grantdickins.co.uk

After a discussion last night with a mate from school who I met up with for a few drinkies, we came across the 4 step drunk guide.
This guide is based on toilet activities as its common ground for all blokes.

So,
Step 1 - Each time you goto the toilet, you pick out the same urinal cake and aim to make it dissolve.

Step 2 -You have to aim really well to hit the urinal cake. You also start to spit on it.

Step 3 - You can no longer balance correctly, but cannot use your hands as they are both having to hold your cock so you can piss on that damn urinal cake. You walk out of the toilet with a red mark on your head because you’ve been using it to prop yourself up against the wall.

Step 4 - You fell down stairs to get to the toilet. By the end, you’ve eroded the entire urinal cake.

On 5th May,  Microsoft made public the Release Candidate for Windows 7 (Build 7100)

Hearing nothing but good things about this version of Windows I jumped at the chance to download and test.
Having recently rebuilt my PC due to the PSU fuckup, I didn’t have much to loose by rebuilding again.

So, rebuild done - rocking Win7 RC 7100 (64-bit) happily. Only one or two glitches but nothing devastating. I’m absolutely loving the experience. So much is working much better than in Vista, I couldn’t be more impressed (Well maybe I could)

However, as there have been some glitches and constant updates on this RC front, I’ve been checking forums pretty much daily seeing what problems other people are having, if anything is similar to what i’ve had. How to tweak certain things.

But the majority of these forums are cursed by people complaining, moaning and whining about some feature that isn’t the same as it was in XP/2000/ME/98.

Seriously? No shit Sherlock!

Its TWO releases ahead of XP. There are gonna be huge changes. If you don’t like it, don’t frikken use it, no-body is making you!
Or has Bill come round to your house and held a gun to your head telling you to install Win7 or else?
I don’t think so.

What would be the point of releasing a new OS if there wasn’t changes? It wouldn’t make any sense to keep updating XP, patch after patch after patch.

In the IT world, you can’t dislike change! Its happening every millisecond!

OK, rant over. Win7 FTW! Final Release December 2009.

I have no idea what spurred me to do this last night.
My phone is capable of taking pictures every few seconds up to every 30min which somehow gave me the idea to photo myself sleeping to see how much i moved around. Don’t question creativity!

So the best way I thought of doing this was to literally TAPE my phone to the ceiling above my bed (using medical tape) and let to take a photo every 30min.

The results are as follows: (continue reading…)

So I figure, now the initial “buzz” of twitter has calmed down a bit, I’d see what all this new shite was about.
I understand the “microblogging” idea. Basically, when your attention span drops to sub atomic levels as this day and age has come to cherish, and no-one can be bothered to write out an actual informative post on their blog. (or in my case complete drivel!)

I signed up yesterday having no idea wtf I was doing. When you begin, it does the friendly “enter your email address and passwords so I can steal all your contacts and spam the hell out of them” but at least gives a relatively obvious button to skip that step. Unfortunately, its probably not obvious enough for all the braindead web-kiddies destroying the net with their facebooks and myspaces.
The next step suggests people you might be interested in “following”. Which I don’t quite understand because I have no interest in following “Sockamillion - Jason Scott’s Cat”. Or for that matter, “10 Downing Street” (Yes #10 has a twitter profile…WTF?!)
It seems more like these profiles are most popular rather than picking people who you ACTUALLY might be interested in.

However, again, its a skippable step and you can get into searching for the people/organisations/etc you want. I found one or two people I know and also the twitter profiles of some celebs like Mr Stephen Fry, Kevin Smith and… Neil Gaiman!!

Its quite interesting following celebs as you get to see a more personal front of them rather than a media bastardisation of their persona.
Johnathan Woss tending to his sick wife, Neil looking after his son with a broken leg.

I’ve also added a “friend” called ‘playtwivia’ which a member of Neowin.net coded which pops up a trivia question every 3-4 hours and you earn points for answering correctly. Its quite smart, but the internet being what it is, every answer is googleable.

(I realised I have coined many new words on this blog post. Or at least words which aren’t technically true words. But hey, its my Blog!)

