Blog: The Life Of A Supreme Ruler

Busyness

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• General

— orudge @ 20/09/2007 10:03 pm

Well, it’s been a busy few weeks. I moved up to St Andrews last Wednesday, and got the house sorted out nicely. It’s a very pleasant house, roomy, and suchlike. All good so far. On that night, a friend came over, and unfortunately, a drink got spilled over the power supply of my computer. Whoops. It didn’t like it very much. It’s pretty much dead, although thankfully, the hard disks are still working, and hopefully some other bits too. Ended up having a fairly relaxed few days after that, though. On the Friday, I ordered new parts for a PC, including an Intel Core 2 Extreme Q6600 quad-core processor, Asus P5B motherboard, a new case, 700W power supply, and suchlike. These parts arrived on Monday, and I got the PC built. However, Windows XP gives a BSOD when installing when the BIOS is in IDE emulation mode for the hard disks, and crashes before it even lets me pick the hard disk when I use the proper SATA (AHCI) drivers. So that’s not so good. I tried installing Vista just now, but it gives me a somewhat odd “Cannot find D:\sources\install.wim” error, which I have a feeling isn’t simply a bad disc, but something more serious. I’m running memtest right now to see if there’s a problem with the RAM. It’s all a bit annoying when things don’t work, isn’t it?

The lack of computer however hasn’t been too great a hinderance at the moment, as I’ve been very busy since Monday with ents stuff. Freshers week starts on Saturday, and we’ve been busy sorting things out, rigging, and suchlike, with more to come. Also had a good few socials though – went bowling on Monday, had a few drinks yesterday, went out for a meal tonight. I’m lighting the opening bop and the Reggie Yates night on Saturday and Sunday with Greg, so that should be something to look forward to – we have various fancy lights hired in for the week. Anyway, basically, a week and a bit to go with freshers stuff, and then it’s straight back to work, with scary third year modules and suchlike. It should be good fun, if a bit challenging – particularly as I’ll be absolutely shattered from all this stuff so far! I could really do with an extra day between every other pair of days, simply for me to rest…

Anyway, back to this computer. It would be rather a pain if I have to RMA stuff, grr. Hopefully I can figure out what it is.

Blackpool!

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• General

— orudge @ 01/09/2007 8:02 pm

Well, as some of you who have spoken to me on IRC and suchlike may know, I went to Blackpool yesterday with Ann, Iain and Phil, to see the Illuminations being switched on by none other than David Tennant, aka the current Doctor Who. Good fun was had, and various artists seen, including Natalie Imbruglia and Natasha Bedingfield, with Dale Winton hosting. Also featured some less glamourous acts such as the girls who did the “Sheilas’ Wheels” advert, and McFly. 😛 (Although Ann was really rather excited about the last one.) The best photos are up on Facebook here and here, although various others were taken too. A lot of them were quite blurry though, due to darkness + 20,000 people in a crowd not being an ideal combination when it comes to attempting to take photos. I’ll probably put the rest up on my blog, along with those TT meet pictures, one day. 😛 I also took various videos, a couple of them are up on YouTube now, such as this one of David Tennant arriving, and this one of him turning the lights on:

I’m heading back up to St Andrews a week on Tuesday, so that should be fun. I’ll probably have to take two trips though (which means three journeys altogether, obviously), unless I can manage to get rid of some stuff! Lectures don’t actually start again until the 1st of October though, so still a month to go for that!