bordagen

It has finally happened, I got myself a new job.

No longer will I be living in Middlesbrough either, but rather moving to York and living in Liz’s parents house for the duration of my probationary period at new work. If they decide to keep me on, then we shall seek our own place again. Only this time it’ll hopefully be in a nicer area with less scum running around the streets banging up my car.

With any luck, Liz’s job will get extended to a permanent position and in which case we’ll be proverbially ‘rolling in it’.

It’s all change.

OK, so it didn’t really work out last time, but I am going to try it again.

I’ve signed up to Gratis in order to try and bag myself a (not-so) free iPod Touch. All the offers to complete this time seem to be ringtone offers, so it might cost anyone who signs up some cash (despite it saying free all over the place) but in the end it saves paying £299 for one when I can (hopefully) ‘rely on the kindness of strangers) to fork out a little bit of cash to help me get an iPod Touch. If you feel nice enough to sign up and complete an offer to help me achieve my goal, leave a comment and if you want to sign up I shall return the favour.

You can click on the link in the blogroll to the right or click here to sign up. I have 90-days to get all my referals to complete an offer for me to get my iPod Touch.

Share the wealth…

Yes, I know it’s a total cliche given the outbreak of people finishing new Valve game, Portal. It took me around 3 hours to complete it and, although it was too short for my liking, it was a brilliant puzzler.

I’ve since started on Half-Life 2 and since I never played it on my PC, this is all new territory.

It’s a great FPS which provides challenging puzzles as well as good combat mechanics. But I’m sure you heard it all before from various review sources.

I’ve not yet had a go on Team Fortress 2 as it’s not really my bag – I’m not a big fan of class based combat. I’m sure though when I’ve finished HL2 and it’s expansion episodes then I’ll have a bash on it.

I’d just like to offer my congratulations to Liz who went for a job interview and got the job stright away!

CONGRATULATIONS!!! (and about time too…)

Hahah, am in your account, typing up a blog for you, mahahahahaha.
I am wondering how long this will be up before you see it and how many comment will be made before you get to it as well.

Comments time, you all be nice now ;)

Whilst browsing the web on my lunch break, I found my new dream house.

The only problem is that is in America in the middle of nowhere. Oh, and it’s a decommissioned Titan missle base.

Today I downloaded the new Radiohead album, In Rainbows. Normally I wouldn’t have done this as I wrote them off very shortly after they released Kid A as it was just too weird for my liking.

The band offered this new album as a download from their website under an extremely flexible pricing structure: you pay how much you think it’s worth. So, being the sensible sort that I am, I paid a grand total of £0.00 for it.

First impressions are that it’s easy to listen to, which is a good thing as I can put it on as background music. Not sure if I would class it as good yet as I haven’t listened to the album all the way through.

More impressions later.

I finally had a bit of spare cash since being homeless, so like the wiseman that I am, I took this opportunity to upgrade my computer. Basically, I wanted a new processor. To get a new processor I needed a new motherboard, and then new RAM and then a new graphics card. I also threw in a SATA 320GB HDD to the mix also.

After building my system, I installed Ubuntu 7.04 again as it was on before the upgrade – but this time I tried the 64-bit version. I managed to get it all sorted, except things kept crashing on me and network access was intermittent.

I then decided to-heck-with-it and went back to Windows XP. I was going to put the 64-bit version of this on, but since my network card is discontinued by D-Link, there were no 64-bit drivers for it (and none included with XP), I decided to stick to the 32-bit OS.

A few days passed and I remembered that I had a fully legit version of Vista on my old hard drive (now sitting in a caddy on my computer). Sadly, the caddy wouldn’t recognise in XP due to it being USB2.0. For some unknown reason this happened, despite me having SP2 on. After some looking around, it would appear that the USB2.0 controller driver is NOT included with SP2, only SP1.

Basically, I had to plug my old drive in to Andy’s computer and pull out some systems files, temporarily add them to the registy of my XP installation, grab the data where the CD-Key is kept and decode it from that *phew*.

I am now running my Vista installation again. With my AMD 64 X2 4400+ it runs very nicely. Still quite a way to go in order to get it working.