Twitter can also be used as a News Aggregator;  a sort of RSS feed mixed into it. So I get the lastest news posts from Neowin.net and also the latest lolcats from icanhascheezburger.com

All in all, its maybe something I’ll keep up with alongside this blog.  Sure i’m not going to ‘tweet’ things like, “I’m in work, its boring” or, “woke up, had breakfast, i’m tired” –At least not constantly. No-one is interested in that crap. I can develop it into something somewhat interesting such as my tweet:

Just made Haggis Neeps and Tatties for first time myself - all i can say is: http://tinyurl.com/arotcm

The tinyurl points to an excellent video on youtube. I suggest you play it with volume UP!

So, if you want to be depressed by my inane ramblings more, follow me on http://twitter.com/grantdickins

No I don’t mean the brown things that form over cuts. I mean the minky scummy waste of atoms which reside in Inverness.

I went into town today, I always like to do something semi-worthwhile on Saturdays in order to make my weekends less tedious and boring. So, I get ready to wander into town. Its raining a bit but not bothered. No intention of buying anything really, that costs money which I don’t have but if there was something that caught my eye I might just make a purchase.
Alas, no. There’s nothing I found on my wanders. Did meet some friends in town and spoke to them for a bit. A colleage on the desk I work on and then some girls by the corner of Schuh and Debenhams. One of them being an old flatmate and her friend (who happens to be my current flat mates girlfriend)

Anyway, after talking with them I figure I’m pretty bored of town and kinda hungry so I head home. Its raining a bit heavier now, but I’m carefree and quite enjoying it in some sense.
Now I’m 2 streets away from my flat. Its not the nicest area in the world, in fact its right beside one of the worst area’s in Inverness and of course no-one shits in their own back garden, so our neighbourhood is the next best place. (Ok, I’m not talking ghetto or shit like that. I don’t mind it really, I’ve lived in worse places)
But this woman is ahead of me. I’d say late 30’s wearing some cheap washed out jeans and a fleece thats seen better days. She’s talking on her mobile (everyone’s gone one these days like its NOT a luxury?) and she stops near someones driveway and bends down to pick something up. I was too far away to see what at the time. But she hurredly discards this object and carry’s on walking (waddling) yapping away on the phone.

I’ve passively curious about what she picked up and as I got closer to this driveway, I notice a almost pristine cigarette packet. Obviously what she saw too. So my guess is that she wanted to check this packet incase it’d fallen out of someones pocket/coat/bag and still had fags in it.

Seriously? I’m far from middle class. I’m near the bottom of working class and I find that disgusting! You just don’t raid litter off the ground. Have some self dignity!

Bleugh… anyway I’m trying to set up a virtual Windows domain (Server and clients) so far I have one Windows 2003 Server as Domain Controller and one Windows XP Client computer, both in a little virtual environment. Its quite cool but I have sooooooooooo much to learn. Need a book I think.

It was obviously so universally unbelievable that Kal was going to do ironing that as soon as he turned the iron on, it tripped ALL the sockets in the flat.

All the computers turn off, the cooker and microwave off (Damn having to set the clock on them again) and of course the iron doesn’t turn on.

But damn! hate when power cuts happen… so just power the pc’s back up and get on with the morning.
Kal’s pc back on. Even the server comes up fine - and its flakey at the best of times.
But my PC, doesn’t come back

We figure, some power supplies have a feature which puts it on a timeout untill any surges are over. So we left it for 10min but still doesn’t come back on.

I’m fucking gutted. Bad case: Power supply is gone. thats £70. but its got 5 year warranty.
Worse case: its fried my power supply, motherboard and CPU.
Even worse: Fried PSU, Mobo, CPU, and hard drives…

Kal went up to his parents at lunch time that day to dig out his old power supply so I could test my machine to find out what was broke.

That evening, rip out my duff PSU and try Kal’s one in it. All plugged in and ready to go… nothing.

DAMMIT! that means the motherboard is fried. My baby is dead
Dunno if CPU is gone, can’t test that yet. So now I’m hooked up with our mediabox, case ripped off and a stack of harddrives sitting on top with a tangle of cables hooked in. So at least my hard drives still work

Will see about returning the PSU under warranty, but i’m gonna have to get new motherboard and see about CPU. oh and RAM! fuck

Yes boys and girls, im a Gigabyte Junkie. Or this time, i should say Terrabyte junkie!
OH yes! Went and got me one of them 1TB Drives earlier this week, delivered yesterday and took all night to format.

