Thy Flesh Consumed

Weeeeell, here we are again folks, another day in the life of nobody in particular. I awoke at 10:30 this morning to find myself on my sofa, which is unusual… the last thing I remember about last night was watching “Interview With The Vampire” while waiting for the resin cast for my teeth to set so I could use them again, one can only assume that I fell asleep while doing so. Naturally, I was a little surprised to find myself there…

I’m now sitting here in front of this thing, yet again, while lurking in Minas Tirith, the new chatroom at OTF. For those of you that don’t know, OTF, or Outpost Ten Forward, is an online community complete with various Guilds, departments and interactive chatrooms. Sometime in the next hour or two I shall be getting a vistit from a delightful young lady who goes by the name of Margie (I’ve mentioned her before in previous entries and shall no doubt be doing so again, many, many more times in the future) although I’m not holding out much hope of her actually turning up anywhere near that time as her timekeeping skills are practically non-existent. Instead, I’ll just go about my business as usually until she finally does turn up, after which time, we’ll probably just sit in front of the TV and watch some of the films I just “obtained". Unless, of course, she manages to persuade me to go to the pub for a couple of pints, which she probably will. She is quite possibly the most persuasive person I’ve ever met, I swear, she could talk the Devil into setting himself on fire… Anyway, more on her some other time.

Oooh, after weeks of misery, I finally managed to fix this infernal contraption! It’s taken hours of work through trial and error and talking to numerous people about it (all of whom were unable to offer any kind of help, despite touting themselves to be “professionals") but I finally did it, and you know what the culprit was? My bloody DVD-RW. Fancy that… So, after yanking it out and running the system for a few hours, I had established that this was the root of the problem. What to do? Well, I decided on trying a firmware update first (assuming I could get the machine stable for long enough to implement this plan, that is…) which I duly did, and lo and behold, it worked! No more random drive accessing or lockups, just pure computing bliss. Well, apart from the fact that a dodgy PSU is now making the damn thing switch off at random intervals. Another problem all together… O’ for data that has been lost to spontaneous shutdowns…

Anyway, I think I’ve bored you for long enough now so I shall resign myself to another hour or so of lurking at the Outpost, make another cup of tea and wait for the arduous task of encoding multiple .avi files into MPEG-2 format to complete itself…

Thought for the day: Don’t ever rely on someone else to solve your problems for you, they’re usually wrong…