Showing posts with label holiday. Show all posts
Showing posts with label holiday. Show all posts

Sunday, January 9, 2011

The Return


I now am back at work, and my computer is finally back in the land of the living, and so I can actually make posts again.

Miss me?

Didn't think so.

Anyhoo, the last couple of weeks were interesting... and quite relaxing. A fair bit of nothing went on, though I did do some things.

Christmas Day was the usual shindig at my place. Family members I rarely see appeared, presents were exchanged, and food was eaten. Lots of food. Like, heaps.
The difference is that this (last I spose) year, the food needed to be gluten free so that I would be able to consume it without my insides melting.
This didn't change much. In fact, it was only my portion that was made gluten-free. So once we reached dessert time (after 3 courses of random meats, pasta and more meats), the true difficulty of my condition hit home.

Plaits of wheaty, pastryish goodness covered in syrup. Cake - lots of it, and many brands of ice cream are inedible to me. Luckily pavlova is fine. As a result, I lived off the pav :P

Post-Christmas, I headed to my girlfriend's place for a few days, where we whiled the hours away playing videogames, and preparing for our next Pathfinder session, and just generally bumming around doing very little. And yes, we did get another Pathfinder session in - quite a long one too, covering the most of a night (10pm to about 4am) and much of the next day (10am to about 3pm).

New Year's Eve was a trip to the zoo. I have ridiculous amounts of photos of the tiger (it wasn't asleep for once! Did I mention tigers are my favourite animal actually-in-existence?), as well as numerous photos of the elephants (the baby one was really cute!)

The night portion of NYE was spent playing Final Fantasy VII. I didn't expect this, but we were both exhausted from wandering around the zoo for the most of the day and couldn't be bothered to go out - nor would we have really been able to, considering that there would have been something like 325682476286784275903862 people there...

After that, I was forced to return home, since my parents had gone on holidays, and they didn't trust my younger siblings to look after the house (and the cat - they took the dog with them) on their own. During that few days I managed to reach level 81 in WoW (Dwarf Hunter on Draenor named Kalgar), and caught up with a few mates who I used to work at Maccas with (playing Mario Kart 64, no less!)

Come the 5th of January, my lady and I headed to the south coast for a few days of escapism from family, and general existence. We didn't do much because the weather was utterly schizophrenic, but we did manage to play some putt-putt, and burn ourselves horrendously at the beach.

We returned, relaxed a day, and are now both back at work.

Oh, and somewhere in there, I managed to finish Castlevania: Lords of Shadow. Good game, will talk more about that tomorrow.

Saturday, December 25, 2010

Dead PC

I was playing WoW the other day, when my PC decided that it would be a good idea to turn the screen mostly purple, and freeze.

Naturally, I was annoyed about this, but I rebooted and decided to load up WoW again and continue. 10 minutes later, the same thing happened again.

I reoobted again, and was greeted with funny coloured lines across the BIOS screen, then a's with the ' mark above it all across another loadup screen, and when it reached the Windows loading screen, it was in a much lower resolution than my regular 1900 x 1200. Oh, and it refused to get any further than that - I could not open Windows.

Safe mode loaded for me, and looked fairly odd with purply blue lines through the screen. Apparently Windows decided I had not done anything on the computer since I got it that was worth creating a restore point for, so there were no points for me to try and restore the computer to, so I let it try to auto-repair... which failed.

Taking a photo of the issue and passing it to my girlfriend, who then posted it on the omni-present Madboards in an attempt to get help yielded the diagnosis which had crossed my mind, though I had fervently hoped it was untrue - my video card was fragged and I needed a new one.

Having planned a full computer upgrade early next year, I took it upon myself to simply move said upgrade to now. I asked some friends for help (since I know very little about hardware. Sure, I know theories behind how a lot of stuff works, and when some of the newer stuff is explained to me I can make sense of it, but I am a programmer, not a hardware junkie), and placed an order with MWave - a computer store not too far away from my home, that offers reasonable prices, and quite quick delivery. Seriously, I ordered a G15 keyboard from them one day, and it arrived the next. Scary fast!

Escept that I had missed the ordering cutoff for delivery before they closed down for the Christmas Holidays by about 5 minutes. So here I am without a working computer for about 2 weeks (they don't reopen until January 5th - which means that for my entire 2 week holiday, I am without a computer since on the 5th I'll be down the south coast!)

So, posts will be much less frequent during the next couple of weeks until I get my computer repaired/upgraded/replaced and working again.

Merry Christmas (for yesterday) and Happy New Year, catch yas all when I can :P