't truly replicate a home computer with constant usage.
One of the more interesting things I found though was that issue with Recuva, where the software itself had actually overwritten part of one of the files I wanted to restore. From that, I'd say it's worth downloading these programs and installing them to have them just in case, to save the risk of deleting stuff by accident and overwriting in the attempt to get it back.
Finally, as to why this post is part one: because of the stuff I said earlier about flaws in this experiment, I'm going to attempt to repeat this on my PC, which is my main computer. No reformatting, no fresh installs, just deleting files and trying to recover them, and seeing if the results are any different. Also, my PC is running Vista Business edition as opposed to Win7. I aim to start that next week.
Oh, and I did a wee update on the music page on Friday about gigs. So there.
Cinematic Orchestra - Drunken Tune
Fish :: 14/01/10 ~13:40 :: Comments: 5
I've fixed up the layout for comments on the comments page, it looks mildly better. Still not terribly happy with it, but given my pointless determination to stick with basic HTML here I'm quite limited as to what I can really do with it. It should do though, the only problem would be if there were a lot of comments, it'd look rubbish. But then, that's not gonna happen on here, so it's hardly worth the worry.
I've shuffled stuff about a lot with the back end of the site this morning, trying to get a bit of organisation since the number of files is starting to mount up a bit, so if anyone comes across any 404s or anything from links on here, please let me know. I've tried to check all the pages that I've shifted about, but I could easily have missed stuff.
Anyway, quick bit of info about my amp. It's nothing special, it's actually the 2nd cheapest one I could find in town; don't have a lot of money to spend, and I just wanted a small amp for messing about with really. It's a 40W Stagg practice amp. I made a couple of videos last night using it, but my camera decided to not actually record any sound. I'm sure I'll end up posting the odd video of me arsing about with it anyway. Sound is pretty good from it though, certainly does what I need from it.
Had an issue when playing last night though. Sodding string on my Carvin has fallen again. Not to the same extent as last time, anything around the top 2/3 of the fretboard still sounds fine, but the lower 1/3 just vibrates off the bottom of it. I'll take it back into town sometime next week, but I presume the screw that's holding up the part of the bridge below the string must be worn, making it slip. Which means repairs, which means money. Which I don't have. At least my old Warwick is perfectly usable in the meantime.
Oh well. I'm going to start doing a wee bit of research into Windows based file recovery programs either this afternoon or tomorrow, just out of curiosity more than anything else. I've got a list of 6 or 7 programs to try out. More than anything else, I'm curious about whether any of them are actually any different. The programs all have the same function, after all. Might be interesting!
What's this? Comments?! :: 13/01/10 ~18:45 :: Comments: 2
Comments are now enabled on here. Not done them in the best or most efficient way, but they work. I'd appreciate it if you don't try to break them! I'd also appreciate it if I never have to look at PHP again in my life. Ok, bit harsh, it was perhaps 5 minutes of frustration caused by a variable not returning what I wanted, and it was also my fault for using the wrong thing anyway. But yes, comments are here!
I may decide to add them retroactively to older posts, but in all honesty I don't think I'll bother. I doubt anyone has any particularly burning comments to make about previous posts that I've not heard from them already now.
In other news, I bought a bass amp today. More on that later, or more likely tomorrow.
Edit: I'll probably work on the layout for displaying comments too, I'm not happy with it, but I can't think of anything better for now that's plain text.
30 Seconds To Mars - Buddha For Mary
Top
As of tonight, my 5,000 word essay due in on the 15th is finished. As such, from now until Jan 25th, when semester 2 begins, I have absolutely nothing to do. Nothing to worry about, no exams to fret over, no coursework to procrastinate on, nothing. It feels awesome. I'm fucking bored already.
I have no idea what to do. Admittedly it usually takes me more than a matter of hours to hit this stage, it's usually at least a week, but I genuinely have sod all to do. I don't even have work to interrupt my weekends. At least this time last year, when I wasn't working, I had reached the stage of my final year project when my brain went 'Holy shit, this is January and you've done NOTHING. Time to work.'. Every year before that, I've been working, usually doing extra hours too at this time of year.
I'm hoping to get back out running again before long, once this sodding weather clears up. I miss that more than much else right now, need to start trying to get a bit of exercising in really, I've spent pretty much the entirety of the last month doing absolutely nothing. I'm fairly sure there's been a couple of days I've not even left my room. There's been several that I've considered not leaving bed. Not so good.
Tomorrow, I'm venturing out into town to look at amps. After a lull of perhaps 4 or 5 months or so of really not playing my bass much/properly at all, I've started playing it every day again and I'm actually remembering how to play songs, which is nice. I do have an aging old amp somewhere, it's actually my dads from the 60s or 70s, but it does (i think) work. Anyway, since god knows where that is or what sort of condition it's in, I'm after a new one. Might even have another go at recording some stuff if I feel so inclined, it's been a couple of years since I bothered trying that.
I've still been spending far more time than is healthy playing iSketch. It's hilarious at times. Not least for the people who play it, although frankly they can be a bit much to handle sometimes. I was playing the other night when we stumbled across a group of illiterate retards. Given the clue for the word was 'Ty--', they were throwing out such suggestions as 'Wheel'. At least they were on the right track, unlike some moronic girl later who, given the clue 'Fi--' thought the word was 'Fila'. Jesus H, how can people be that thick. I should point out, if you've not seen it before, this is basically pictionary online; someone is drawing the word and you have to guess it. The person drawing has to actually give clues, generally reserved for very tricky words or very thick audiences. I wish I could remember what the Fi word was, but it sure as hell wasn't a tracksuit.
I got bored the other night playing with 2 mates and decided to try to piss them off, with this wonderful rendition of the word 'Umpire':
Well it amused me. Just like blocking out my name did, I don't even know why. God I'm bored.
In other random news, tomorrow evening I'll probably start delving into allowing comments on this site, so you can all express your hatred for my nonsense.
Anyway. I'll end on an amusing [stolen] note on religion:
Hah.
The Gathering - Great Ocean Road
Avatar and 3D films :: 12/01/10 ~00:55
Before I start this, I should warn you - SPOILERS BELOW! Don't read this 'un if you've not seen Avatar, and you plan on doing so.
So, where to begin. Tonight, I saw Avatar in 3D. I think I'll start by talking about 3D films. Sigh.
Okay. I have never seen a 3D film before, prior to tonight. I didn't really know what to expect. I shall sum it up briefly though: it's a novelty. One that wears off quite fast. In fact, for a fairly sizable portion of the film I didn't even really notice that it was 3D. Occasionally you're given a reminder because they'll make something float 'towards' you, which I'll reluctantly admit is quite cool. But really, it was a novelty, and it was fairly pointless. They give you the glasses (which I've kept, I am actually more fascinated with them and how they work), but they're irritating. It's not an example that everyone can relate to, but if you've ever had to wear safety glasses for anything - I had to wear them when doing experiments in chemistry & biology at school, and when we were in the forensics lab last semester at uni - that's what they're like. Oversized glasses, that will fit on your face even over normal glasses, although at some discomfort to your ears and nose.
I don't have a lot more to say about 3D films in general. This is apparently the next big fad in cinemas though, there's talk of rereleasing stuff like Star Wars and Lord Of The Rings in 3D, and I was treated to trailers for I think 4 different 3D films. Actually, hadn't planned to talk about that, but I will. There was an advert for a limited showing of Toy Story 2 in 3D, which to me looked barely different to the original. There's a new Disney film about dragons, which looks awesome. Ok, that's a lie, it'll be dreadful, but it looked adorable and I want a pet dragon. There was a film called 'street dance' or something, which made me die inside a little. And then a 3D version of Alice In Wonderland. Possibly interesting, probably crap. Moving on.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * HERE BE SPOILERS * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Okay, so, Avatar. God, I don't know where to start. That was almost 3 hours of my life. Within perhaps 25 minutes of the film, I knew the plot. It's not deep or clever, it's blatant, and worse, it's bloody stupid. Obviously the film is going to be far-fetched, it's a sci-fi/fantasy film about weird aliens. But the parts of it that were stolen from other films were just so bloody obvious. The whole 'linking' thing was taken right out the Matrix. And fair enough, Avatar is a James Cameron film, but half of the props were stolen off the set of Aliens. Including Sigourney Weaver. Actually, I'll take that back - I'm really not a big fan of hers, but she was probably the best person in the film. The army leader guy was your stereotypical military grunt twat, utterly one dimensional and every time the guy was on the screen I sighed. The bloke from Bones was quite amusing, but he added nothing. I enjoyed his little pissy fit for about 15 minutes of the film when he found out that the uneducated unscientific guy was doing better than him, but why did they even bother with that, it added absolutely nothing. I think that's my biggest complaint with most of the film to be honest, there were so many bits and pieces that were completely pointless. Actually, we'll get to my biggest complaint in a minute.
What else! Well, have you ever seen The Last Samurai? That film where Tom Cruise plays an American soldier who's hired to help fight the Japanese, but then he gets captured? And then he decides that he loves the Japanese, falls in love with the girl who's caring for him, has a lot of tension with her relative but then they end up respecting each other? Tom Cruise is an American, with no clue whatsoever about Japanese culture, heritage, or language, but in the space of a few months he's a certified fucking expert, trusted by the entire community, in fact to the extent where they pretty much make him their fucking leader? Well, go watch Avatar and see if you can spot a similarity. Now, The Last Samurai was worse because it was Hollywood shitting all over Japanese culture. Seriously, some American wanders in and they all grow to love him and he becomes their saviour? Do fuck off. At least James Cameron had the good taste to make the people he was pissing all over from a great height a bunch of fictitious aliens.
I have various other niggling complaints about the film overall, but we can now come to my biggest one. Unobtainium. Really? Fucking seriously? Unobtainium? Creative genius at work :|
Not to mention that they made a point in the film of specifying that that's the reason they were on the planet in the first place. They starkly said it, the reason they wanted to move the lovely aliens out of their pretty tree was so they could mine the 'unobtainium' out from below it, because there's lots of it there. So...they invade, and try to kill everyone? Logical first step there. Ok, I will grant you that they hinted that they'd tried to negotiate. Actually no, that's incorrect. They gave them stuff. They gave them schools and medicine etc, so we were graciously told. We were not told if anyone ever just asked the fucking aliens if they mind if humans do a bit of mining. Perhaps they should have done that at the start of the film and saved me a bit of time. Gah! So much of the film just made NO SENSE AT ALL.
