Boingy! Boingy! Boingy!

A sunny Mondya morning.. that sun sure helps getting up int he morning.

Anyway, quick resume of events so far in the previous episode of “Life”:-

Friday saw lots of little work jobs followed by re-installing ER Mapper on all the undergrad PCs all afternoon due to the clocks changing. (The time change causes the licensing software to think it’s been hacked.. the only way to get it working again is to uninstall, re-install and then call the manufacturer for a new license! Apparently this will be fixed in the next version.) Then the card swipe system stopped reading cards at 16:59, just too late to call out engineers.

I was, therefore, very glad of the nice social chat I had all evening as the dept’s “Happy Hour” extended ’til 20:45. T’was nice nattering with those two hippy 4th year undergrad women about life and stuff. (Before anyone asks, they’re both happily in stable relationships.) It meant, however, i got home too late to eat, so watched telly a bit then went to bed.

Saturday morning was a bit rushed as I needed to go and get the weekly shopping and then go to Sinoco to buy a DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive and memory for the Hartlands before zooming off to Hartley Wintney to visit Alec, getting there for midday.

Visiting Sinoco is always a deeply risky thing for me to do. It’s all too easy for me to get tempted by all those nice computer bits. Saturday’s visit was no exception.. I went in for the bits for the Hartlands and came out with not only those two items but an Athlon XP 1800+, heatsink/fan, motherboard and a case. Oh well.. I HAVE been thinking about upgrading my PIII 500MHz machine (or rather, cascading the guts down to my Dad to upgrade his system) for a while now since games on the Computer Shopper cover disk no-longer worked fully due to the machine being below minimum spec.

The fixing of Alec’s bike took rather less time than expected. From the description Alec gave me before I went it seemed to me that it was rusted solid and needed a rebuild. In fact, when I saw the machine all it needed was a good oil with 3-in-1 and a little gunge removing from the derailier cogs.

I had a very pleasant afternoon at Ramtops with Rachel, Graham and Christopher.. on and Fi who popped around. The flapjacks were most enjoyable as was the company. Oh, and the computer upgrade went well too, though we discovered there was no DVD playing software sold with the DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive.

Sunday started at about 9am.. though I woke up at 6:15am for some unknown reason. It’s not as if Alec’s spare bedroom is noisey. Had a nice quiet morning listening to the radio and then surveying Alec’s “front” garden before trundling home to watch the Grand Prix on telly.

The fact that I didn’t actually see much of the Grand Prix in the end (though I did hear it) was due to the drawn of those boxes sitting waiting for me in the living room. You can guess, can’t you? Yes.. I spent the afternoon building the new incarnation of my PC and gutting the old one. The only problem with this new case is that the holes for the 5.25″ drive bays don’t fit my old 5.25″ floppy drive so I couldn’t fit it. :-/

My good intensions about cutting the grass in the back garden and washing the car came to nought, as you might imagine when there’s the draw of technological tinkering. Oh well. 🙂

…and that brings us up to date.

This week’s excitement merely involves going out to an indian restaurant on Thursday night to celebrate 10 years working here in the dept. of Earth Sciences at the Univeristy of Oxford. It should be fun.

4 thoughts on “Boingy! Boingy! Boingy!

  1. The only problem with this new case is that the holes for the 5.25″ drive bays don’t fit my old 5.25″ floppy drive so I couldn’t fit it.

    Why on earth do you need a 5 1/4″ floppy in your main desktop PC? Do you not have a home network and secondary PC to house it like a normal geek? 😉

    • Of course I do, but this is the only one able to run M$ Windows, hence wanting the floppy on this machine to read my ancient floppies.

      For the record, my home network contains a server/gateway (Celeron 300A, 64MB RAM), “big” games machine, Sun SPARCstation 4, SS5 and a laptop for TV hacking. It’s a 10Base2 backbone with a 4-way 10baseT hub in the living room. The server and the SPARCstations are in the spare bedroom.

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