RIP my original* Game Boy, 1996(?)-2005

*Actually it is my second. I got my first for Christmas, but we took it back a few days later to get this one because it had Super Mario Land 1 & 2 with it



A cat. On an amp.

Hooray! Sonalysts have released another of their deliciously anal (no, not that meaning) naval sims. FFG-83! MH-63! 668i! I'm in navy geek heaven.

Incidentally, I saw Stephen Fry coming out of the Forum t'other day. As he passed, I heard him say in that unmistakable voice: "David Walliams and Matt Lucas, you know." Apparantely seeing him is a common occurance, but I've never seen him before. It was quite exciting.

SO HERE IT IS

DURRANT'S UPDATE

EVERYBODY'S HAVING FUN (possibly)

Uhm well I did end up going to the PC World sale, and picked up two nice bargains. Firstly, that 512MB of RAM, bringing my total to 1GB. Which is nice and makes games go good. I remember when my hard drive was 2GB. Tcha. Kids today. Know not if they are born.
Secondly, for some reason they were selling a wireless router and wireless laptop PC card for £30 or something, two day offer. I bought one. Bargain. Exciting embedded device set-up later (it's so cool, like something out of a film, plugging a laptop in with an ethernet cable, going to the IP, typing lists of numbers in and clicking "VC" and "PPP over ATM"... well I found it cool), I have a proper wireless network now, not just a shifty ad-hoc one. No more trying your luck with unreliable ad-hoc (which never works half the time, and the other half kind of works but takes an hour to get it to work properly). And I can use the internet in the middle of the night without having to switch my PC on. And because I've put my router in the middle of the house, I can achieve the holy grail of wireless internet and get Google in the shed.

Which is nice.

And I don't need the Wireless Adapter for Notebook PC Card thingy, so I'll sell it on eBay. Ask if you are interested.

Also saw a third of Sin City this morning. Cracking stuff. They seem to have solved the problem of making a good comic book adaption - basically, adapt a comic book into a film, faithfully. Yes, that means using the original words. Yes, no adding of crap characters or taking away the good ones. No major plot changes. In fact, you shouldn't have any plot changes at all. Put in the bits the fans want to see. Don't have the main character take off his helmet.

Follow those rules and you come up with Sin City. It's simple and it rocks.

Oh ya, and it snowed.

So it appears I was slightly over-enthusiastic. It now seems likely that it was running as a Athlon 2200+ all along.
Oh well.

I also attempted to overclock my PC. Again. Don't bother. It didn't do much and I ended up wiping a bunch of DLLs, crippling Windows (although ironically Windows had no inkling that anything was wrong, and happily burbled on with its usual tasks while everything else silently failed in the background). For the first time ever I had to use System Restore, which thankfully I had turned on for some reason. It worked well. Three cheers for that.

So school ended, hooray. Mulled wine and mince pies, yay. Went bowling. I won. Natch.

Anyhow, my maw has had a Bad Back, so it was up to me to do some Christmas Shopping today. And what shopping I did. I wish I was getting a present from me.

For paw: a high quality, RRP £50-but-£20-off 4-CD box set of Acoustic Folk, with your Martin Carthy and Kathryn Tickell and Billy Bragg and Dave Swarbrick and the lovely Kate Rusby, and well yeah people you've never heard of but trust me, they're big names on the folk circuit.

For braw (who is now back from Cardiff): A extensive but bargainy poker kit thingy, with cards, chips, baize cloth thingy, etc. Poker is fun. But I must learn it.

For sistaw: some yoga kit. It's cool. It's pink. It has incense. How can it fail?

Furthermore: we all need to go see darling henner live at the Maddermarket. Organise something, Shaun.

Rove Implicated In Santa Identity Leak

WASHINGTON, DC—The recent leak revealing Santa Claus to be "your mommy and daddy" has been linked to President Bush's senior political adviser and deputy chief of staff Karl Rove.

If I've totally wiped my BIOS, tell my wife... hello.

(after the operation) Wow, I can't believe I didn't try this earlier. Five minutes ago, my processor was a humble Athlon XP 1800+. Now, it's a brand spanking ATHLON XP 2200+!!!1 Confused?

Well when I last upgraded my PC with a new motherboard and processor, I was confused that I thought I had a Athlon XP 2200+, but it showed up as a 1800+. I hypothesied that it was because my motherboard didn't support the higher speed, and was pleased to find a BIOS* update that would support the higher speed. However, having just got a new PC, I didn't want to screw it up with BIOS-related hard drive trauma.

Fast forward to now, where on a whim I decided to update my BIOS, without bothering to backup or anything. I just ran it and it did something. "Oh, well, here we go," said I, and restarted my PC. Huttah! My CPU was 400Mhz faster! Fuckah! I got that feeling that every true geek feels whenever she's gone too far - that feeling of your blood running cold, as you read the words "Hard drive must be formatted. Press any key." or "Memory on fire. Press enter." or in my case, "OS boot failure" or something. Luckily, I realised it was all down to the fact that my boot devices were configured wrongly. You see, HDD-0 was set up as the second boot device, when it should have been HDD-1, which has Windows on. A couple of CMOS changes later and I was on my way.

I can feel the speed difference already.

...You didn't understand any of that, did you?

*it is the computer equivalent of your mum waking you up and making you tea in the morning. updating the BIOS is the equivalent of having a Ferrari and exchanging your mum for Mika Häkkinen so you can get to school faster