So yeah. The film, not so good. Overhyped? Perhaps a tad. I will grant you that some of the CGI was stunning, and it was very well made. It's just a shame they didn't put a bit more effort into the plot and the characters. Oh, and finally, that bloke who was in charge of the whole thing - I was waiting for the moment when he had the inevitable change of conscience that the ENTIRE FILM had built up towards. But it never came. So...why did they bother making him seem all worried and hesitant, when he did fuck all in the whole film anyway other than make stupid remarks and side with one dimensional angry army man? OH MY GOD MAKE IT STOP.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * YOU'RE SAFE TO READ AGAIN * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Oh, and I'll end this on a note of praise. The woman who voiced the main girl character is Zoe Saldana, who also played Uhura in the new Star Trek film. And she's hot. So I forgive the film a little bit.
Just because :: 11/01/10 ~12:55
Don't think this quite justifies me spamming out an RSS feed update.
Nirvana - Where Did You Sleep Last Night
Hey look, I can fit RAM :: 10/01/10 ~19:15
Oh how long awaited this post was. Haha. Yeah, anyway. I won't even bother as if changing RAM is even remotely complicated, as this post will clearly document. And I'll even point out that switching the RAM on a laptop is a lot more arduous than it is to do the same on a PC, but I'll leave the comparison for later. So!
I assembled everything I'd need for this. A bunch of screwdrivers (you never know what size you'll need. Case in point, absolutely none of those ones worked, they were all too big and I had to buy a new screwdriver set before work on Saturday), the 2nd laptop with the Apple official guide on how to change the RAM, simply to keep myself right - I'd never opened a MBP before, and obviously a laptop is a laptop, I knew what to expect, but all the same, no harm in being prepared. Also, need some music for while I fixed it up, and it's quite convenient to have the new RAM to hand.
So, 10 tiny fiddly screws to remove and then the cover lifts off easily.
It's actually quite nicely compacted in there. DVD drive and hard drive over on the left, battery along the bottom, you can see the RAM just sitting there above the battery. The RAM is fitted as it is in most laptops, little plastic clips that you shove out the way and it comes up at an angle, nice and easy. The second DIMM is hidden below the first one, and I will take a slight exception to Apple's layout there - that was a mild frustration, you don't have very much room there and it could have been easier to remove and fit the lower DIMM. Also, from what I could see the channels aren't marked at all - if you plan to replace 2 DIMMs in a MBP with a single one, don't ask me which slot it goes in! Anyway.
I stole the antistatic bag from some old laptop RAM I had floating about, I think from when I changed the RAM in that old Dell that's in the corner of the first picture. The other 2 DIMMs are ancient DDR sticks, they're barely worth keeping as spares now. But they're techy, I can't bring myself to throw such things away.
And that's it, new DIMMs in place, closed it back up. The entire process of changing out the RAM on my macbook pro took, including removing the screws, perhaps 5 minutes. And it worked nicely:
So yep, that's it. I'd always happily advise people to mess about with their own computers if they're doing hardware stuff, just check a guide or a youtube video first to make sure you know roughly what you're doing. But when it comes to switching out memory, it's unbelievably simple. In a PC, you're doing exactly the same thing, except the DIMMs are gonna be perpendicular to the motherboard and held down by two clips at either end, which you just pull up with your thumbs.
Anyway, enough of that nonsense. I listened through Kings of Leon's first album earlier today, and my verdict is pretty much what I thought it would be - it's alright. Two or three awesome tracks, a few middling tracks, several I can't even remember. My view is slightly tainted though, because it has a hidden track at the end. God I hate that. I don't see any artistic merit or, indeed, any point whatsoever in doing it, and it just means that I either need to get some editing software to cut the last 7 minutes off a track if I want it on my iPod (because fucked if I want to listen to a song then have to get my iPod out and skip to the next song simply cause the band decided it would be a good idea to dump a huge block of silence in there). Alternatively I need to get editing software and cut the silence out and make the hidden track another song, on the [very] rare occasion that it's actually worth listening to. This particularly annoys me with Coheed & Cambria - their track The Final Cut, which is one of the best guitar driven tracks ever (if you disagree, you're simply wrong :P), but then they dump a little bit of silence at the end, then some bloody weird outro to the album. ANNOYING! Sod off with that.
Drunk on the intertubes :: 10/01/10 ~01:10
There's nothing more awesome. Of course I'm not being serious, contrary to what many 15 year olds would have you believe, but all the same. I have yet again lately overindulged, but at least with good reason this time! As I mentioned earlier, today was my final day at work, and I am now once again amongst the ranks of the unemployed. Well, I'm a student, so not really, but I'm jobless. And frankly, it's bollocks. I hate not working, I really do. I hate being stuck in at the weekends and doing sod all, it's tedious. Yeah, I have time to spend on uni stuff, and I have a day or two a week when I can do pretty much whatever I want (including sleep in) should I not have uni work to do. And to be honest, I won't use the time wisely for stuff like uni work anyway; my mind will say 'I shouldn't have this as free time, as such it doesn't need to be used productively!' and I will abide by that logic.
So today was pretty good. I bought a screwdriver set, tomorrow I'll have a go at that RAM replacing. I'd do it tonight, but drunkenness + electronics = explosions. So no thanks. Even if I am reasonably sober now, I still don't think I'll be chancing that. Work went very well, I didn't honestly do much but I did what was required of me, and in all honesty I had a very good day there. It was very laid back, obviously, and I find that a much nicer working environment. On reflection, I'd actually say to an extent that I preferred Borders over there simply because of that, in Borders it was far more laid back, and I respond better to that. I'm bad with stress, not that working in a shop is terribly stressful, but all the same. But no offence to Borders, and the people I know who worked there, but my last place had nowhere near as much bitchiness or cliqueiness (is that a word? it is now), and overall I preferred the staff there. Anyway, today the lift broke at work, and I had to make my first venture into the goods lift in the back. I was amused to be greeted by this:
Which amused me.
I nipped into Fopp before work, which is one of my favourite CD shops in town, simply because they're outrageously cheap. I spent £25 and picked up 5 albums, which I will attempt to use to stop listening to Kings of Leon's last album for a while. I (finally) got The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill, which I'm quite looking forward to listening to. I also picked up Kings of Leon's first album, as I said I'd give it a proper go. Aside from them, just albums I've been meaning to pick up for so long but just haven't got round to doing it. Nimrod by Green Day, and two Nirvana albums - Unplugged In New York & From The Muddy Banks Of The Wishkah. They shall be on the iPod soon. I'm particularly looking forward to listening to the Nirvana Unplugged album. Nevermind was one of the very first albums I ever had, and I've always really liked it, but there's something about the prospect of an acoustic album by Nirvana that I really like. Plus, I've heard their cover of The Man Who Sold The World from that album before, and it's fucking stunning. Can't wait to see what the rest of the album is like, I just hope I'm not disappointed. But other songs on there like About A Girl, Come As You Are, Polly and On A Plain? Can't be bad.
Actually, on a slight tangent, I always thought Kurt Cobain was a complete tosser, until about 2 years or so ago I actually did a bit of reading into who he was. And he seems like a pretty decent guy, drug abuse aside. Particularly fond of the fact that he was apparently quite an ardent pro-feminist.
I went out for a few drinks after work, which was a good laugh, although I had a truly sobering experience during it. I was there with a group of 5 other people, and I was the oldest one there. I'm only 23, and that's the first time that's ever happened to me. I don't even know why I care, but it was intensely weird, and I was suddenly very aware of it and a bit self conscious. I'm getting old, apparently. It was a good laugh though. I will actually miss a few of the people I worked with, and even the place itself, at least to an extent. It's the first job I've had where I actually have socialised with colleagues outside of work, and to be honest I feel like I've missed out somewhat in not bothering beforehand. Well, perhaps that's a bit harsh on myself, I wouldn't say I didn't bother, I just didn't perhaps make quite the effort I could have.
There's meant to be some work night out thing later this month after payday, which I might (read: probably will) attend for the fun of it.
I had a decent wander home, through the motherfucking snow. I swear to god I am beyond fed up with it. I want it to just thaw and vanish, not only is it cold and slushy in most places, but the places where it's still proper snow it's turned into ridiculously hard, compacted snow which hurts your ankles to walk on. So, I decided to walk on the road. And take a photo!
Yeah it's a poor photo, but you try taking a decent one on a phone's camera. I like my walk home, primarily cause pretty much no one else is ever walking when I do it, which means I can unabashedly belt out whatever I'm listening to on my iPod at the time. Tone-deaf renditions of Closer & Be Somebody by Kings of Leon and 4:AM Forever by Lostprophets surely echoed out through Newton Mearns this evening.
Finally, a belated RIP to Border, what remains to date the place where I've worked longer than anywhere else.
Saw those signs outside today saying the premises have been aquired by some company or other. Quite surprised about that myself, I had envisaged the place being vacant for quite some time! The rumour flying around before they closed was that Top Shop was going to open another place there, but we'll see what happens I suppose. But yes. RIP the Good Ship Borders. Good luck to everyone who lost their jobs when it went.
That'll do for now. Tomorrow I'll be fitting that RAM, and you can all be bored with my tales of that. Woo! Listening through Unplugged In New York just now. Sigh, if only I hadn't been 8 in 1994, perhaps I could have seen Nirvana live.
Nirvana - Come As You Are (Unplugged In New York)
Cold :: 09/01/10 ~11:00
I ought to be being more productive this morning, but I'm not quite awake/in the right mindset yet. Got a 5,000 word essay that's due in this coming Friday (although it's quite possible that we're going to be given an extension on it) which I really ought to be working on instead of typing up this. But as usual, I find myself messing about online instead of doing uni work. Bit of a constant problem over the last 5 or 6 years really, but I get there eventually. Besides, the topic I chose for the essay is frankly bloody easy. Which is a shame I suppose, I'd expect them to mark it a little more harshly due to the fact that of the 5 topics given to us, it's the one that requires the least amount of research and the most amount of opinion. But then the other options aren't too much better; one is about the system which I based the entire of my final year project around last year, which I'm absolutely unwilling to look at again, even if it would be possibly easier to write on for me than what I chose. Another involves a Dutch Forensics system which does sound quite interesting, but Sarah is doing that one and she's had issues getting the sod to work at all. The third is a comparison between forensic analysis of different OS's, you can pick between Windows & Linux, Windows & OSX or OSX & Linux. Actually on reflection that's probably the easiest topic to write on, since you could simply perform the experiments we did in some of our semester 1 labs and see if you can get useful results from both OS's (which you won't, and the experiments we did were based on Windows). Then a little bit of research into the forensics of the other OS's, and that's it. The fourth topic is about file and disk encryption, which might be of some degree of importance, but frankly... 5,000 words on disk encryption? I might be struggling for motivation on my topic, but I'd be struggling to wake up in the mornings if I had to write something as tedious as that.
My topic is on the strengths & weaknesses of open source software in forensics. Yeah it isn't a hard question, and it's very easy to write about, but I actually chose it because I do like to rant about open source software; I approve of it entirely, and I support its use, but I think there are some situations where it's not the reliable option.
