I have memories, clouded by sorrow

There's not all that much going on. I went out to a gig on Thursday (Evile supported by the amusingly-monickered Keltic Jihad), which was... ok. Then I went out to the student pre-term party on Friday which was... ok. And last night was the Dimmu Boring Borgir and Amon Amarth gig which was... ok. Tonight will be another Evil Scarecrow gig, which at least I can guarantee will be no worse than the last 3 nights.

Today I'm somewhat disheartened at encountering another computer problem - it's started hanging the whole system when I use my audio recording software. Everything else is fine. All I can think of is that one of the drivers I've installed recently isn't cooperating with it, but how to tell which one it is, I have no idea. I'll try removing the dodgy USB -> mobile phone cable driver that I got off eBay first, and see how that fares. Until that's fixed, no new music from me. I'd get a Mac for audio stuff if I had room for one... (Update: it seems to have been the webcam. Curse you Logitech! Still, fixed now.)

I have nothing much to do next week, except the Soilwork and Dark Tranquillity gig on Thursday, and an assortment of things on the Saturday. I suppose I could tag along with some of the student stuff during the week, but I don't know if I want to. We'll see.

Has anybody else noticed that it takes ages to bring up Livejournal's "Post an Entry" page these days? I can view my friends list just fine, but as soon as it comes to polluting the friends list of other people, the system shows its reluctance. Not entirely surprising, I suppose.

Yet again Linux is fucking me off royally. A few weeks ago I managed to finally build the driver for my onboard network adapter, and finally got online. Kubuntu went and updated everything, in much the same way Windows does. Except it upgraded the kernel so my network driver no longer works. And in trying to rebuild it, it fails, because it can't access certain code files which probably aren't on my system.

I was going to save the error messages and log into Windows so that I could post a request for help online, but my Windows drives are all formatted with NTFS, which means Kubuntu can't write anything to them. This pretty much makes having Linux useless to me unless I can figure a convenient way of converting the drive from NTFS to FAT32, or installing the slightly dodgy stuff for Ubuntu that makes NTFS writable. What a load of shit. But even then I still won't have a working net connection until I figure all the rest out.

Yes, I'm being a bit unreasonable, because I'm angry. I just wanted to do some coding but now I can't. The sad thing is that some people enjoy this kind of crap. I just want to use the damn computer, not reconstruct it.

The new computer is going ok, with just 2 exceptions. Firstly, I got myself a new CPU cooler and fan, but I can't attach it, as I seem unable to remove the existing one. I unclipped it at both sides, pulled... and it still felt very firmly attached. I wonder what I'm missing. The other problem is that my Kubuntu 6.10 partition is almost completely useless since it failed to detect my on-board network adapter, so no internet access at all. Do any of you Linuxy types have any idea what I'm supposed to do here? (EDIT: I found a compilable driver for the adapter. Unfortunately it won't compile without what looks like the kernel headers, and I don't know how to get those when the Add/Remove Software program seems to rely on an internet connection. AARGH!)

I'm trying to expand my musical horizons into new and less well known bands at the moment, so perhaps in the future synphony won't be able to mock me for not knowing certain 'underground' bands who appear on the cover of Terrorizer magazine the next month. Since I seem to have a reputation for liking 'doom' I figure I should have more of it than just the obvious bands, so picking up stuff like Keen of the Crow, Funeral, and Mistress of the Dead is enlightening. I also put in a similar order to Plastic Head (more Keen of the Crow, Saturnus, and Canaan interestingly), which I expect to arrive some time in September. :P

Nothing much else has happened - work is ok, social life is minimal, health is acceptable (put on 3lbs a mere week after losing 6lb - strange), the band situation should pick up next Sunday, I still have no shelves at home, and that's about it. Looks like Wacken has sold out so my plan of making it to either Graspop or Wacken or both has failed miserably, which doesn't make me too happy. Oh well.

One day, I will develop enough assertiveness to say, "are you sure that's the right cd?" when it looks like the guy from Selectadisc is putting the wrong cd in the case when I'm buying one. Until then, I suppose I will just have to go back the next day and swap it. That's if I haven't drowned by then, since it just won't stop raining.

Oblivion's working ok on the new pc, by the way. I can't remember half of the quests I did, though. :( Thief 3's ok too, though the current level I'm on is a bit more like a dodgy platform game than the usual sneak-a-thon, given how often I'm falling off ledges and having to reload. And people still get stuck in the scenery, grr! Crap programming makes me annoyed.

As a last resort for my computer problems, I posted on Yahoo Answers to see if the collective hive mind there would have any idea of what's wrong. I pointed out that I'd tried 3 different graphics cards from 3 different manufacturers based on 2 different chipsets, but that didn't stop the very first respondent insisting that I need professional help from the manufacturer of my graphics card. Someone then rated that answer as a good one, too.

People are stupid.

I think I will buy a new pc on Saturday if I don't get a solution before then. Hopefully Compuplus can make me something that runs fairly quietly. Maybe I can still get a single core one, but that gets less likely every day. Either way, this useless hunk of junk will then get relegated to the server-under-the-desk position.

Wow, it's quite amazing, but Nvu seems to be even worse than Microsoft Word at generating HTML, and Nvu is supposedly designed for web authoring whereas Word is not. It's shockingly bad. Anybody know anything better, that still has some of the usability of (for example) Dreamweaver, without generating abysmal code?

I spent most of the weekend indoors, working on my telnet client application, missing all the sunshine. Boo! I also wasted a little more time playing around with my computer to try and work out what the hell is wrong with it. I'm reasonably confident it's not a physical problem but some sort of configuration issue. No idea how to diagnose it though. I'm half tempted to buy a new case, build a second machine out of my spare parts, and see what happens. It's beyond frustrating now. 7 months with a broken computer.