Of course, those who understand the tech world of bits bytes and megabytes, will understand that hard drives need overhead for the file table and such. Also that manufacturers use base 10 where kilo is 10³ and giga is 10⁹ etc. Whereas most OS’s use base 2 (2ⁿ) to do their byte to kilobyte etc.
Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibi#IEC_standard_prefixes

So basically, my 1TB drive is actually only ~931GB

And I don’t know what to use it for! LOL
Well, I do. My 1st 500GB drive is now full with TV shows and Movies. I actually split them up so its mostly jsut TV shows on the 500GB and stuck movies on the 250GB drive (Previously used for backups and junk)

Unfortunately, the 250GB is not big enough for the Movies alone, so thats now overflowing onto the free space of the 500GB drive which i don’t like because I’m anal retentive and like to keep things organised and together.

So here we have:
Vista (C:) and Program Files (E:) are my other 500GB drive. 2 partitions
Audio (D:) is a 200GB IDE drive - Just for music.
Data (H:) Stores my ‘My Documents’, Game installs, backups of some things, CD Images, etc etc etc…
TV, Movies (G:) is the 500GB for TV shows and Movie overflow (For the moment)
Movies (I:) is just Movies, catagorised by Genre and some even by director.
And then New Volume (J:) is the new 1TB drive ready to fill up with crap. Huzzah!

It seems lately that I keep getting these annoying messages coming up on messenger at home and even a couple of times on my work email; requesting (I use the term loosely) that I remove entries from this blog…

I mean, fair enough if these “requests” were worded nicely instead of threateningly, well…who knows. That

Waaaaah !

train has sailed. (Deliberate bastardisation)

What really pisses me off is that now, not only am I getting these pestering messages, but my family are now being harassed about it. That’s not really on. In fact, this sort of harassment could have legal action brought upon it.

Thing is, right, this is my blog. I can write whatever the hell i want and nothing can really be done about it.
I have stayed well within the constraints of free speech on the Internet. I have not defamed or spoken in a slanderous way about anyone. And for that matter, I haven’t named a single person who I didn’t obtain permission from.

So I regret to inform my dear, sweet, warm-hearted and oh-so-kind readers, that no post on this site will ever be removed. Nor will the backups of this site be deleted. Or the backups downloaded to my pc. Or the backups stored off-site.

Fact is… if you don’t wanna see it, look for the little X at the top right of the window and quit crying!
Its the Internet. If you don’t like it, don’t read it. Go here instead.

<Sentence deleted for irony>

“Would you like some cheese with that whine?” - Kal c. 2004-2009 (permission for name given)

Weekday mornings.
Wake up, drag myself to the shower. Actually wake up in there because i have to move. Dry off and get dressed. Make coffee. Read emails, check various sites which are blocked at work (Whilst drinking coffee) Put shoes on and cycle to work.

The next 7.5 hours are shite!

Between the times where I get to wander through to the coffee machine and maybe speak to people and chat about rubbish, I have to work.
This includes dealing with problems that are so tediously boring that i’d rather bang my head off the wall - to problems which are so stupidly difficult to fix that i’d rather bang my head off a wall harder.

During this time, i’m getting paid absolutely bollocks. Somewhere around £13.5K a year… for a second line desktop technician!

Lets put that into perspective…
A Job agency in Aberdeen (100 miles away from Inverness) is advertising a job as “IT Support/Helpdesk Analyst”
The job Description:

As an IT Support / Helpdesk Analyst you will be involved in providing daily IT 1st / 2nd Line helpdesk support for around 2000 users operating on 150 Vessels. Daily duties will include:

* Providing telephone technical support to users in all areas of 1st and some 2nd line support.
* Helpdesk case logging, escalation and resolution.
* Providing support to the IT team for various projects.

Currently, my position is provide 2nd line support for over 8000 PCs, and probably somewhere around 12000 Users.

Here’s the stinger though…

Salary: 22 - 25K

How the fuck can my current employer get away with these slave labor wages when there are jobs out there where there is less work but more fucking money!?
Where is the justice!

Needless to say, I’ve applied and submitted my CV and hope to hear good things back.
Actually, sent my CV to a few places because I’m really wasting my time here and need to get the fuck out!

I’m fed up of Inverness and its population of narrow minded fools, whiny bitches and fucktard neds.

I read a joke earleir today which actually made me giggle despite the Math Geekyness of it. Thought I’d share it with nobody who reads this site…

I liked it!