And I do see the irony in the fact that I can't be bothered to write the actual paper, but I'm happy to make a blog post about it when I ought to be working on it. Oh well.
Today is my last day at work! I finish with a 4 hour shift today, working 3-7. The position was just a christmas temp one, and I've not officially been told I'm not being kept on, but I had a word with my mate who's a manager there a few days back and he seemed to think it was quite unlikely. I took that as him being polite because he knows I'm not gonna get kept on, but in all honesty that's fair enough anyway. The company I worked for (I don't half go out of my way not to mention them by name, it's a bit stupid since if you look at my facebook page you'll see it) aren't planning on keeping many people on, and I've not gone above and beyond enough to really merit it. But I didn't have the time this year to be volunteering for extra shifts every other day, even though I could really have used the money. It certainly didn't help that my uni term didn't finish until the 19th. But I'm not making excuses, I don't feel I have to anyway; it was a part time, minimum wage job in retail, and I don't much care. My only issue is that I'm going to be without a job, and at a time when finding another isn't going to be terribly easy - everywhere is getting rid of christmas temps at the moment and keeping on the ones they want, they're not really looking to hire new people from elsewhere. I fired some CV's into some shops in town the other day, but there's only two that I'm particularly interested in working in. One of them said they've got nothing going just now, the other said they're probably not going to be hiring again until Easter.
Which sucks.
Hopefully I'll be getting a screwdriver today that's small enough for my Macbook Pro, so if all goes well I'll do a post sometime tomorrow (probably while procrastinating) about that. And hopefully my MBP will still work. I hate when you have to do something like changing the RAM on a laptop, with the exception of my old, old Dell one they never make it easy. The process of swapping out the DIMMs takes all of 15 seconds, the time is removing tiny screw after tiny screw and then wondering where that last screw disappeared to and hoping it's not the one that holds the whole sodding laptop together.
If anyone wants to buy 2x 1GB MBP RAM (1067MHz, DDR3) let me know.
It's Friday, right? :: 07/01/10 ~17:40
I have had a ridiculously hard time trying to remember what day of the week it is today, and I do not know why. I woke up quite convinced it was Friday, then I thought it was Wednesday. I met a friend for lunch, who also thought it was Wednesday, until we realised otherwise. Then I informed a random person in a shop that today is the 8th and it's Friday, and about 30 minutes ago I told my dad that town was remarkably quiet today for a Saturday. I think I've suffered a mild aneurysm.
Due to popular demand (ok I think 3 people have mentioned it), I will be trying to implement comments on here in the very near future. I have some uni work to get out the way first, but I have at least a week between finishing that and starting back, so that's plenty of time to try to do that, plus update the shoes page a bit.
I spent today wandering around Glasgow city centre looking like a wee bit of a prick. I had to take my bass guitar in to get it fixed up, as I mentioned the other day. The bridge had been pressed in somehow. No idea how, I blame George. Anyway, it took about 2 minutes for the guys in McCormack's to fix it up, and it's back to normal now. I bought the gutiar from there about 6 months or so, I do really like the shop. It's really small, and they don't in all honesty have a terribly good selection of guitars, but all the best ones I've seen have been there. My Warwick Rockbass came from Reverb, or Sound Control as it then was, on Jamaica St, as did my old Yamaha thing. I doubt I'd buy another guitar from them though, they're really pushy and they were really not too impressed with me actually wanting to sit down and play a few of them before deciding which I wanted to throw hundreds of pounds at. McCormack's, they're just far nicer. When I went to get my last bass, I sat in there for about an hour and a half playing pretty much every bass they had out before I decided on the Carvin. There were a couple that were perhaps a bit nicer than the one I got, but I really wanted a 5 string, and I love the way the Carvin looks and sounds.
I remember going in there before I bought the Warwick bass, and playing a few that they had out. I wish I could remember what it was, but they had an absolutely awesome turquoise-y 4 string fretless bass which I would have bought there and then if it wasn't for two things; firstly it was I think £479, which I couldn't afford at all at the time, but primarily it was a left handed bass. I've tried a few times to play left handed instruments, but I just can't do it, it's too peculiar. But I wish I'd at least made a note of the make or the model of it at the time, because even though I love my Carvin and I certainly don't need another guitar, I'd still want to check it out. I suppose another reason I didn't consider it was because it was fretless and at that stage (and still now really) I wasn't good enough to play a fretless bass well, but the sound of that guitar was awesome. I'd still love a fretless bass really, I played about with a couple today after they fixed up mine, but the two they had were very cheap and you could feel and hear it when you played them. I did also play this 8 string bass there.
I hated it. Seriously, why would anyone, ever, play one by choice. It sounded bloody terrible, it was awkward, and it was just plain weird.
Anyway. My bass is fixed, and I'm not buying a new one, that's all that matters!
I also got 4GB of RAM in the post today, for my Macbook Pro. This was actually originally going to be a post about that, switching the RAM etc. Not the most exciting subject, but I do like hardware work and I don't get to do enough of it, so I was going to ramble on about it. However that has been postponed til this weekend, since I don't have a single screwdriver small enough to get the screws out of the base of the bloody laptop! So that'll come later.
I guess I should actually go do some work now. Oh, and Kings Of Leon's last album, Only By The Night, is absolutely awesome.
Back to normality. Ish. :: 05/01/10 ~19:40
Exam is ooooveerrrr! As with every other exam I've ever sat in my entire life, I went in there knowing my stuff, I think I've done well. Usually this is a particularly bad sign and I actually got in the region of 30%, but we'll have to wait and see. As for now, sod it, I'm not going to think of it again til I have to. Although my head is somewhat littered with useless information now. If you ever want to fake having a bloodsoaked house to the police, just rub horseradish everywhere. Also, you can do this if you want your house to smell of horseradish.
I have a 5,000 word mini-dissertation that's due in in just over a weeks time, which I do need to get working on. It's basically a comparison between open source and closed source software in forensic tools, so it should be relatively easy, particularly with my penchant for having a rant about open source software at times. Not that I have any particular issue with open source software per se, I just think it's inappropriate for some situations and environments. Home PC use etc, that's fine. When trying to deal with something which could be key to someone spending years in prison for something they didn't do, or getting away with a crime, I'm not so keen on it there. And I know there's no real higher guarantee with closed source software that the quality is higher or that it's more professional, not to mention that you can't even actually check yourself what's going on inside it to see if it works ok, but you'd hope that a company marketing this sort of software would be reputable. Anyway, enough of that, I'm not going to do any of it tonight because I want a day off, I'll start tomorrow.
I'm considering enabling commenting on this site in the near future. As my website skills are somewhat far from what they really ought to be, I'll need to research how it all works (I'm reasonably familiar with setting it up cause I've done form submission nonsense before, but I've always just followed guidelines/notes - if I put it on here, I want to actually understand it), but that might be coming soon, if I have the time and I can be bothered. In a less techy area, I'll be trying to get the last of my shoes up on here over the coming weeks too before my course starts back. Certainly between the due date for the essay and classes starting up again I'll have pretty much nothing better to do.
Tomorrow, I'm going into town to get my bass fixed (my E string has slipped somehow, and vibrates off the bottom of the fretboard when you try to play anything other than an open note, making a thoroughly horrible noise), hopefully that'll be quick and painless. I'd like it to be free too, but no chance of that sadly! If they charge more than a tenner they can sod off though, it's perhaps 2 minutes of work and requires no new parts, I'd do it myself but I've never messed about with it before and I'm too scared to do so. I'm also going to apply for part time jobs in a few places, since my current job is a Christmas temp position and my contract expires in the incredibly near future, and as much as I'd like to be kept on, I'm incredibly doubtful that it'll happen. That said anyway, I'm going to apply at a few shoe shops. Because if I'm going to work in retail, I'd rather it be there. There's one in particular I'd love to work in, but I doubt they're hiring at the moment sadly, it's not the busiest of shops (although it bloody well should be) and there were 5 members of staff there at least when I was in this afternoon. Still, no harm in trying.
Finally, RIP my Adidas Top Ten's. They have been retired from service today, because they are absolutely bloody disgusting. I wore them solidly for about a month after one of my trips to Florida, when I couldn't be bothered to actually pick a pair of shoes every day again for a while, and they took quite a beating and saw some nasty weather. They've now reached the point where they're pretty horrible and they just look shabby (even moreso than in those photos), so they're now only going to be worn when the weather is too crap to risk a decent pair out, or for painting outdoors etc, stuff where they might get properly knackered anyway. Poor shoes! On a shoe related front, I'm looking out for a good pair of red trainers. I do not own any red trainers aside from my red/green 88 Fades and my Consortium UNDFTDS, and of them the 88's are a bit too bright red, and the UNDFTD's I've still not worn once yet - they're suede, and the weather here has been either rain or snow since I got them, and I'm not willing to risk them til it's decent out there. I thought about a pair of red Puma Suede's, but I don't honestly like Puma's shoes very much. So the search continues.
My iPod has been posted out to attempt to have it repaired at last. Pain in the arse too, I'm without my alarm clock til it's back.
Venetian Snares - Szamár Madár
Happy New Year! :: 01/01/10 ~00:00
Although I'm not actually quite pathetic enough to spend the first part of the new year writing a blog post (it's currently about 11am, I'm just not going to upload this until later), happy new year everyone! 2009 was a pretty good year for me, even if it started off in complete chaos because I was in Florida in January trying to work on my final year project for uni, but I spent the best part of 3 weeks fighting with my install of Ubuntu (can't even remember the issue now, something involving disk space causing my laptop to stop booting up on Ubuntu). But 2009 saw me finally graduate from uni, I had a good few months away in Florida in the summer, I've started my new uni course which has been pretty good so far. 2010 is just a much scarier prospect really - it's going to start off with me most likely losing my christmas temp job, then followed by my last semester at uni before I need to realise that I'm actually meant to be getting a job and trying to live like a properly responsible adult. That's not til September though, so it can wait. I need to start applying for jobs though, including ones back out in the US. Not really holding out much hope of getting a job out there starting this year, given the economic climate is still messy, but I'll apply there and here all the same.
So, happy new year everyone, and I hope 2010 is a good one. Oh, unless you refer to this decade as the 'twenty-tens', in which case I hope it's awful for you.
I have an exam on the 5th, so I highly doubt I'll update this again prior to that, but after that I'll be posting crap no one cares about with frequency again. Woo.
London, Snow, Cows and Travelling :: 22/12/09 ~16:25
Sarah and I had planned a trip down to London from the 20th til the 21st, just as something to do for a couple of days. She'd never been to London before, and while I've been there quite a lot of times, I do quite like London really. I would absolutely hate to live there, it's so busy and it's just a pain to even go out onto the street sometimes, but I do like visiting for a couple of days. There's always a few things I'd like to do - we stuck to very touristy stuff for the most part, the British Museum and the tower of London etc (which I had actually never been to before - it's quite interesting. And the ravens are cool.). Although there isn't a whole pile of stuff left that I want to do in London; my last trip down I went to Abbey Road, and the only thing that stands out that I still want to do is visit Highgate Cemetery.
