Zorac's LiveJournal

"Microsoft is working with Ford Motor Co. towards car that can't crash."

Am I the only person who finds this both amusing and terrifying? Apparently not. But seriously, this is a company whose flagship product is well known for its ability to ... er ... lock up (oops. That's not much better a thing for a car to do...)

Old gag: If Microsoft finally manage to make a product that doesn't suck, it'll be vacuum cleaner.

1. Four day weekends are good. Especially when they cause a pair of four day weeks.
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4. I've just finished reading Peter F. Hamilton's latest science fiction epic, ( Collapse )
5. GIP! Yes, I have been known to perve over Nala at this particular moment in The Lion King. What about this surprises you?

Ever wanted to learn how to speak 1337?

Micrsoft tells you how!

Yes, I am slightly disturbed by how well-written that article is. Gacked from Slashdot.

The rumors were true :)

OMGWANTZLEIKNOW!

If you need me, I'll be in the corner, drooling.

So, on Friday night I decided to reinstall Windows on zorac, on the grounds of it having developed a tendency to lock up of late. ( Collapse ) Having done all that, you can imagine my delight to discover that XP is still subject to random lock-ups. *stabs*

Last night, the gale-force winds managed to give me a nice little power-outage. Initially, all seemed well, until later in the evening visar (and thus my Internet connection) died. A post-mortem this morning revealed a dead power-supply as the culprit, and given that it was the one thing not on a surge protector... This afternoon I popped into PC World to pick up a new case and another surge protector ( Collapse ) I had something that worked, in a Frankenstein's monster kind of way.

All that really got in the way of me getting anything much else done (other than shopping trips), so my evil plans to take over the_restricted appear to have been thwarted yet again. Wah.

So, I had that strange feeling that something wasn't quite right on the way to work this morning. Come lunchtime, I figured out what it was - the missing weight of my bag on my shoulder. No bag = no wallet, no wallet = no way to buy lunch. Thankfully, I have a well-stocked snack drawer in my desk. Even less fortunately, my web browser had a tasty meal of freshly prepared LiveJournal posting. Meaning I'm retyping the whole blasted thing now.
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The rebuild of Visar into its dinky new case is finished for now. I finally gave up on trying to get the PCI ADSL card working last night and fell back to the USB modem I was using before - and which I had working in ten minutes flat. Meh. At least I have my routing an firewall all working again. Currently it's running Red Hat 9, although I'm leaning towards putting Debian on there, but probably not until Sarge goes stable. I guess this means that I can go back to software rather than hardware hacking this evening...

Last night I t00bed into Oxford to meet up with jiggery_pokery who was passing through. It gave us chance to catch up and gossip about other t00bs. Also, an excuse to go to G&D's for ice-cream. (Note to self: excuses not actually needed)

Today, most of the bits for New!Visar arrived, so I attempted the transplant operation. Unfortunately, all did not go well - it showed no inclination to boot off the old disk, and getting into rescue mode merely showed up some more funnies. Final score: Video BIOS: Lots, zorac: 0. Bleh, will do some research and try again on Monday.

Tomorrow, in a massive feat of coincidence, both hermorrine and I are off to places called Springfield. She to the one in Illinois to visit the new twins, and I to one somewhat closer to home for a t00bage. Neither of them is populated by bright yellow cartoon characters (OK, I don't know that for sure, but I reckon it's a fairly safe bet).

Of course, what I neglected to mention earlier was the death of Visar, my Linux box under the sink. I got home to find no Internet connection and a strange silence in the kitchen. My initial diagnosis is a dead PSU, but it could be the motherboard, Hopefully I can borrow a spare power supply from work tomorrow to test my theory and get things up and running again. For the time being, the ADSL modem is hooked up to Zorac the Windows XP box, and I even have the internet connection sharing working for the benefit of (no-name) the iBook, but it's far from an ideal long-term solution - plus there's all sorts of stuff on Visar's disks that I want to retrieve.

Anyway, time to stop spamming my friendspage and go to bed. OK, so I ended up not posting until this morning, due to LJ being DDoSed. Meh.

"Surround sound is going to be increasingly important in future offices" - yeah, right. That's going to work really well when every desk in an open-plan layout has it's own set of 5.1 speakers. Plus they're suggesting that we'll all be using emailed audio and video for intra-office communications - have they never heard of the telephone (or even Voice Over IP), heaven forbid anyone actually walk across the room and actually talk to someone. Read the full article for further examples of Microsoft Deeply Not Getting It.