> got into drum and bass / trance / post-rock / hip-hop / pop
> went to four fests: Ragnarok, Hellfest, Bloodstock, Heidenfest
> went to germany for the first and second times
> got my bassssssssss
> completed first year of college, 7 units of work complete
> did about half the work required on another 7 units
> applied for uni
> went to see UWE and Stafford unis, Stafford being the superior
> made probably a good 6 or so last.fm accounts
> lost a good friend to suicide (SILLY MAXFACE)
> completely dissasociated myself from a certain person \o/
> brought probably far too many albums and saw far too many bands
> stopped wearing only black (omg colourzzzzz)
> shaved off my beard only to grow it back straight away cause it was bloody cold otherwise

and now soon i won’t need this blog again \o/

and monday should at least be cheaper too, cause i don’t have first so it’ll only be like 3.40 or whatever ludicrious price is gonna be.

but more importantly, i actually somehow plucked up the courage to call up stafford and confirm my interview for the 24th of feb. which is actually amazing for me cause beyond mark and gemma (mainly gemma ;p) i have insane difficulty talking on the phone. never quite understood why (cause it’s irrational as hell) but i would actually quite happily walk through a mile of broken glass if it meant i didn’t have to take a phone call. oh well, tis done now \o/

hard drive errors made it stop working at all
tried transferring shit off
appeared to finally work after 3 days of transferring
reformatted
tried putting stuff back on
found basically all the files were fucked
found the hard drive was completely fucked
broke it out of the external, put it in the place of my CD drive, reformatted and partitioned dozens of times
put back in external enclosure
now have 200GB of the original 300GB space back \o/
lost pretty much everything that was on it but fuck it, i have over 200 albums that i own to tide me over until i can start to rebuild my collection.

no fucking hard drive of mine is gonna fail, silly bastard. you can’t die. that’d be easy.

i need to do a full writeup or something at some point, but it can be basically summed up by this.

reasons i like windows XP: my external hard drive actually works with it, thus i have my music and all my files.
reasons i like ubuntu 8.10: i can play fucking tetris while i scan the drive to see what the problem is.

So woo. Gotta wait for the one from stafford, and then i can decide which one. although the preference is obviously stafford cause the course is better, it’s cheaper and i liked the place more than UWE. hopefully they want the same amount of points too \o/

edit: just checked the Stafford undergraduate prospectus (i keep the UWE and Stafford prospectuses with me most of the time thesedays ;p) and it says the typical offer is 280 points, so yeah, just gotta wait for the offer ;D

so i shut down the computer, plug it all in (removing my second hard drive to do so) and oddly enough, it recognises it in the BIOS, but wouldn’t do shit with it normally. it just wouldn’t boot from it. even more oddly, it would completely negate any other drives plugged in; basically, if i had this plugged in, i couldn’t see my normal C:\ drive to boot from that. and no matter how many cable changes i tried, it wouldn’t work.

so i resolved to drag out my ubuntu disc. which i couldn’t get any result with. resigning the laptop drive to oblivion, i attempted to just put my normal drives back in and just go back to using my computer normally.

now this is the classic bit where the laws of causality fuck up; and they did quite rightly so. i could see both my drives again after plugging them both in within the BIOS, but in windows i couldn’t see my secondary drive. and ubuntu still refused to boot up. so after 20 minutes of basically nothing, i swapped out the ribbon cable with an unused one from my backup system and bam, things seemed to be alright. so i put in the adapter and laptop drive again, tried to boot it up – still the same negation of other drives, but it got to the stage of attempting to boot windows and dying. which is brilliant. form then on ubuntu stopped being a git, booted up, let me see the drive – all the data’s still there, which is what i wanted to know. just the windows folder is fucked or something.

after that success, i tried to boot up windows in my normal state with my two drives. and success, it worked again.

so from that 3 hours of nonsense i learned this: don’t try and do anything in my computer, LEAVE IT THE HELL ALONE. it’s too old to be reasonable anymore.

oh, and as of today i’m apparently employed. hell yeah getting paid to do CSS Stuff i need to practice and enjoy anyway ;p and it also means i’ll soon have a host, meaning that i can get my own blog with my own blog theme finally \o\ so that’s a good thing, yez.

lots and lots of work to do tomorrow and over the weekend for college.

believe i have just won the internets. again.

i’ve got an oldish laptop that was given to me (well not technically but they don’t really care what i do with it so whatever), because the screen is broken (something to do with the screen’s backlight as opposed to the VGA output – i forget the name of the part that’s in there that needs replacing but costs more than the laptop is probably work now anyway. so what do i do?

i remember most laptops since around 2005 have S-Video output. So i spent half an hour finding the S-Video cable that came with the graphics card in my computer, and bingo. I am now posting my parent’s TV in the lounge. which also has the advantage that i’m next to the router now, so wireless ACTUALLY WORKS. it only gets black and while, but i imagine if i tried it on my brother’s TV sometime, it’d actually be in colour since that’s LCD and thus can support a higher quality input.

i know it’s not really anything that amazing, but i enjoy doing frivilous little things like this that get some use out of otherwise useless old technology.

ultra short version: 1/3 – went to germany for heidenfest, took yonks to get there, germans are annoying, gemma and i are now engaged, manegarm are awesome, took yonks to get back. 3/3 – went to UWE for open day, did not like. too many people, too bloody big of a campus, costs both arms, legs, and whatever limbs you have going that they feel like having.

my back fucking hurts. headbanging is a stupid idea.