Anyway. It was fun, it was a good trip. I save special praise for the restaurant we went to for dinner, Gaucho (we went to the one at Picadilly Circus). Definitely the best steak I've had in a restaurant in the UK, also on a par with Ruth's Chris out in the US, which I frequent when I can afford to. Ok, I've been 4 times I think, but I'm a poor student, it's not often I can shell out £/$100 for dinner for 2. But Gaucho was awesome, not least because the entire restaurant was made from cow. The walls were lined with cow hides, which I have no reason to suspect were fake. The chairs were too, with leather underneath them. Add to that an awesome 3 course meal, wine and a whisky afterwards, it was bloody good :P.
So, snow. There was quite a lot of it this weekend, the outskirts of London were quite thinly veiled in it when we got the train into Liverpool St station. London itself was just wet until Monday night, when it started to snow. Not very much though, the centre didn't get enough snow or cold enough for it to actually lie on the ground while we were there, but apparently there was a wee bit. For a good few years now I've been of the opinion that snow is quite cool, unless you actually need to go anywhere. That was spurred on by me nearly missing an exam in 2nd year because there was about 6" of snow and all the buses and trains got cancelled, I had to get my dad to give me a lift into town (which made him late for work), since there was no alternative. I had even left early that day, anticipating delays. But that was a good 6" of snow, which is an acceptable amount to cause problems. 2"ish is not, which is what London, and in particular Stansted Airport saw over the 2 days we were down there. There was a massive backlog of delayed flights at Stansted, and the runway had been closed for 2 hours at some point, and only just reopened after we got through security.
Our flight was supposed to leave at I think 7:30pm to get back to Glasgow. We were through security by 6:30, and it wasn't until roughly 9 that they told us our flight was cancelled. Not just ours though, there were perhaps 7 or 8 flights cancelled by Ryanair and Easyjet, which just led to complete chaos at the airport. After we managed to get back through security and into the main airport bit, there was already a queue going halfway round the airport to the Ryanair ticket desk, ably manned by 2 people to deal with a good few hundred angry travellers. We investigated all the options we could: hire car, but that was out because they wouldn't hire a car to anyone who wasn't bringing it back to Stansted, since they were all fully booked for the christmas period. trains, there wasn't any more running that night. coach, there was one from Victoria in London but it left at 11, and since the train from Stansted takes an hour to get back to Liverpool St, then we'd need to jump on the tube (and it was about 9:30 by then), there was no chance we'd make it. We even looked into getting a taxi, but at £650 from Stansted to Glasgow we thought that was perhaps a little bit steep. We thankfully ran into 2 other people back by the gate who were also on the same flight, so we weren't totally on our own. By about 9:30 I was just so pissed off with the whole thing; there were about 10 computers available with internet connections for the public to use, which had massive flocks of people round them trying to rebook flights. Ryanair, who we used, put up a link on their site which lets you rebook your flights if your plane was cancelled, but when you actually tried to use it it claimed you couldn't change the flight since the one we were originally on, the cancelled one, was in the past. In the end I called my parents back home and had them book a new flight for us this morning at 8:30am.
After this I was quite content to just stay overnight in the airport. The Ryanair staff were meant to be in at 4am, and I really quite fancied screaming at them. It's really rare that I get angry, but I was just so sick of it all last night, it was beyond belief. They kept making an announcement over the tannoy which went along the lines of 'Ryanair customers are reminded that they may go home and rebook their tickets online.'. Which is all very well, but there was absolutely fucking no one there who could get home without the flight they were booked on, and certainly by this time everyone who lived locally had already left. I did end up screaming at an airport employee after a quick succession of this message being announced 3 times in 7 or 8 minutes, because it was just so grating and stupid. In the end, the other couple we met up with had managed to get a room booked in a hotel near the airport, so we headed over there with them. When we were on the bus, they got a call from one of their dad's saying they had a 2nd room in a 2nd hotel booked, so we took the one we were originally heading to for ourselves. It was good to have somewhere to sleep and to be able to have a shower, but we were stuck on the smoking floor of the hotel. The room didn't smell too badly but the corridor was disgusting, I was very pleased we weren't there for long. It was about 11:30 by the time we got checked in, and the first bus back to the airport was at 4, so we were up for the 4:30 bus so we could get checked in and so I could yell at some airport plebs.
Never got to yell at anyone in the end, we got checked in at the hotel at 4am before we left (thanks to the incredibly irate employee letting me use her computer to print our boarding passes), and our flight left about 30 mins late, but at least we got home today. It was just so unbelievable that all this was caused by about 2" of snow. Useless cretins that run these airports, how can they not be prepared to deal with this kind of weather. Anyway, could be worse. We're home, I've put in my claim to have my flight refunded, and I'm not flying to Stansted ever again. Virgin trains take 4 and a half hours from Glasgow Central to Euston. That'll do me.
I do feel somewhat sorry for Ryanair and Easyjet. Well not so much for Easyjet, who apparently cancelled half their flights today too, while Ryanair let theirs run except to places where the weather is ridiculous. But this reflects very badly on those airlines, when in reality it's BAA and Stansted Airport who are at fault for being thoroughly unprepared to deal with these conditions. All the same, they're all bastards, and I still absolutely hate airports. Flying, don't care, don't mind that at all. Airports, however, are hellish.
I've got a few photos from London which I'll stick up here later on at some point. For now, back to hibernation (read: inactivity) until January!
30 Seconds To Mars - Night Of The Hunter
Cold :: 13/12/09 ~09:20
I absolutely hate being up at this time of the morning for work. Plus it's bloody freezing outside, and I have to spend the entire day stuck in a shop, followed by coming home to make a half-hearted attempt at doing some uni work. My brain already thinks term has finished, I can't seem to remember the deadlines for any of my stuff, plus I keep forgetting that I actually have to go into uni again this week. Oh well.
The christmas course night out was good, I had a very good night. First time I'd been into a club in Glasgow for quite a long time. I also managed to get us all lost for a few minutes in the west end, which I'm particularly proud of. Serves everyone right for trusting me with directions.
Right, i have no decent way to end this mindless stuff, so I'm just going to go away. I'm also not listening to anything at all, nor do I particularly feel like it!
Hybrid :: 11/12/09 ~13:20
I'm incredibly bored and I'm going through a bunch of old photos for lack of anything better to do, and I came across this, which I feel the need to share. This is Sarah's cat Chai, dressed as a bee for Halloween.
Haggis :: 11/12/09 ~10:40
Fog!
I hate walking outside in fog, because every single car will be doing their best to blind me with headlights.
I resurrected one of my old iPods yesterday. Well, resurrected is the wrong word, recommissioned is more like it. I have an alarm clock thing which an iPod can plug into, and that's where my old 30gb one has been living ever since I got my Touch. I think it's a 5th generation video iPod, but I don't actually remember anymore. It's been quite strange using it though, I keep trying to push the hold button down instead of sliding it across, and I am quite convinced it is 100, maybe 200 times louder than my Touch is. I will usually have the volume set to about half way on it, and the pointless volume control on my headphones (gah I hate these things) is always set to max. On the iPod Touch, that's pretty reasonable, it blocks out a lot of other sound but I can still hear cars and I can still hear my phone going off. With my old iPod, I was on the train yesterday with it for about 5 minutes before I started getting a bit nervous about the large amount of glares I was getting. Took my headphones out for a second and bloody hell, they could probably make out the words of what I was listening to. At least I wasn't listening to something embarrassing.
My girlfriend Sarah is coming to stay here for a few weeks on Tuesday, so I've been frantically trying to get the place tidied up. My desk is usable again. It is awesome.
I also found out that 'my' Russian surname is actually Evsovitch, so I have spelt it wrong for many a year. I also didn't realise just how closely connected to it I am - I thought it was the surname of something like my dad's grandparents or even a generation above that. But my dad's dad should actually have had that surname; one of his brothers even did, it wasn't until between two of his older siblings that they changed the name. Which I think is quite cool.
I know you all don't.
Top
Just got home at about midnight tonight, it's been a looong day. A good one, but a long one. It's been a fair while since I've been out of the house for a 12 hour stretch without staying in another city overnight. What a pointless claim. But I shan't bore you (or debase this website) with the details of my day, which was fairly unimpressive, short of tonight when I went through to Edinburgh with my parents to see The Bootleg Beatles. I'd link to their proper website, but it's got a flash front page, and as such to directly link to it would violate every moral I have. They were really good, certainly worth seeing. Played most of the best stuff, a few tracks I'm really not too bothered about (I Am The Walrus, Lady Madonna, The Ballad Of John & Yoko in particular) but really it was worth it just to see While My Guitar Gently Weeps and Back In The USSR. The performance was really good, it certainly kept me entertained at least. I took a bunch of photos, plus I attempted to take a video of While My Guitar Gently Weeps, but I dunno how that came out. I'll probably stick it up on Youtube later this week, and I'll probably stick the photos up on Facebook. I'm considering linking to my Photobucket (and making it public) on here, but I've got about 3 pages of really stupid pictures that I'd need to remove first, but that's always an option. Alternatively I could investigate something like Flickr. Ideally I'd quite like to have a proper section on here where I can stick photos etc or stuff that's not quite suitable for it's own blog post, but I don't want to clutter this up further, and I know I'd use it so rarely it's pointless. Plus I always set everything on Facebook so only my friends can see it, so linking to an album on there probably won't help everyone. Oh well, right now I don't care anyway.
In other exciting news, I finally put the Samba's up on the shoe page. Had planned on doing it last night, but was interrupted by uni work and an iSketch marathon.
Tonight was the second time in less than a week I've been through in Edinburgh, which I find oddly quite astounding. I'm actually not a massive fan of Edinburgh; I think mostly because I don't know my way around. I mean, in the centre I can wander and find my way back wherever, but I don't know street names, I don't know landmarks. For example, last time I was in Edinburgh in the summer, I had about an hour or so to kill before I was meeting people so I decided to wander over to the Scotch Whisky Experience by the castle because they have a thoroughly awesome whisky bar in the basement and I thought I'd have a drink. From Waverley Station to this place is perhaps a 15 minute walk. The route I took was so roundabout and complex that it took me 45 minutes, I actually ended up meeting my mates just down the road from it instead since it took me so long to find the bloody place. I don't deny for a second that Edinburgh is a far nicer city than Glasgow though. Glasgow might have a few things going for it, but the primary one for me is familiarity, and that's not one that matters in terms of the actual city. Wish it was a bit cheaper to travel through though. Ten quid for a single isn't really all that bad, but a return should be cheaper than twenty. And buggered if I'm ever driving that. I'd be lost the minute I got off the motorway.
