Happy Christmas to the lot of ya, all 5 of you who read this

IT WAS ME, I WAS THE TURKEY ALL ALONG!

Now that all the exams and done and more or less the heavy drinking finished, I’ll be revamping the site hopefully before the new year, just more to mess around with the coding more so than anything, try out a few extras etc… gonna mess around with a whole load of add ons lets see if I can get productive. It’ll also help if I actually finish the dam site lol

Well think about it, it’d be awesome, well minus the killing people bit. But if it was something like evil aliens or a galactic invader of some sort, that’s “morally” ok to kill.  Since I was a kid I always loved the idea of robots, and giant machines to do our bidding. But what if you were that robot, the power of a fission reactor powering you, being able to sense for hundreds of miles around you, being able to link up with satellites to co-ordinate attacks against the enemy. All the time, weird techno, experimental music is playing in the background.

I want to dive head first into the throws of battle with the enemy, massive plasma cannon letting off burst after burst of superheated energy, cleansing the field of scum that oppose us. Swinging massive arcs of chaingun fire, crushing the hoards of chattering aliens beneath my feet. Then to go hand to hand in battle with an enemy equivalent to me. Feel the heat and hate radiating from its scaly armoured skin.

As it’s about to spit a volley blue flame towards my head, I clasp it’s hands, drop to one knee, roll while swinging it, then pushing it back towards its own forces, draw my combat knife, slice its head clean off in a spray of green/orange blood. It falls, crushing it’s own forces. Onwards, crushing the insects below, towards the next challenge.

When I grow up, I won’t be a battle robot, but I’d like to.

I need to cut down on the Warhammer 40K novels.

Sony. What a shower of *insert expletive*. A customer dropped in a relatively new (probably about 6/7 months old) Vaio. It had received a bit of a knock and it wasn’t booting to windows anymore, he tried repairing it himself with the built in OS restore. That aside, it semi-wiped the drive and outright failed then. Ok I’ve no problem with that, customers mistake, probably didn’t read the restore warnings, but he wasn’t too bothered about the data, just needed it up and running before leaving the country, or at least to know what can be done about it.

So anyway, I bring it home, try to boot up using windows disks to do a check disk. No joy, constant “Operating System Not Found” warning, despite setting the order of boot to cd first etc.. So fine, not working, time to take out the drive and check it. Hummm no bloody access to the hard disk! To get to the drive I had to take the entire laptop apart. What muppet in Sony designed this! What normally takes 2 mins to remove a hard drive took 20. I thought maybe they designed it this way to keep customers coming back to THEM for repairs, this is just a really bad design. No regular customer would be taking their hard drive out, so why do it?

I can’t just blame Sony for this crappy design, I’ve seen Fujitsu do it too but it was on their older models. Sony seem to be taking a cheap route in their laptop design and building. I hate badly designed goods, it couldn’t have been that more expensive to add an extra panel for easy access. At the very least it’d make it easier for their own staff to assemble, repair or customise laptops. The only reason I’m ranting about this is that Sony were the expensive, quality laptop, now they seem to be going down the Iqon route. I’ll rant about Iqon another time, actually I don’t think there’s a need. Anyone that has repaired, owned or used an Iqon laptop/pc knows how crap they are and how inept the company were.

rant rant rant

Anywho, besides me ranting about crap, I’m now older, kinda only copped it this morning, when thinking about finances for year 3 of college, may be able to get the mature student grant (if the country hasn’t melted by then).

Gonna try and keep this up to date a bit more, preemptive new year resolution. Anywho back to work and study, exams Monday, fun fun…

Ooo also blood update, got an email back eventually from IBTS.ie, the soonest I can give blood in Athlone is… January. wow

Edit/Update: I withdraw my insults about Iqon, while they’re still crap, they can’t beat HP’s wonder Pavillion DV series. Yesterday I recieved yet another DEAD Hp Pavillion Dvxxxx, I’m into the double digits of these laptops that decided to roll over and die. Main cause of the problem seems to be the Nvidia graphics chip, requiring an entire mainboard replacement. Guess what? Most of these laptops I’ve dealt with are out of warrenty and some aren’t covered by the limited add on warrenty hp offered. A total recall of these units should have been performed. I’m offer repairs on a small scale, I wonder how many hp have recieved of these? Also good luck with their tech support staff, not in warrenty, you have to call a premium rate number, then you have to pay for the mainboard replacement, despite it being a widespread fault. Way to go HP, you now take number one position on manufactuers I hate.

Laptop manufacturers listed by hate:

1: HP - For faulty hardware

2: Iqon - For no driver support / no customer support

3: Sony - Bad design

4: Fujitsu Siemens - Selling loads of cheap laptops with Celerons

5: Dell - Feckin Indian tech support, your last name isn’t Smith, it’s something with 6 syllables, don’t lie to me.