The Dark Prince

Three down - literally

I awoke today to the sounds of birds chirping, gentle breezes and otherwise natural noise that so brightens my heart. Unfortunately, my heart was immediately darkened by the sudden realisation that I was not woken by my alarm and was one hour late for my exam. Of course, this didn’t bother me that much as I had as much chance of passing as a constipated firefly, (geddit? passing, oh never mind.)

Well, apart from that things continue to be irritatingly bad. I discovered recently that the ERC (Education Resource Centre) is in possession of a sizeable quantity of PS2 games, most of which are on two hour loan. Now, I have a DVD burner, so I would like it very much if these games could become aquainted with this wonderful hardware. However, the disks aren’t allowed out of the library. Bugger. Well, to get around this, all I need is a laptop with the ability to read DVDs, if only I knew someone who had such a thing.

How did I find out that I wasn’t allowed to take the discs out of the library? I took them out of course. So now I have two new PS2 games (two was the maximum you are allowed to take out), but I can’t reap this veritable goldmine any further. Oh well, that’s about the usual I guess

Now, only one more exam to fail and then I can get on with failing my Design project and then fail these exams a second time in about 4 weeks or so, ooh, I can’t wait.

and the small matter of a failed exam

Well today heralds good and bad things in the land of somewhere. I have finally gotten all the bits of my computer to talk to each other after what seems an eternity now, but is most likely around two weeks. Unfortunately, this has resulted in my Linux partition not working, but it never really did to begin with.

As well as this, all the good work of me doing quite well in yesterdays exam has been removed by me doing appallingly in todays exam. Since they are both for the same subject this is really unfair, as I’d rather go well in one subject and fail horribly in the other, thus qualifying for special exams and having at least one good mark to my name

Aside from the usual mundane failures of my life, today I got thoroughly annoyed with the tram system. Now, I know that it’s unlikely that such a system will work perfectly all day and everyday, but it really is quite bad. Nearly every tram is late, and when you finally get the chance to get on a tram you can’t because everyone and everything has decided to get on the tram before you and are practically hanging out the windows, so you have to wait. And wait. And then you wait a bit more until you come to a tram that has room on it.

Now, you would assume that this would be it, but unfortunately, your way will invariably be a woman with a double pram (evil evil things), a large derro who looks as though all of his skin has been replaced with sandpaper that has been left in the sun for two weeks after being crumpled repetitively, or a large group of socialising Malaysians.

If you do decide to force your way through the lowest humanity can offer you, looks of annoyance will be received from your quarry, I can almost understand the first two, but why is it that Malaysians talk so loudly, (or should I say: tok so high larrrrrrr), their accent irritates me at the best of time, but this look as though I have done something wrong by wanting to get through their wall of indifference just makes me want to do something very bad with a lot of magnesium strips, matches and the offendees core body temperature measuring point.

This wall of slowly moving, really really loud, and highly irritating Malaysians occurs everywhere, actually. In crowded shops is, where they seal up entire sections because they have decided to tok about something incredibly inane whilst several people get really pissed off trying to get through, cues at fast food places (where they merrily annoy the hell out of everyone else by not ordering), and other places where generally you are forced to go out of necessity.

Enough about Malaysians. This story is about trams. Or something. Anyway, I had an exam to go to (not particularly pressing, granted), and this tram decided to just sit there for about 10 minutes. Needless to say I was nearly late, but what’s worse, is exactly the same thing happened to me on the way back from failed exam. I suppose this is what the %10 increase in ticket prices was to ensure, less reliability and more bullyish tram inspectors

Well, after a hard working weekend, or more precisely, a hard working Sunday night, I have handed in one of my overdue assignments. This leaves one remaining, but as I now have two days to study for two exams and much procrastination still to be done, I shall avoid this report until after that.

Anyway, despite this rather pressing deadline, I am quite relaxed about my situation. I have been to most, if not all, of the relevant lectures for these exams and I have studied a reasonable amount for them. Plus, if I fail, I simply try again, no questions asked. Seriously, though, I will definitely study. Soon.