I'm somewhat hoarse from singing along to Beatles tracks, but quite surprisingly the entire time I was there (and pretty much the whole day today anyway) I've had The Whore, The Cook & The Mother by My Dying Bride stuck in my head. Don't even know why.
I bet you've never seen me in the same room as Patrick Moore :: 8/12/09 ~16:45
I don't really have a lot to say today, to be honest! It was a pretty good day, in fact it was just a good day. Lecture this morning was quick and painless, had fun messing about in the lab (it turns out that Diet Coke works quite well at cleaning whiteboards), badminton was good fun and I didn't have a single niggle from my right shoulder, which has been pretty much painless since Saturday after I buggered it up playing squash 3 weeks or so ago. Now it's just after 4, I do have a fair bit of reading to do for my class in the morning but I've got plenty of time for that, and other than that I'm gonna do pretty much nothing tonight. It should be good, providing nothing unexpected pisses me off!
The only down thing about today was that my iPod is officially trashed now. It's reached the stage where the headphone jack is so sensitive to pressure that if it's in my pocket when I walk, every time I move my leg the left earphone cuts out. It's a bugger, yeah, but I've got a stack of books to get through on the train just now anyway, so it's not that bad. Plus, I'll get it fixed pretty soon in the new year I reckon. December's pay is pretty much earmarked for going to London, and January is paying off the credit card. If I get kept on at my job after Christmas then all will be well, if not then I guess I'll have to scrounge off my parents, but at least I can do that for now!
I'm probably gonna stick photos of my Adidas Sambas up later tonight, I took the photos today before I wore them out - they're orange suede, I have absolutely no idea how they're still so clean. Even though its wet out and the ground is covered with puddles and mud and dead leaves and all kinds of crap, they're still pretty much spotless after today. No idea how, but I'm not complaining! I do wish I'd taken photos of a lot of my shoes a bit earlier, since some of them are a complete state (my Adidas Top Tens and Marathon 88 Fades in particular), but it's not like it matters. Anyway, I'll probably just edit this post when I put the Sambas up and not bother updating the RSS feed, since I know the only person who uses the RSS feed doesn't give a shit :P.
Finally, I've updated my music page. Exciting times.
30 Seconds To Mars - This Is War
Shoes :: 7/12/09 ~18:10
For the millions of you that care, I've put up another (I think) 14 pairs of shoes on here. Woo.
My Dying Bride - The Whore, The Cook And The Mother
Top
I don't know if anyone else has had experience of trying to export an iTunes library. Today, I attempted to do this. I found 2 options within iTunes to allow it - the obvious one is the 'export' option, but my warning for anyone who dares try this is to steer clear. All it does is create an awful, messy, borderline unreadable XML document. Not what I wanted.
The second option is to create a .xps file. Which is, I believe, the Microsoft equivalent of a pdf. So, since this was the only mildly viable option, I went with this. The problem is, whatever the hell Windows uses to read a .xps, it's not preinstalled. I tried to open the file, which just led to Chrome attempting to download it (?!). I downloaded the proper xpsviewer program, but it needs all kinds of messing about with the .NET framework, and I'd rather eat needles than spend half the day sorting that lump of crap out. So I set about looking for a convertor to switch from .xps to, well, pretty much anything. I was hoping for an xls, since y'know, everyone loves Excel. That and I always had my CD list kept as an excel workbook, it works well for that function. But anything would have done, even a plain text file so you could bung it in notepad++ to get line numbers. Anyway, I played with a few programs, the best of which is a PDF conversion program called Able2Extract. Quite a nice program actually, if a bit needless nowadays. But the problem with that is the trial version only lets you convert 3 pages of an xps file at a time. My file was roughly 340 pages.
So, I did some hunting and tracked down a few illegal copies of it. I must say, generally I don't bother doing this, this is the first program I've downloaded illegally in years - normally the effort of having to find a working, non-virus-ridden copy of a program is daunting enough to put me off. But I persevered this time, since having a hard copy of my library isn't really that bad an idea anyway. Now, being the paranoid person I am, I decided not to install these downloaded versions on my PC, or in fact any of the computers that I regularly use. My dad's old PC, which was sitting on my floor last week by my feet...well, it hadn't moved. I'd run DBAN on it, so I thought I'd put a clean install of Windows on there and then I'd have my test box.
Now, I have a comment or two to make about Dell's build quality to start with. First off, what the hell is this. This case parts at the back and splits open. Convenient, perhaps, since there's no case side flapping about, but it makes accessing the drives at the front absolutely bloody impossible. Idiotic design, and whoever came up with it needs a good punch in the face. Secondly, although this is nothing to do with the build quality, this is a computer that had been in daily use for a good few years, aside from the past year or so. I can't for the life of me understand why it's so clean. There was barely a layer of dust in it. Weird! Anyway. I had a poke about, nothing obviously wrong, but the fact that when it's plugged in there wasn't so much as a light on on the case, I decided to check the PSU.
If you've never jumpstarted a PSU before, it's a very very simple process and, thankfully, it is safe. You need a PSU, a power supply, and a bent paperclip.
Basically, you plug the PSU in, take the paperclip, and connect the green wire (there's only one) to a black wire. If the PSU is alive and well and happy, then it'll flare up into life (or, rather, make a vague noise from the fan) and you know it's at least working. This one, I plugged it in and nothing. So, apparently dead. Thankfully I have my spare parts box (Duck One still serves a purpose under my desk aside from a footrest), so I tore him apart and tried out the PSU there too.
Again, dead. Well clearly this is nonsense, there is no way in hell that 2 PSU's are dead like that. I took them through to another room and tried it again, and both work fine. Confusing as hell, because I know the plug socket I was using works - my speakers are back in it now, and I'm fairly sure I can hear the music I'm playing.
So, after all this (and this took probably about an hour or so to do, between lugging the bits about and trying to coerce the PSU out of Duck One), I plug my dad's old PC into another socket, and it's still dead. I have absolutely no idea what's wrong with it. It worked fine the other day when I DBANed the bastard, but apparently I did more than just wipe the drive. I'm firmly of the opinion that this is a hardware fault, most likely the motherboard has just packed in. What I'm actually wondering is whether I have just, for the first time ever, actually killed a computer with ESD. I'm well aware that it's possible, and I took absolutely no precautions before tearing into either of the computers. But then, I generally never do, and with all the hardware work I've done over the years, I've never had a problem. Course, I can't actually diagnose this, and I think it's probably actually just died, but it's a fun thought.
So. I set out to export an iTunes library, and thus far I had torn 2 computers apart, killed one of them (probably both, I didn't even bother screwing stuff back down on Duck One), and got absolutely no closer to getting a working convertor for this bloody .xps file. Last resort is my old Acer laptop. This was my Windows 7 test platform, which I have used perhaps 4 or 5 times overall. Absolutely hate Win7, I really do. It'd be usable if there was a massive tick box somewhere which said 'Disable GUI', but sadly there's not, and the new taskbar and system tray are bloody awful. I stuck all my illegal versions of Able2Convert on my laptop, and shockingly enough not any of them work, and one in particular started trying to run all kinds of odd DLLs. Scary thing is that I did scan these files for viruses before running them, but I never trust .exe's anyway. The Acer was perhaps not the best choice in that regards too, since DBAN refuses to run on it, but I suppose there's no harm in going for a fifth install of Win7. I never use the sodding thing anyway.
After all this, I decide to simply google how to export a library from iTunes. Turns out if you highlight the contents and hit copy, you can paste it directly into an excel sheet.
Yeah. Fuck everything, ever.
The correct way to end a hard weekend :: 6/12/09 ~23:30
It's been a long day, so I might as well unwind in as unhealthy a way as I can. See you later.
Self indulgent nonsense :: 6/12/09 ~19:10
Today was really quite awful. I don't even really know why. I didn't sleep too well, then when I finally struggled out of bed I only had about 45 minutes to get ready and get out, as I said earlier, which meant I decided to forgo a shower for the sake of my wonderful post this morning. Not an idea I'm terribly happy about, since I've spent all day feeling pretty disgusting as a result. But then it was just downhill. Train was late, I got into town and had roughly 30 mins so I tried to get a little bit of christmas shopping done (I've finished it, but there are two people I still need to get a couple of little things for) - I rushed around a few places near work and found absolutely nothing, and was nearly late for work because of it. At work I was supposed to have my review done today, so they can tell me how fabulous I am at putting books in plastic bags for money. But that's been postponed to next week, meaning I spent 15 mins rushing about trying to find my manager so I could get the damn thing done for nothing. And on top of that, I got my break at 1:30, so I had a 4 hour block to work after it. I realise that everything I've mentioned is mind-numbingly petty and irrelevant, and none of it should really even begin to bother me. Particularly the break bit, when I worked in Borders my standard shift was 4 hours, lunch, 3 hours. In fact, when I started at my current job, I initially only did 4 hour shifts, and you don't get a break on those. But it just compounded the fact that today had been shit, more than anything else. I think I was just in a bad mood when I got up and never really shook it off, even til pretty much now.
I have much more ranting to do, but on reflection I'm going to leave it to a more private forum, lest this becomes Livejournal angst ridden rubbish. I'm sure I'll be embarrassed enough as soon as anyone else reads it.
In other irrelevant news, the third and last line of the Adidas Consortium City series got announce recently. More info Here at Hanon. I won't draw attention to any in particular, in all honesty I think the first line of the City series was the best, but this is better than the last one. The first one (which my UNDFTD's came from also had an awesome pair of Boston Supers by Bodega, and I did really like the Solebox Berlin's, even if they were bloody weird (plain black and white on the exterior, but an entirely different colourway on the inside. Pretty cool, but utterly pointless.). This third drop though, I quite like all of them except the Toyko's. The Toronto's I probably wouldn't bother with either, I have enough pairs of grey trainers. I do like the other two though. If only I had money.
Leaving work today was as awkward as expected. There were probably roughly 20 staff members in the shop when I left, and I had to gingerly wish them all a pleasant evening as I walked out. Do vaguely wish I'd stayed, I wouldn't mind a drink or two in a sociable environment. Still, uni course xmas night out this week, I'll have to wait til then.
Started reading Naive. Super today. It's really good. Haven't quite got into it yet (only maybe just over a quarter of the way through) but I like where it's going.
Seriously don't actually want to put this post up. It should be filed away somewhere under 'crap I should never have written, nevermind made public'. But what the hell.
