Neil Hopcroft

Life assurance, not life insurance

“U.S. Bunkers is dedicated to providing the most ultimate, portable and multipurpose habitat for protection and security from threatening and non-threatening situations.”
(thanks to evilmattikinz)

“No, really, I’ve got this great idea for a film…”

“The international survey of 900 taxi drivers reveals that absent minded passengers are leaving…a harp, a throne, £100,000 worth of diamonds, 37 milk bottles, a dog, a hamster, a suitcase from the fraud squad and a baby”

Today I’m no longer full of rant. I’m full of Tescos Lemon and Ginger sauce instead. Thoroughly recommended, though I don’t feel particularly like moving very fast with quite that much of it inside. Ooops, I’ll turn into a porker if I’m not careful.

Depressed to see the snow melting outside when I woke up this morning. Glee returned once the blizzard started, sadly it was only a baby one and didn’t settle much during the day. It was enough to scare me into finding my scarf though.

Yesterday I was full of rant about the state of the modern world. Again. Today Microsoft aren’t making anything better – this is a beautiful piece of obvious engineering, in order to get your sparkly new top-of-the-line disk to work on Win2K you have to search around on their website for an obscure set of instructions to change the registry.

But that is not the rant I was aiming for. Out of town shopping centres are. I’m prepared to believe that Cambridge is somehow a special case because it has more serious parking problems than many places (howcome? Maybe thats /another/ rant?). So the thing to do is to go to the out of town centres. Theres a sprawling complex along Newmarket Road, including a whole series of the usual suspects, PCWorld, Halfords, Courts (as was, thats just empty now), MFI, etc.

I parked near Maplin, not that near, since everyone is fighting over the spaces close to the shops. This, surely, only actually makes a difference if you are intending to buy something heavy, or have difficulty walking, or something, but people fight over the spaces anyway. Which makes it quite difficult to get across the carpark since they’re all looking for the next space rather than paying attention to not running people over. And, of course, the few footpaths there are head in completely the wrong direction.

Then, since Maplin didn’t stock the thing I wanted (but at the time I didn’t really know what I wanted so it wasn’t particularly helpful to try to ask) I headed over to PCWorld. Easy.

Apart from the fact that the whole area has been designed so its ‘easy to drive around’, without any thought for pedestrians, sure, theres a footpath, but that hugs the edge of the buildings and is more there for fire safety requirements than to actually be used.

Then theres the crossing to let you get to the other half of the complex, theres a fairly busy road through the middle.

Whoever ‘designed’ this has never walked anywhere in their life, you start by pressing the button to say you want to cross, but theres no man on the other side of the road to tell you when you can go, you have to look at the little man above the button, you can’t see the lights for the cars since they’re all shielded from you so you have to rely on the beeps. You only get four or five before the traffic starts going again. Assuming, of course, that the traffic is taking any notice of the fact there is a crossing there at all, since its only a few metres from a roundabout and theres invariably enough of a queue that everyone is quite impatient by the time the pesky pedestrians start pressing their buttons.

Then theres the battle with the people who’ve decided to park on the pavement because theres no parking spaces close to their target shop – I wonder how many of these people drive from one shop in the complex to another?

Getting back to the car and attempting to escape the whole area before going mad found me in a 10 minute queue to get out of the car park, due to some spectacularly badly timed lights.

How can we stop this madness before its too late?

Killer application – “Brad Pulaski had died of blunt trauma to the head after being repeatedly bludgeoned with an iPod, a popular MP3 player produced by Apple.”

Ooo, got one, an ATI 3DCharger, (c) 1998….RageII+DVD, whatever that means….or a Diamond FirePro 1K of similar vintage…anyone know about running either with DX?

Still wrestling this machine, trying to get a good boot out of it. Progress so far is that Win2K-AS boots fine on first install but as soon as I install DirectX9 it keels over with exactly the same symptoms as WinXP/2K3-AS. Which kinda suggests its a DX/Graphic driver problem of some sort. So I’ve downloaded new drivers from Abit, ready to install now. Not sure where to turn next (I’m reasonably confident new vga drivers aren’t going to help). Probably dig through the big box of useful things to see if I’ve still got a PCI graphics card there somewhere…doubt I’ll have anything manly enough to have DX drivers, but its worth a go, isn’t it?

Now got a microphone, so can Skype properly…if you’re into such things my name is ‘neilhopcroft’…now if only I could get it to route through this bluetooth headset….

Anyone got any clues to help me track down why WinXP isn’t booting on my shiny new box? I think I’ve narrowed it down to graphics drivers (Abit Radeon X600Pro256) or networking (builtin gigabit ethernet, or, more likely, firewire networking), but sadly even safe mode isn’t working any more, so I’m a bit stumped. Just installing Win2k atm, to see if that behaves better.