On things unrelated to the shady and depressing side of my life that is university, things are not wonderful, but not bad either. I went and visited my old computer store, (where I got my computer originally), only to find that the part that I’d ordered had been sitting there for two weeks and they just couldn’t be stuffed telling me. Customer service and the computer industry seem to be mutually exclusive or perhaps inversly proportional. Either way, I got the part, smiled politely and quietly called them a bunch of arseholes, because they are.

My new, soon to be old, computer store has been really nice however. I took the box in for the card that didn’t work today and hopefully soon my computer will be back and functional. Maybe I’ll give them a bit more of a chance, but then again, maybe not.

And the ground beneath your feet’s reaction to it

Well after an exhileratingly horrible couple of days before the weekend I have managed to remove all assignments in my way with the exception of two. Normally this would be something to be happy about, except for the fact that both these pieces of work (although another word could equally well be substituted for work) are about three weeks overdue.

Combine this with the fact that they are about %10 each, and you have something that is too big to ignore and too small to really want to spend time on. Also consider that the work will take hours upon hours of painstaking analysis and you can begin to see why this is not such a wonderful situation. But I will somehow get them done, somehow.

As well as this exciting plethora of overdue work I have recently taken my computer into the shop whence the stupid IDE expansion card came to convince them that their card sucks. They took one look at it, and pronounced it fixed, to my great surprise and happiness. Then I took one look at their proof (they showed me that my computer now registered 3 CD devices and a zip drive), and realised that this particular bunch of retailers were, (as we say in academic terms), completely fucking stupid.

There is a program, a wonderfully useful program, called Daemon Tools. Most people who need something like it know about it. As I am sure you have already guessed, oh intelligent reader, this program gives you a thing called a virtual drive. Why is it useful? Apart from copying DVDs or CDs raw onto your harddrive to play at a later date in the virtual drive, it also allows you to check if an image you are about to burn works. Sure enough, the clever-clogged people at this store had mistaken my virtual drive for my DVD burner.

So, I did the only thing possible, I quietly disabled the virtual drive in front of them and watched their looks of satisfaction drown in a tidal wave of incomprehension. I think it is time, yet again, to find a new computer store.

You may recall from previous entries that I have not been a well chap for a while. Sickness constantly coming and going, mostly light colds but the occasional crippling illness has taken hold on me as well. Now it seems I have not only passed these problems to my friends but also my computer.

That’s right, I managed to get a virus on my computer. Now, reader of mine blabber, you most likely know that I am reasonably good at things involving computers and for this reason I rarely worry about such things, so how did this happen? Well, bugger me if I know, but I’d say it’s been there for around two weeks before I noticed it. It’s nothing bad, it just alters some files (by adding bits at the start) to spread itself and occasionally delete things. To my knowledge nothing was deleted, so nothing was lost. What makes me feel a bit stupid is how long it took for me to realise it was there.

How did I notice you ask? Well, a while ago, notepad stopped working (this is quite normal for windows for bits to stop working), so I replaced it and went away again. After about a week several programs stopped working and just crashed the system. I re-installed only to find that they worked once or twice and then crashed again. Strange, thought I, the ever-intelligent type. At first I thought it was due to the programs use of other libraries, perhaps windows installer had been corrupted? It wasn’t until it suddenly occurred to me that the files might have been altered and checked by trying them on another computer (where they also failed to work), that I realised all was not tickety boo.

So I examined the files in question, found the bit added to the start and removed it. All was well. I then tried to search for a bit of code unique to this thing and found that at least 110 files had been corrupted. Bugger.

What does one do in a situation like this? Well, you can manually fix each file, which takes ages, or you can get a program to do it for you. The latter is known as a virus killer, so I got one and let it do it’s work. It removed the vuirus and another two I didn’t know about and I was happy.

Well I was until I tried to use the programs and found that the stupid program had not fixed the problem but simply deleted the files. How very very rude indeed, I guess the moral of the story is that if you want it done right, you do it yourself.

Oh, and I’ve got four things due tomorrow and I haven’t really started any of them. Again.