Binky :: 6/12/09 ~10:05
Probably just a shortish update since it's 10am, I just got out of bed 5 mins ago and I have roughly 45 minutes before I need to leave for a day at work. Going to be an awkward evening when I leave work, as our staff night out is tonight, and I don't plan on attending. I used my familiar excuse of uni coursework (saying I have some due on Monday) which, while it isn't true, isn't really far from the truth either. I don't think anyone from work has found this page yet, so I can safely say that too without them all hating me! If anyone from work is reading this, then it's nothing personal, I just never attend work nights out. Not for the sake of being antisocial, but because I try awfully hard at work to appear sensible and at least mostly normal, and I don't want to lose that pretense so quickly. Maybe if I get kept on as a permanent employee. Oh, that and the one staff night out I have attended, a leaving night for someone back in Virgin, I got us all kicked out of the pub cause I was underage and had no ID, and was fairly drunk. Dunno why they booted us all out, rather than just me, but I felt somewhat awkward that night. To get back to the point though, it's awkward tonight because everyone is meeting at work at 6, which is when the shop closes, and also when I finish. So I'll probably have to wander past everyone on the way out, making excuses. Oh well.
I spent Friday in Edinburgh with Sarah, meeting Pixel and Nybble and Steven, and failing to see Jesus. My conclusion is that bunnies are pretty awesome, even if they would appear to be terrified of me. And even if I never caught a proper glimpse of a rabbit binkying (is that the conjugation?), it remains an awesome word. And I have finally found, in Nybble, a creature that eats faster than I do. It was a good day, Excel aside. I shall resist the urge to go on another rant about *spit* pivot tables.
I also finally managed to finish reading The Road, which has taken me since I think November 17th to read. Very good book, you can actually probably get through it in a couple of hours, I have no idea why it took me so long. But it did mean I had to update my now reading bit on my book page. Such laborious work.
I shall end with a short rant about customers in a shop in Glasgow at Christmas time. Yesterday I encountered what was perhaps the largest quantity of idiots I have had to deal with for quite some time. I got posed such trying questions as 'Do you sell blu-tak', 'Why are bibles not on the ground floor', a complaint because the coffee shop inside our shop had no free tables, and various other ridiculous questions. It very much vexes me how some people seem to honestly believe that their every thought and wish are of paramount importance to the whole world, and everything should be just as they expect it. These people are morons, and I have no idea how they survive. It's a bit of a shame that they do.
Oh, and an old guy touched my arm and then my waist. Not cool.
And Aileen, if you're reading this - a woman sat next to me on the train to Edinburgh, and started eating a tangerine. I thought it was hilarious, and you ought to know.
Top
Forgot to say. Main Source have got a restock of the Adidas x Sneakersnstuff Consortium Stockholm's from the City series. Someone buy me them, as I am broke :(
Far too many things I want to buy floating about at the mo. I need another source of income.
Jimmy Eat World - If You Don't, Don't
what to do in the interwebs :: 3/12/09 ~18:00
I dunno if anyone else finds this to be a regular problem, but I certainly do. Is it just me, or is the internet actually bloody boring? I'm very grateful for this website now, because frankly I'm spending time updating this or dealing with shoes for this which is time I'd usually be spending sitting staring at nothing, constantly refreshing the forums I use to see if anyone's posted anything new in the last 30 seconds.
Aside from that though, I find the internet really limited in holding my attention. I talk to people online all the time, that's probably where the vast, vast majority of my time spent online actually goes, and I do check the BBC football page and Glasgow news page repeatedly throughout the day. But that's it! Once I've done all that, I'm left either browsing last.fm or amazon to find CDs or DVDs I can't afford to buy, or looking at shoes online. Which I can't afford to buy either. And then I'm down to really scraping the barrel, that's when I start hitting random articles on wikipedia or checking my fantasy football teams. I also do usually check the sites I've got listed in the top part of my links page around once a day, but after that, it's all downhill.
Perhaps I should read or study more.
Just a couple of other things. Went to the Apple store today to investigate the possibility of a repair. Sadly my iPod is out of warranty now, so it'll cost me roughly 80 quid to get it fixed. Going to give AppleCare a call over the next day or so just to confirm it with them, but that's a bit of a pain in the arse. Still, it's better than buying a new one for 200 odd quid. Plus, my girlfriend bought me this one and being the sentimental fool I am, I'm rather unwilling to part with it.
Also, is it just me, or do other people have favourite words? I think it's rather unfortunate that all the awesome words in the English language have bad meanings. Asphyxiation, immolate, saturnine, those words are excellent, but they're hardly positive ones. Oh well.
Finally, more site tech nonsense. I've started to archive old posts, a link can be found at the bottom of the page, plus I've put a timestamp on the RSS feed.
Calle 13 & Mala Rodriguez - Mala Suerta Con El 13
A day in the life :: 3/12/09 ~00:30
I feel the need to share this image with the world. This is the current state of my room and desk.
Okay, well, I'm going to begin with the less obvious part. Which is yeah, my room and desk are a complete mess, and it's REALLY bothering me. I'm generally not that untidy a person in all honesty, this is the only part of my room which is a complete tip, and I need to get time to fix it. So yes, enough about that, and on to the point.
Four computers switched on. My PC, 2 laptops, and my dad's old PC. Plus the rotting hulk of Duck One hidden under my desk. This is what I do, quite often. It's pretty geektastic, and I'm equal parts proud to be quite this lame, and embarrassed. Primarily I'm a bit ashamed of the ridiculous electricity consumption, for which I do actually feel a bit guilty. But each of these systems has it's own purpose!
So anyway, I have time to kill while DBAN runs. Quite a lot, in fact. When I started DBAN, it told me it'd take roughly 90 minutes. I'm now 1 hour and 32 mins in, and it says I have 27 minutes remaining. And after this I still have to install an OS, but I really doubt I'll do that tonight, it's already way too late.
*Hey, look at that, I remembered to put in my note this time. I had, for many a year, always bought pre-built PCs, usually from Dell. Well, aside from laptops actually, exclusively from Dell. Customer loyalty and all that, I dunno. Anyway, I spent a year working on hardware (mostly servers, but a few desktops), I realised just how simple it is to build your own PC. I absolutely hate analogies, but to put it bluntly, building a PC is like piecing together a jigsaw. There's no real technical knowledge needed short of knowing what part is what and how they connect together. Very easy to do, the most complex bits are making sure the motherboard is connected to the case properly (and I mean in terms of cables, not screwing the thing down). And even that is very straightforward, the only issue is how fiddly the tiny connectors can be. So, basically, I would recommend to anyone that you build your own PC for 2 main reasons: firstly, it's far far cheaper, and secondly, you get experience in fiddling with computers, and when something breaks in a computer, hardware wise, it's nice to know how to deal with it. In general hardware stuff is easy to deal with. I never found the basic hardware stuff hard in my job, the problems were when a pre-release server had dodgy firmware which caused banks of ram to fail for no reason. So yeah. Build your own computer.
So yeah. This is a truly sad insight into my life, because this isn't a particularly uncommon occurance. I do enjoy toying with computers, I have no issues with breaking them and trying to fix them up again, or with installing OS's just to give them a spin. It's all good fun.
Tomorrow ought to be a good day. Aside from a quick jaunt to the Apple store for them to see if there's anything they can do for my poor iPod (although if they want me to hang around and wait for an appointment then...no, I'll be back next week for that thanks), I have a lab in the morning with the software I rambled about last night, which ought to be a breeze from the fact that I spent half a year fighting with that thing. I do have another lab for that stats class though, which I need to attend because we're getting details on the proper final assigment from it, but after that I'll be playing squash! I need to blog about squash at some point. I'd played it I think twice before this semester, I didn't realise how fun it can be. And how exhausting. Anyway that's for another pointless rambling post some other time.
As with last night, the song is a lie. My speakers are unplugged, so I'm listening to nothing. In fact it's quite embarrassing - I have a 6 plug strip on the floor beside me, to which all this stuff is connected, and my speakers are directly into the wall socket. However, when I put the 4th PC on the strip, it wouldn't boot up cause the thing was already pulling so much power for everything else. I've never had so much crap plugged into a power strip that something can't actually turn on cause of it. So speakers are lying on the floor and the other PC is in the wall. Hah. But yeah, go check out this song, it's awesome. One of very few songs from when I was a kid that I still like.
Deftones - Change (In The House of Flies)
Part 2 :: 2/12/09 ~18:20
Well, I'll get the site stuff out the way first. I will now be adding timestamps to blog posts before I submit them, so you can all know exactly where I was and when. Additionally I've added a date on the RSS feed. Also, perhaps more importantly, the email address at the bottom of these pages finally works. Finally, I'm adding date stamps on new posts in music and books too, although I'll probably highlight them in here anyway.
A few points left unmentioned from last night. Well, only one thing in particular - I left an asterisk by pivot tables with the expressed purpose of leaving a note on them, which I promptly forgot to do. So I'll have my moan now. Whoever invented them is a ridiculous waster who deserves to spend their life in a vacant, sealed room with endless overlapping recordings of Paris Hilton's voice being played at ear-bleeding volumes. Of course, I can understand the point of them, and in their own right they are very useful for data representation. Trouble is, I don't care about data representation in Excel. I don't care about Excel. At all. It pained me throughout university to have to use it, it caused me literally days of frustration with my final year project (although I'm the first to admit I'm partly to blame there, I chose to use it after all), and now I use it to make pivot tables. For those who don't know what one of these wonderful things are, I'm not going to explain it - trust me, you don't care.
Also, I must confess to having lied to you all - I'll be doing nothing shoe related on Friday, I'll be in Edinburgh. Monday then.
Today also marked the day that I can finally conclude that my iPod touch is dying. Briefly, I bought a pair of new headphones on Sunday, and the left ear was working intermittently. I took them back yesterday and exchanged them for another pair. Sound is still intermittent on the left ear. Basically if any pressure is placed on the headphone jack at all, the left ear cuts out, so the connector inside my iPod is knackered. I'll be jumping into the Apple store tomorrow to have a quick word and ask if there's anything they can do to resolve this, but I highly doubt they can; I expect it's new iPod time. I'm faintly toying with the idea of chucking my phone and getting an iPhone instead - after all, even if it costs me to buy out my contract and sign a new one, it's not gonna cost me a lot more than a new iPod. But then, given that my long term plans have me (hopefully) working in the US before the end of 2010 permanently (or at least as a contractor for a year at the very minimum), is there any point in getting a new contract phone? Probably not. More pertinently, can I afford either? No. My iPod does still work, just only to a certain degree. So I guess it could really be worse, at least it's still usable. Still, it's a pain in the arse.
Uni was a bit odd today, the lecture this morning was interesting but short, the work in the lab following was a tiresome chore (although saved by Maru the cat), the lecture was hilarious but only because hangman took an extremely...interesting course, which has resulted in my notebook containing some 'artwork' which, well, I don't even know where to begin about it. Phallic is a good general term.