In slightly better news, my second Before The Dawn cd arrived today. Hurrah! Thus ends the recent spate of having to wait a month to get cds delivered. I am running out of cds that I want though, so it wouldn't be a problem for much longer anyway.

Today, I nearly got run over, for the 3rd time at a single junction by STUPID DRIVERS. Most often, drivers heading into town turn right when they're supposed to wait for the 'turning right' light. That was what happened the first 2 times, but today someone coming the other way turned left, ignoring the 'do not turn left under any circumstances' sign. I shot him a withering stare as his van came to a halt 1ft away from me in the middle of the road, but I think he was too concerned about the bus that came to a halt about the same distance behind his vehicle as a result of his sudden stop.

Ok, so...

Friday: I think I stayed in, taking backups of my data, in preparation for installing my 4th new computer motherboard in the space of a year.

Saturday: It only took me an hour to replace the motherboard, and quite amazingly it booted into Windows XP fine first time, probably because most of the underlying technology is the same across the two boards, and also because I uninstalled all the old drivers first. But it wasn't long before I was able to run my 3D test and see the same tell-tale problems with the display. When will it end? The entire system has been replaced - in some cases, more than once - with the exception of the CPU, the cooler, the RAM, and the DVD-ROM drive. Neither the cooler or the DVD drive could possibly be the cause of the problem, so that surely leaves just the CPU or the memory. The memory has been tested before and it was fine, but it makes more sense for the problem to be that than the CPU. Cheers for the lending offers so far, but I think I may just buy new RAM, since that won't go to waste if it doesn't help, and try and find a CPU from somewhere.

Maybe I just live on a ley line. It really is tempting just to buy a whole new computer.

In the evening was the Insidious/Evil Scarecrow/Interlock gig. Insidious seemed like a decent band but I don't think there's any point to bands like that playing live, since you can't hear anything but noise. Evil Scarecrow were amusing as ever and had the local crowd enjoying their unique form of entertainment. Interlock weren't too bad, in a stompy-industrial-metal sort of way, though few of my friends seemed to like them. Perhaps it's because they took the male singer's onstage rants a little too seriously, which mellowed out towards the end of the show. Afterwards came a brief stop-off at the Salutation inn, after verbally abusing Gay Dan en route for kissing a girl recently, the fucking hetero. ;)

Sunday: after last minute exhortations from _arnamentia_, I went down to rabbleuk's abode to hitch a ride to ogly's place in Loughborough for the first 'barbecue' of the day. Barbecue is in quotes because the rain made it more a case of sitting around watching Russian supernatural film 'Nightwatch'. At least, most of us were watching it - _arnamentia_ didn't bother watching it and instead just asked us what was happening every two minutes.

After a few hours of that, spazzhammer gave me and our not-too-good-with-films friend a lift back to Nottingham. Having got used to Allan's driving on our trip to Wales, I barely noticed we were even moving with Nick at the wheel. I could even read the road signs and everything. Eventually we got to the next destination - terrorhol's barbecue, this time protected from the elements by flimsy gazebos. I didn't bother cooking anything as it seemed like too much effort, and I wasn't really in a mood to socialise with randoms (am I ever?), but it all seemed well-run and the like. I think I consumed 70% of the carrot sticks, too.

Monday: not much happened. I think I played some non-3D-requiring computer game off and on for hours, and managed to pick up the guitar for over 30 minutes too, which is a record at the moment. I also re-listened to the latest Paradise Lost album, which isn't as bad as I initially thought, but still a somewhat missed opportunity I feel. Then in the evening I was going to write a new CGI script for one of my games, only to find out that the old ones have all stopped working. Grr, "500 Internal Server Error". Useless.

Today: at work. Will go home and email the admin about those CGI scripts probably, before working on my Amazing Telnet Client of Uberness. (Huh? What?)

Today I got a new motherboard; my 4th in just over a year. The process will be to back everything up on my current machine to my external hard drive, pull everything apart, put it all back together with the new motherboard installed, and probably perform a repair installation of Windows XP, followed by downloading the thousands of updates and service packs. Anybody got any suggestions for how I can ensure that goes more smoothly? It's likely to waste an entire evening or more as it is, and knowing my luck, leave me with some broken stuff anyway.

If I can't play Thief 3 and Oblivion after all this shit, I may just give up computers and get a job in the hospitality industry or something.

At work, our project went public today, with articles on various gaming sites. It'll be interesting to see if that translates into pressure on us in any way. The closest I've come to having my work publicly exposed before was when I wrote the graduate/sandwich/summer placement online registration stuff for Boots PLC and it nearly got shown onscreen in a lecture when I went back to uni that year. Not very comparable.

Not much else to report. There's loads of stuff on this weekend but whether I go to any of it is debatable (and likely to depend on whether I get Oblivion running or not...)

Last Friday was the six month anniversary of my computer's graphics being broken. Grrrrr. I tried out the ATi card that rlucas666 lent me but the problem is just as apparent, if not slightly more so. The motherboard is most comprehensively fucked. I'm currently waiting to see if ASUS reply to my technical support request with anything resembling a useful response, and hopefully should know that within a day or two. Looks like I'll be buying yet another motherboard soon, though. And I'm really not looking forward to having to reinstall all the updates for Windows. :(

While I'm on the topic of fixing computers, does anybody know of a tool that'll quickly diagnose what's being run at startup and so on? For some reason it now lingers on the 'Welcome' screen for about 4 seconds when I boot up when it never used to, and although 4 seconds is no hardship I'd like to know why it's doing it.