#65: Untitled

It’s blog o’clock.

After having made myself ache by playing with my powerball so much, I decided to learn to start it by hand (as this is apparently what the pros do). It was quite easy once I worked out how, with the help of an excellent YouTube video. Don’t mind the dude’s cheesy voiceover, just watch exactly how he holds it and what he does and copy it. You’ll get there soon enough.

Unfortunately, I bottled out of deleting my Myspace account last week. I never use the thing to edit or do anything with my profile, but I’ve realised that I’m far too nosy to get rid of one of the only methods I have of looking at photos of old friends. I am sorry to have to admit this, but it seems that Myspace has beaten me. Perhaps in the future I will be able to break the hold it has over me!

I have been working at home a lot more recently, I have to say that it’s absolutely awesome. I also got a substantial pay rise from my boss, which I was very pleased about. To celebrate, I bought myself a nice shiny new 22″ monitor to put on my desk at home, so I now have an awesome dual desktop setup going on. I also paid substantially less than the price Amazon are currently quoting - something more in the region of £150, which was very, very reasonable. The monitor itself is fantastic - picture quality is superb (particularly in World of Warcraft, which is absolutely stunning at 1680×1050), it looks brilliant on the desk and it makes doing all my work a whole lot more pleasurable.

I transferred my level 61 alliance rogue over to Kloopy’s server recently, after he got back into playing WoW regularly. I’m just about to ding level 65, and it’s all going very well so far. I’m using Jame’s Alliance Levelling Guide, which has got mixed reviews from people in the past, but I have to say that I find it very easy to follow, and I’ve managed to get four whole levels in not a great deal of time. I’ve not played an Alliance character in ages but it’s all slowly coming back to me. Playing on a PvE server is also very different to the PvP servers I’m used to, and I find being able to level without the threat of being ganked to be a dream come true.

I also ordered myself an 8-bit tie the other day. They look great - see for yourself! (Kloopy and I realised afterwards that we probably should have taken the photo while not staring directly at the sun, however)

#44: eBay

This won’t be a very exciting blog post I’m afraid because this is my first day back at work after having been off since last Thursday, so I’m quite busy. I’ll try and write an update on personal stuff a bit later.

Actually, this post is just to try and drum up a bit of free publicity - I’m running a few eBay auctions at the moment for various things, and I thought I might as well link them here in case anyone is interested. They’re mostly some old mobile phones that a friend of mine has asked me to try and sell for him, but there’s a decent Windows Mobile 2003 PDA in there too which would be a steal for anyone who’s looking for that sort of thing.

Nokia 6310, good condition, £3.99 starting bid
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=140152227980

Nokia 6310i, OK condition, £3.99 starting bid
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=140152229758

Nokia 6310i, bad condition, £2.99 starting bid
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=140152230450

Nokia 3120, OK condition, £3.99 starting bid
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=140152232602

Nokia 3120, good condition, £4.99 starting bid
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=140152233508

O2 XDA IIi PDA, good condition with charger, leather case and manuals
£29.99 starting bid
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=140152239428

If you’re at all interested, either bid or let me know. The phones would make good spares for anyone who needs one, not to mention that they’re also the ones that work best with Nokia-supplied car kits.

#3: Sunday

Today, I have done very little. I watched the Bolton vs Blackburn game (Blackburn won basically because they had two penalities given, there wasn’t a lot else to say) and I earnt £40 fixing a computer.

There were three fundamental things wrong with this computer:
1) It was running Windows XP on 128MB of RAM (ouch, swap file thrashing)
2) It was running Norton Antivirus (this is bad, no matter what)
3) Its ADSL modem/router combination had no microfilter between it and the wall socket

I got rid of the expired Norton Antivirus without a second thought and installed the wonderful AVG Free instead. The 128MB of RAM is more a problem, although I advised him that if he wanted his computer to speed up, he could shell out £50 or so and it would be a lot better.

The thing that made me laugh the most was the lack of microfilters in the system. Originally I wasn’t sure what the problem was, because he told me that he doesn’t answer the phone next to the computer any more because whenever he picks it up, it disconnects him from the Internet. This sounded a little odd, so I decided to investigate…


C:\Documents and Settings\User>ping -t webvictim.net
Pinging webvictim.net [80.175.29.126] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 80.175.29.126: bytes=32 time=32ms TTL=46
Reply from 80.175.29.126: bytes=32 time=23ms TTL=46
Reply from 80.175.29.126: bytes=32 time=24ms TTL=46
Reply from 80.175.29.126: bytes=32 time=25ms TTL=46
Reply from 80.175.29.126: bytes=32 time=22ms TTL=46


Nothing wrong there at all, everything pretty much as I’d expect it to be. So at this point, I picked up the phone and started to talk into it as though I was answering a call.

Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Reply from 192.168.1.1: Destination host unreachable.
Reply from 192.168.1.1: Destination host unreachable.
Reply from 192.168.1.1: Destination host unreachable.


I asked him how long it had been like this and he couldn’t remember. Wouldn’t you have done something about it before now?! I mean… honestly!

I advised him to purchase some microfilters :)