Now, I need to do uni stuff. I have to try to find a copy of the software I was talking about in my last post and upload it for the guys in my uni course, since our lecturer has yet to do so, and the version I uploaded last night has seemingly not got the installation scripts with it. Hope I can find the sodding thing. I also need to attempt a disk of an old OS that I need for uni, which is not where I thought it was. Overall, today has not been terribly successful. And it's probably downhill from here.
Also, I have stolen my 'monthly top 10 albums' bit from my last.fm page and it's living in the Music page here now.
Blogging instead of sleeping :: 2/12/09
Hah, mince. Stupid word. I cannot sleep, and I don't want to open my laptop and sign onto MSN or AIM because I don't want to start talking to people and get stuck up for another hour. I hate not being able to sleep, there's nothing worse than lying in bed and thinking about pointless nonsense when all you actually want to do is sleep. I've spent the last 30 minutes lying in bed racking my brain trying to pin down the source of a slight concern I had with a piece of software that was talked about in my lecture this morning at uni. And after finally realising what it was, I jumped out of bed to post on my uni forums and let everyone know, since we're meant to be using it. Exciting stuff to keep me awake for sure.
It's december now, which means it's officially winter! I celebrated this fact by actually wearing a scarf and proper gloves, instead of wearing fingerless gloves and complaining about the cold a lot. Well, I still complained about the cold a lot, but at least it was justified complaining, not just my standard whining. I have a feeling tomorrow is going to be a pretty terrible day. I have a 2 hour lecture in the morning which I'm thoroughly unprepared for, not least because it requires me to have read a chapter of a book that I've still not bothered to buy, followed by an hour off which will be spent doing a statistics lab with the wonders of Excel and pivot tables*, then an hour lecture in that stats class (admittedly not so bad because doubtless it will be spent playing hangman, as is the norm for that class now. Not quite the same as the elaborate game of Battleships my friend Elliot and I managed to concoct using notebooks and paper, but still fun). After that I have another 2 hour lecture which will probably not be too bad really, and I'm quite hopeful it won't go on for the full 2 hours. It's a new class that we're starting for next semester, the basic premise of it is we're split into teams of 3 and each team has to perform a 'crime' on a computer, and then try to cover it up as best we can. Then we analyse another team's 'crime' and try to uncover it, and it all ends up with a mock trial where we have to take the stand as expert witnesses. Sounds pretty awesome, frankly, and I'm looking forward to it, but I have a few wee reservations about it. But yeah, tomorrow is a pretty full laborious day. Add to that the fact that the high temperature is meant to be 7 celsius, and it's just a bit more rubbish too.
Anyway, enough drivel. I'm hoping to get a bit of time this Friday to get a bit more work done on the shoes page, it's quite hard to find the time for that at the moment. I've also updated the about page so I have a permanent record for the RSS feed url. I've been updating this blog a lot more than I had expected, although I sense it's likely to be the usual thing of starting something new, before too long the posts will go from daily to weekly to monthly, and then I'll check this site in 2013 and go 'What? Idiot.'. But in order to keep this page reasonably clear, I'm going to start archiving posts in a while. I know you care so much about it.
The song for this post is a lie, it's quarter to one and I'm listening to nothing. It's just a very good song and everyone should know that.
The Stone Roses - Love Spreads
Uni, textual analysis and haddocks :: 1/12/09
Was in uni today for a single lecture, which turned out being on the subject of linguistic analysis, with a vague amount of emphasis on detection of authorship. Amused me somewhat, since that's what my final year project entirely focussed on. It's quite an interesting subject, but to be brief, it's bloody impossible. Certainly I came across problem after problem with regards to how to actually do it; the primary issue is that, to compare a piece of text, you need something to compare it to. Now, take this website for example, this is a good slab of text written by me. Compare this against say, something like my MSN conversations, and will you get a good result? Well, no. It depends. I talk to everyone in a slightly different way, for example I talk to people I know from work in a far different manner than I talk to my girlfriend. As a result, in all reality, the analysis generates disparate nonsense, there's almost nothing that can tie an author to a text unless they've repeatedly written on a specific issue which requires a fair amount of repetition of keywords. Keywords are always fun, especially in the field of linguistics, when paraphrasing just ruins it all.
I played badminton today, as has been the habit of late. It was fun, and I hurt.
In other news, I've added an RSS feed to my page, after being inundated with requests for one (okay, one person asked).
Top
Spent a long, long time today starting to put the shoe page together. I've got I think 16 pairs up now, so feel free to check that out. The grid looks a bit wonky at the moment, because my placeholder image is a tiny bit smaller than the thumbnails I'm using. Perhaps I should have done a table after all instead of faffing about with non breaking spaces. Still, not gonna change the layout now. Done for tonight too, there's only so much I can do with my camera, once it starts to get dark the photos become really terrible. And yeah, I'm aware they're not that hot to start with, but I'm not a photographer :P.
Progress was also somewhat impeded by my cat deciding to try to sleep in the spot where I've been taking photos. I picked him up to remove him, and he graciously bit my face. Which is sadly not a particularly uncommon occurance with him, he gets angry.
On the subject of shoes, looking at the latest Hanon newsletter. I really fancy the Nike Air Max 90 Huarache's they just dropped, although at 95 quid I'm really grateful they sold out in my size before I'd even checked them out.
Otherwise it's been a pretty unproductive day, and I've got a ton of reading to do for uni at some point before wednesday morning. So I guess I'd best get on that.
Agalloch - The Hawthorne Passage
Site edits and random nonsense :: 29/11/09
Well, the first thing I plan on changing about this blog overall is that I'll try to stop starting sentences with 'So' quite so much. I have a few words that I use with ridiculous frequency (So, anyway, frankly, clearly), and I do not know why.
In other news, I might have suffered from iPod death this evening. I have a terrible knack of breaking in-ear headphones, it's usually only a matter of months before the left ear stops working for me, most likely due to how I coil the cable round my ipod, but I dunno. Regardless, the last week or so the left earphone had been acting up, and then last night I lost the little rubber cover bit from the left one, so I opted to buy another pair. Now, either I have tremendously bad luck and the new pair I bought also has a broken left ear straight out the box, or the internal connector on my iPod is dodgy. I'm really hoping for the former, in which case I'll just get an exchange when I'm in town on Tuesday, but if it's my iPod, well that is just hellish. I have to face a 30 hour wait at the Apple store in town for them to tell me that it's broken and there's nothing they can do, followed by me having to buy a new one. Although if it is actually broken beyond repair, I am somewhat tempted to look into buying out my O2 phone contract and getting an iPhone instead. I'll have to test tonight to see if it's the headphones or the iPod that's broken first though.
And to annoy me today, there's this in the news today. I genuinely hate this country sometimes, people come up with such absolute reactionary nonsense, and absolutely everyone is apparently a paedophile until proven otherwise. Bloody ridiculous.
Finally, email is still not working. As opposed to being screamed at for DNS not being resolved, now my domain is flat out refusing replies. Will have a word with my hosting people and see if I can get that resolved.
An edit at 1:30am! First pair of shoes have been added, a very old pair of Nike Shox, just to test the layout etc.
Woo! :: 28/11/09
We are LIIIIVEE!
Motion City Soundtrack - L.G. Fuad
Practical Science -
As I'm sure everyone is aware, keyboards are disgusting. They get covered with dirt and dust and whatever else, if you eat near them then that's a whole extra dimension of disgustingness in underneath those keys.
From that picture you can't clearly see how dirty it is, and for that you ought to be grateful.
So, here he is about to get a bath!
And upon removal from the dishwasher:
So, this keyboard has been forcefully cleaned by heat and water. The question that this experiment is simply trying to answer: will a keyboard still work if you wash it in the dishwasher?
The answer? Nope. A million times nope. I can't say what caused the damage, whether it was the water or the heat, but it's pretty damn destroyed. Quite interesting to see what actually happened, I plan on taking it apart soon and seeing if there's any physical damage. I plugged it into the computer, no errors etc. But it was totally haywire; it was basically detecting keystrokes where there weren't any (right clicking on the desktop was fun, watching the highlighted option scrolling up then down in random directions). start+m, which by default should minimize all windows, opened up the Mail client (which I think is start+ctrl+m?) and start+d did all kinds of bad stuff. If I selected a file on my desktop, there was no unselecting it - actually on reflection, i'm fairly sure that the left ctrl key got knackered and was acting as if it was permanently held down.
Top
Few changes made, shoe page completely redone with a placeholder image until I can get my thumbnails sorted. Vague concern about loading 48 150x150 thumbnails at once, given that I state in my about page that I really wanted to keep this site pretty minimal, graphically, but what'cha gonna do. Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:
HELLO I AM AN EDITED OUT EMAIL ADDRESS SO I DON'T GET SPAMMED
Technical details of permanent failure:
So yeah, that's a bit infuriating. But having said that, until the IPs get resolved for DNS this site isn't strictly speaking live either, in fact the only people who can read this are people I've given the temp URL to. You guys are my beta testers, enjoy it. So any issues/typos, let me know. Complaints, don't bother, I know you'll all hate this :).
Also, I'm aware that the link bar at the top will sometimes shift slightly when you click certain links. That's HTML for you, there's not a whole lot I can do about it, I believe it's something related to how it parses when there's embedded images on the page (in other words every page except home and links should have a degree of shifting now, I think). I can live with it, so you can too.
An edit! After checking the site on my macbook, this post actually could use a return to top link, haha. Awesome. Also I'm aware that the links page needs a bit more on it, hence the stupid stuff like the wikipedia link. I just can't think of much else of use to put on there for now, feel free to recommend stuff to me.
Motion City Soundtrack - Indoor Living
#2 :: 26/11/09
Two posts and my website isn't even live yet. I know, but seriously, I need to flesh this thing out at least a little. I had planned on not going live on this for quite a while yet, I had wanted to populate my shoe page first! But that involves multiple photos of 50ish pairs of trainers, and frankly I'm gonna delay on that bit for as long as I can.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor - East Hastings
okay, so. :: 26/11/09
This is a blog! I guess. I don't really know what I'll do with this website in the end. I've left it very bare for the moment, but I'll consider adding extra functionality here and there as it's needed. So perhaps one day there'll be a search bar and comments. But I'll hold off til it's, y'know, worthwhile.
