I, Cheddar Monkey

I've gone to visit my Mum for the weekend. So I'm here in sunny Torbay, where it's raining. It looked nice first thing, but has been raining most of the day. We went to a car boot sale where I found many games which will be very helpful for Hullabaloo and we looked at a house that Mum is thinking of buying. I liked it. Then we sorted some stuff out. There appear to be many folders of my school and Uni work here. The sane part of my mind is saying to throw it out, but that part as you may have noticed, is very quiet and is usually bullied around by the more vocal irrational part which appears to believe that at some point in my life I may need an 11 year old's attempts at a self-portrait; a tent-tidy made for my GCSE Textiles project: a poorly constructed device which incidentally was incapable of holding anything larger than a toothbrush; degree notes written in an illegible scrawl using an incomprehensible form of shorthand and several other folders of work dating back to my secondary school days. Now I'll have to find somewhere to store these things, Why I can't just throw them out I don't know. I'll end up putting them with my teaching notes in the cupboard under the stairs, noticing them every few years and arguing with myself, and possibly housemates about whether I should throw them out.

Random observation of the day

I got the same as Helen on that other geek test she did. I don't know why I bother with these tests, I always get the same as Helen. We even got exactly the same IQ on the BBC's test the nation thing. There may be one or two tests we didn't score the same on, but I can't think of any right now. I guess at least this time we didn't get exactly the same score, I got higher actually, don't know if that's true or not really, I never really know what to answer on those things. This was the result on this one in case you didn't see it on Helen's:

You are 35% geek

You are a geek liaison, which means you go both ways. You can hang out with normal people or you can hang out with geeks which means you often have geeks as friends and/or have a job where you have to mediate between geeks and normal people. This is an important role and one of which you should be proud. In fact, you can make a good deal of money as a translator.

Normal: Tell our geek we need him to work this weekend.

You [to Geek]: We need more than that, Scotty. You'll have to stay until you can squeeze more outta them engines!

Geek [to You]: I'm givin' her all she's got, Captain, but we need more dilithium crystals!

You [to Normal]: He wants to know if he gets overtime.

Take the Polygeek Quiz at Thudfactor.com

- Ali, 11:12 pm

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Wednesday, April 14, 2004

Me again, erm, well, of course it's me, who else would it be it's my blog. I'll go out and come back in shall I? okay, right, hi. I'm back.

What else was I going to tell you about then? I rambled about Lucas, I like Lucas, he's good, he doesn't have his side on at the moment, I should sort that out, he's not properly positioned either and kind of leaves me rather squashed up as he's sitting out from the desk by the side of my chair, this is until I get everything plugged in properly. Hmm, my point was that I've told you about Lucas already, so why am I talking about him again? Sorry, oh, I need a new mouse and keyboard as I don't have USB ones. He's pretty much working now apart from lack of sound and the lights and USB ports at the front.

Anyway, what else is new. Oh yes, I have been pretty productive, last week I learnt how to do Cascading Style Sheets. I started reading Helen's book "Teach Yourself CSS in 24 Hours" a few weeks back, did the first 4 hours, then kind of left it and then last week I finished it all, well, I didn't do a couple of the hours and skimmed through a lot of them picking up what I wanted to know, I already knew how to do some stuff anyway. I used my newfound knowledge to redesign The boringly named Peter DeLuise Website so that was fun. Well, it was fun sometimes and really irritating at others, Internet Explorer is very annoying, I kept doing things and they wouldn't work, but it turned out they were working in Netscape, mind you you get a much higher sense of achievement when you've had to find ways to work around the bugs in Explorer, so in the long run maybe it was more interesting because IE doesn't quite work the way it should.

Random observation of the day

"Romantic zombie comedy" is very hard to say, it seems to come out as "Romantic Zomedy". Shaun of the Dead is the best Romantic Zomedy I've ever seen.

- Ali, 11:18 pm

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Okay, it's been ages since I blogged again, I didn't realise it'd been quite that long. Anyway, no one barraged me with emails about my dilemma, but that's okay, I've resolved it all now. We went to a computer fair at the leisure centre across the road on Sunday and I bought a new case. Helen Rob and I then spent the rest of the afternoon and evening taking computers apart and swapping bits round and reinstalling windows and finding drivers, ooh what fun. By the end of the day we had successfully built 2 computers that didn't work properly. Not including Simon who wasn't meant to work properly, what with having no hard drive anymore, though he has been left with a floppy drive. It wasn't too bad though, once we'd fiddled they were mainly working. My "new" computer is called Lucas. He is black and silver and looks like a mercedes, though at the moment his front lights aren't working. Don't worry, I'm sure they will soon. Some of the USB ports aren't working yet, but about 8 are, so it's not a major problem, I may have gone overboard on the firewire ports too since the motherboard has some and I added my card, so I have 9 ports, I only have one firewire device, so I think maybe I should put the card back into Simon. We can always put a hard drive in him and make a back up computer. I'd have to get an operating system for him though.

Had to phone Microsoft this morning, that was scary. Hate having to phone, but apparently I'd used my activation code to many times, what with reinstalling windows twice this year. Not sure why they make you phone, he didn't even ask me why I was reinstalling it again, I could easily have been adding it onto a different computer. Maybe it's just to scare you. Maybe they ask you if you keep phoning.

Anyway, as well as all that, Helen and I went down to her parents' on Monday, came back last night, so we've had a fairly productive bank holiday weekend. Saw Shaun of the Dead, it's very good. Can't say more now as am blogging in my break at work and time is up, so back to work I go.

Random observation of the day

When pointing out stupid spellings of place names in Leicester (Sunday 28th March) I actually failed to draw attention to the major one, it's so major it slipped my mind. It is of course Leicester, pronounced Lester. Mad I tell you

- Ali, 5:18 pm

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