Blurgh, have hundreds and hundreds of photo’s, loads of digital photo’s, loads of regular photo’s that have been scanned in previously, sometimes more than once, sometimes getting half way through a batch and giving up.
We really need to sit down and get them all sorted into some semblance of order and get rid of the duplicates!
he’s insulated the speakers and plastic and he’s going to check with LG (i managed some caps!) fingers crossed.
… arrived about 10 minutes ago, tv won’t play ball and made a little bit of the noise but nowhere near as much as it normally does. anyway he believes us and is ‘on the case’.
with what looks like a lot of velcro.
… no sign of the tv repair individual as yet.
no energy for upper case today. tv repair man (assuming it’s not a woman) is coming around between 2 and 5 to have a look at the tv. the speakers resonate when there’s a specific frequency being played which is usually deep voices (for some reason, without a trace and ncis are the worst offenders although it’s possible we don’t watch enough other stuff to notice it). so they’re bringing some more speakers and hopefully a ‘main board’ to repair the tv.
real shame because i loved the lcd tv, and i hate it when technology fails.
we had half planned to go out for breakfast but grete reminded me they were calling in the morning to let us know when they were coming around, and i had this image of us missing their call, them putting it back to tuesday and me spending my entire two week holiday waiting for the tv repair guy (unless it’s a gal) to turn up.
weather is shit anyway so no paddling in the ocean for us today. grete (and myself i may add) want to try and get to the beach if it’s warm enough and paddle without shredding our feet like we nearly did in brighton. the council in brighton should ship in a billion tons of sand and get rid of that pebble beach shit[1]. i’m sure sandy beaches support more types of natural wildlife, like paddlers and sandcastle builders or something.
so i’m sitting here, in the muggy dampness of the height of the british summer (it’s raining) waiting for the tv repair bloke (unless it’s a lass) to turn up so i can start my holiday for real. which probably describes my life, always waiting for something to happen so i can start my life for real.
and then you look back and think ‘shit, that was life, that i just let go by while waiting for it to start’, or something. i think i read a quote recently from someone, let me see if i can find it, meh can’t find it, never mind, it was really insightful and sharp. basically, stop waiting for it to happen, this is it.
which is good advice, when i look back in a few years i’ll probably wish i’d done just that.
maybe i’ll cherish the day i blogged without using the shift key.
we’re planning to visit tracey and stuart at the end of the holiday, and visit fiona in the middle (although i need to talk to fi and confirm details), there’s the beach (and we may have to go paddling in the rain, and if we do we will, fuck you british summertime), birmingham sea life centre looks neat although the ticket buying process scared me (really, i had nightmares) and we have to go and see hellyboy 3 (no spoilers from anyone ok?). the mummy got bad reviews and i may just wait for it on dvd.
maybe i’ll have another cup of tea in my favourite cup (from lindisfarne which we visited during our honeymoon two week tour of the uk, during which we took in 5, maybe 6 different locations!) or maybe i’ll watch some olympics on tv.
fuck it, i’m on holiday, i’ll do both.
edit: visit to fi sorted.
[1] i have half a mind to start a facebook group dedicated to convincing the uk government to do just this.
Novatech sent the replacement card today, and so the second machine is back up and running with the new card in my main machine. Seems ok, they had to send a 1GB version since they were out of 512MB versions. It’s not quite the same model, the 512 had an HDMI out, this one has two DVI outputs (I think they’re DVI), but I guess I’ll live. Doesn’t seem as bulky as the original one either, not sure if that’s good or bad.
Saturday we got back from breakfast, mooched about a bit, played some Lord of the Rings Online and then poof, monitor dropped into power save mode. I say poof, when of course it was entirely silent. The graphics card just decided to stop outputting a signal. I powered off, and on again, and the machine just constantly cycled through the DVD drives. A few more power recycles and it clearly booted up, but no video output.
Blurgh. I hate computers. I mean my entire job is computers, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it when my own break. I relaxed in the lounge, watched some TV, ate some home made soup to calm down. It’s frustrating when things go wrong, luckily I have plenty of spares. I powered off one of the other machines, and swapped the graphics card in and the dark machine powered up fine. I guess it could have been worse, could have fried everything around it when it went. (Please note, for the geeks among you, I did carry out extensive pre-removal testing to ascertain which device had failed, I knew it was the graphics card).
Novatech are pretty good with returns, but this is the second card (same type/model) that’s failed, since Grete’s died about 8 weeks ago (different fault, bearing went in her card fan) and that makes it doubly annoying. Anyway, got a returns number and we’ll pop it in the post tomorrow. For now I’m ‘limping’ along on an nVidia 8500GT, which feels like slumming it despite the fact that it’s about 10 times better than what I was using only 8 months ago.
I do like Novatech, been using them a long, long time (~1992) and I was pleased they let us return just the graphics card, and didn’t force us to ship the entire machine back despite it being pre-built by them, but this is the third ‘annoying’ thing in the last 8 months. It’s great they have good customer service, but I wish I didn’t have to use it so often recently.
In unrelated news, our LCD TV has started to vibrate and make a disturbing noise when the TV sound plays a certain low frequency. The background music in Without a Trace sets it off and one or two bits of recent NCIS episodes. Argh, technology, it sucks.
Sky+ has really totally changed the way we watch television. We spend a lot of time on the computers, and that meant we used to not watch much TV. We taped a few things we really wanted to see (like Buffy), but even when we had Cable we only really watched a few programs, most of the stuff on TV just passed us by. We moved house, and ended up with Sky, and I started catching an hour of CSI or something before bed, because on Sky you can be sure that at least one channel is playing some form of CSI around 11pm, but we still didn’t really watch much TV.
And then we got Sky+ and honestly, it totally changed how we watch TV. I’m sure any good PVR with a scheduler built in will do the same. We watch CSI (all 3), Criminal Minds, Without a Trace, Grete watches a whole bunch of other stuff like Moonlight, Heroes, soaps. I record stuff I love like Time Team and Michael Pailin stuff and just catch up with them when I can. It’s just so useful being able to record good television and watch it when you want, rather than trying to arrange your life around a TV slot.
Which brings me to good television, I’m sure that I miss loads of quality TV, afterall we don’t have time to watch everything. But we do love our crime drama, CSI (Vegas is still the best, New York is ok, Miama is almost like a pantomime), Without a Trace, Criminal Minds (sometimes it’s hard to watch, but rewarding), Bones. We finished the season two DVD of Without a Trace, I think we’re watching season three on Sky at the moment, but we’ll probably get the boxed set and catch up. I’d love to get all the CSI’s but there’s so many of them, and since we’ve seen them all it’s harder to justify compared to Without a Trace where we hadn’t seen a full season until we got the boxed sets.
I thought ‘I know, I’ll just stick WoW onto my machine and play for 14 days for free, for a bit of a break from EQ’. Hah! 120 minutes later I’m still patching.
Gah.
The GeForce 6600’s arrived last night. Took about 3 minutes to install them – very pleased with the case on the new machines, two slide locks to move and the cards were in.
Much much quicker than the 6200’s as you’d expect. Although I did get two crashes last night in EQ, one bluescreen and one just weirdness where the monitor went off which is a bit worrying. I’ve re-installed drivers and we’ll see if that makes a difference. I’ll be dissapointed if they cause problems in EQ.