So, what is there to say? I'll be using this site to discuss stuff, haha. Imaginative and novel stuff right here. I'll be rambling on about what music I think is awesome over here, I'll be talking nonsense about books over there. I'll post info about and photos of my shoes here, although I know none of you care too much about that, it's more for my own fun that bit. I guess the whole site is really.DiskDigger
PC Inspector File Recovery
Recuva
Runtime's Data Recovery Software
Diskinternals Uneraser
Results!
category: site tech/random
category: random
Properly back to normal :: 13/01/10 ~02:10
category: random
John Campbell's Pictures For Sad Children
category: random
category: random
category: tech
category: random
category: uni/random
category: music/tech
category: random
Updated the music page. Exciting times.
category: random
category: random
I won't go into detail about the restaurant here, simply because I don't particularly want to in this post; perhaps another time I'll actually write about restaurants I like. It won't take too long. But I'd definitely recommend it if you've got the option to go there, and you enjoy eating cows.
category: random
I'll probably be updating this very infrequently, possibly not even at all over the coming few weeks while Sarah is here, since generally when she's here I have better things to do than sit at my computer half the day. Plus I have an exam on Jan 5th, which I really ought to start looking at my notes for. So this short post is quite possibly the last I'll make until early next year, unless something happens that I quite simply need to tell to the three people who read this. Quite unlikely.
category: random
category: random
Occasionally, I feel like my blog posts ought to have a point. This one does not. :: 10/12/09 ~00:45
category: random
category: random
category: random
Exporting an iTunes library and jumpstarting a PSU :: 7/12/09 ~12:40
category: technical misadventure
Now, this goes back slightly to the problem I encountered when I first set up that computer on the floor: 2 wall plugs. One wall plug has my speakers, the other has a 6 plug powerstrip, which has my pc, my monitor, my macbook, phone charger, my wee fan heater and a spare plug which i alternate between whichever of my other laptops is being used at the time. I tried various methods of plugging stuff in to try to get that old PC to turn on, but I just seemed to be drawing too much power. Basically, the old PC just wouldn't power on, even when I directly plugged it in to the wall. So, investigation begins!
So, the PSU is fine. I connected everything back up, and took it through to another socket to test it in there (although not before taking a photo of the scene:)
category: liver mutilation
category: random/fashion
category: random
PS :: 3/12/09 ~18:30
category: fashion
Images taken from Main Source
category: random
I'm quite fond of Mousebreaker as a good way to kill a few mins with some pointless Flash games, and over the last 4/5 days I've been playing on iSketch, which is basically an online pictionary thing. Its good fun but I don't particularly like playing on my own with randoms, I like playing with people I know. But other than that, there's not much that I tend to do regularly online, despite the fact that probably about 75% of my life is spent sitting behind a screen (or four).
I do read a few webcomics, but that's turned into something more of habit now than enjoyment. Questionablecontent is the only one I read which has a decent and entertaining storyline with good characters. Qwantz, Pictures For Sad Children and XKCD are all sketches, which are amusing/strange/clever (delete as applicable), and Ctrl Alt Del is entirely out of habit that I read it, since it's been absolutely rubbish for about 2 years now. Although on the subject of webcomics, I do feel the need to post today's update of Pictures For Sad Children, because I found it hilarious.
Pictures For Sad Children by John Campbell
category: random
The PC, well, that's my PC. It is pretty much running 24/7. I do all my uni work on that, I do all the stuff for this website on it, I do all my technical stuff on it. I do use the terminal on my macbook when required, but I'd much rather use Putty and WinSCP on my desktop for remote stuff. And also, as can be seen, Steam lives on my desktop.
Then there's my macbook pro, which is shiny and delightful, even if Chrome still doesn't properly exist for it. It's my casual computer, I use it to the height of it's power and abilities - generally, for MSN, AIM and net browsing. I will occasionally embark on a bit of scripting on it, and I do like using it to poke holes in my network (Windows can try to make their networking as simple as they like, but nothing will ever beat the command line for it). But pretty much it is thoroughly underused.
The second laptop, that's my very very very old Dell, which is sitting on top of my old Acer. It's being used currently for uni work, to set up a few types of server to test stuff out.
The PC on the floor, that's my dad's old PC. Frankly it's the reason I'm writing this after midnight when I'd much rather be in bed - I'm giving it a good beating with DBAN, and then I need to reinstall Windows on it. Although, it is first going to be part of an experiment, which is what the USB thing and floppy disk on my desk are there for - I'm going to give Menuet a go on it. Menuet is basically an extremely compact OS, which has been hand coded in assembler. And frankly that absolutely astounds me! I couldn't code a print statement in assembler, nevermind a whole, functional operating system. And so small that it can fit on a floppy disk?! I need to see what it is capable of. Sadly however, that's the catalyst for working on my dad's old PC, which has been dead for months. I might have a PC and 3 laptops that are functional in here, but not a single floppy drive in sight. In fact, I'm quite surprised I even have disks still floating about. But it's gonna get a go, cause I wanna see just what this wee thing can do and how it runs. The PC is nothing special at all, if I remember rightly is a 2ghz pentium 4 single core processor, I think there's a gig of ram in it, and a 40gb hard drive. It's an old Dell pre-built system*. So it should run it quite well, I should hope. I'm mostly curious about compatability really, I think. We'll see.
category: random/site tech
Today they caused even more suffering too, as Excel stubbornly refused to create one for about 5 minutes when I was giving it all the correct information. Then, randomly, I tried it again and it worked. No reason for it whatsoever, nothing had changed. I don't understand it at all, it makes no sense. I detest Excel.
I think the most important thing I learned today however, is that people should not turn at unexpected angles when being poked.
We need to commit a 'crime' for one of our classes, involving the illegal sharing of MP3s. I will have fun trying to kill the computers with my iTunes library.
I think that's it for now. I'll post whatever I've forgotten to say later.
category: mince
Also, email address at the bottom of the page still doesn't work yet. Dealing with it slowly.
category: school/site tech
My project was reasonably successful in the end, and certainly quite interesting. I had a massive amount of texts from Project Gutenberg and I wrote an algorithm to scale and rate each text, then a database for comparison. It was very rare that it matched an author to a title, although it did match authors quite well. That's probably a bit contradictory; to explain, there were actually 2 databases - one was of individual texts, one was of authors. The test text was usually a piece of a text, anything from 20 lines or so to 3/4 of the whole thing. Generally speaking unless there was a very very high volume of the original text given to the system for analysis it'd pretty much never match the inputted text to the correct one from the database, but it wasn't bad at getting the author as one of the top 5 best fits. Again, perhaps contradictory in terms of what I said at the start of this post, but my dataset was insignificantly small in comparison to what it could have been, and also this was using (generally) at least 5 full texts per author - that's a really huge amount of words, and you don't get that kind of luxury when you're examining emails or chat logs.
Still, fun though.
Feed URL is http://www.jasoned.co.uk/feed.xml. To tie in nicely with the rest of my wonderful site, I have not formatted it at all.
Updates, shoes and assaults :: 30/11/09
category: random/site tech/fashion
Image taken from Hanon
I'm planning on tearing that old keyboard I killed apart sometime very soon, to see if there's any obvious physical damage to it or not. I don't expect to see anything, but it'll be fun all the same, so I might stick up a post about that sometime later.
The destruction of that keyboard has caused me somewhat more pain than I'd anticipated, due to the fact that my new keyboard has a really weird layout. It doesnt have the section towards with right with the arrow keys and the 3x2 block with home/end/delete etc, instead it's a compact one and I keep having to look for delete, or hitting the wrong keys. Argh. This will take some getting used to. And I should have ordered a US layout one too, damn.
category: random
Edited the layout of the books page, firstly to slim down the image size of the cover of whatever book I'm talking about, and to bring the layout into line with music, which I reckon is way better.
Also, I have the day off tomorrow so I'm going to start populating the shoe page. I need to take a massive stack of photos and it will be a slow process, but I've got nothing else to do tomorrow, so hopefully the bulk of the day will be doing that, listening to music and playing my bass. A good day!
category: site techDestroyingCleaning a Keyboard :: 28/11/09
category: SCIENCE!
My current keyboard is some generic PCLine thing I got for a fiver out of Dixons about a year ago. I've always bought cheap keyboards; they work, they're always durable, and I have no need for a massive array of media buttons and the like to hit by accident. Don't get me started on my Acer laptop's additional buttons. Anyway, this keyboard lives by my desk, which is also where I tend to eat. Here he is, having a good day:
So, in the name of science, I am going to clean this. How? Not by your usual methods of turning it upside down and firing compressed air through it. I shall clean this thoroughly in the dishwasher.
So, all in all, a success! Except for my keyboard is broken.
edits and stuff :: 27/11/09
category: site tech
At the moment the email address at the bottom doesn't work; waiting on DNS to resolve it I guess, since I can email out from the account, but sending will hit you with this:
DNS Error: DNS server returned answer with no data
DNS resolution takes between 24-48 hours regularly, so since I got this stuff underway last night at probably around this time, I'm hoping by this time tomorrow (or really sometime during the day tomorrow) that this is actually gonna go live on the proper URL. If not, I'll be firing off an email to tech support.
Did toy with the idea of hosting this locally actually, given that I have a computer sitting switched off right beside my feet which would be more than adequate. Actually kinda wish I'd thought of that earlier. Although that does mean a computer that I can't turn off, even when Sarah is staying over, unless I want my site to go down. So maybe not such a bad thing. Oh who cares.
Spent an unreasonable amount of time fiddling with tags and BR tags to get that shoe page layout looking half decent. 5 images per row works quite nicely, although given the resolutions most people use these days I could probably have gone further.
Out of interest, I've designed this site on Chrome using 1680x1050 resolution, so I imagine that's what it's gonna look best on. I've not even bothered to check it on FF or IE, or on my laptop yet.
Also, added tags at the bottom of each subsequent blog post to return to the top of the page. Not gonna bother putting one on the most recent post until I actually type something that's long enough to require me to scroll down.
Also the content on the books and music pages at the moment I'll probably actually delete quite soon, it was pretty much an experiment so I could see how it looks.
category: random
So. I've decided to stick in a couple of additional little bits of info. I'm putting a category on blog posts - not to link them together, but frankly so you know whether you'll find it tedious or not. In other words, if you see 'category: fashion' or 'category: trainers', you're pretty much safe to stop reading at that. I might alter the layout a bit to make it a little more, I dunno, not rubbish. But for now it'll do. I've also added a line at the end of what I'm listening to, even though you can find my last.fm on my links page, just because I want everyone to care about what I'm playing. Tracks are linked to last.fm, partly cause some of them are there on the site in their entirety. Enjoy.
category: random
Might be a long time.
On top of that, I'll be using this main bit to talk about uni stuff to a degree (albeit a very slim one, given that I have around 5 months or so left of my postgrad then I'm done). I'll post about general stuff in here, including music, books and fashion stuff; I'd quite like to keep the separate pages pretty narrow in scope.
And yeah, that's pretty much it. Feel free to drop me an email, I'll reply if it's not abusive and I can be bothered.
Check out the about page for a vague slither of extra info on me and this site. Very, very vague.
All content belongs to me unless stated otherwise, and if
you use it without my permission, I'll set my cat on you.
jason at jasoned dot co dot uk