The problem with these black holes of updatelessness is that it becomes hard to remember what the hell has happened since the last time I wrote. My relationship with Tina is amazingly still intact, though I still keep wondering to myself every now and then why she puts up with me, silly girl. We’ve had our ups and downs — a very big down just recently in fact — but I think it has only made me realize even more how much I love this beautiful and wonderful girl with the cutest hiccups ever. Also, I should hire a professional bowling coach so I don’t get my ass whopped the next time we play bowling together. And no, I won’t tell you my score, shut up!

I sent my XFX GeForce 8500GT in for a replacement, and I got a ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT in return. Initially I had the most annoying problem with the ATI card; every time I rebooted I’d get a blank screen and the monitor would turn itself off. Booting into safe-mode helped, apparently the drivers got messed up every time I’d shut down, so I’d have to go into safe-mode, uninstall drivers, reboot, install drivers, reboot again and voila. Then if I shut my computer off I’d have to repeat the same process again. A bit of a bitch to say the least. I have no idea how it got sorted out, but it just stopped happening eventually thank god.

In WoW-related news, my mage pwns (well excuse me, but it does!). I’m basically stuck with it upgrade wise, as the notable upgrades I can get at this point are all from Mount Hyjal and Black Temple content, which my guild has not yet progressed to, though we plan to start on MH this week. I’ve got my warrior up to level 65, where it has been stuck forever now as I really hate the slow leveling process in Outland. My rogue is currently 62, pretty much stuck with that as well. My other characters are still lingering around the 30 range, easily the most painful place ever. Not sure which character I’ll concentrate on next.

I really was hoping to write something a bit more interesting when I sat down to write this post, but this is all you get, sorry.

So time for a little update I guess. Nothing out of the ordinary has happened (how unusual), but the last few weeks has been great nonetheless. Tina has stayed with me for quite a few weeks during this month (my last post about her apparently being a bit overly dramatized) and it has been wonderful to have her with me. Still playing WoW together, taking walks, watching series/movies and the usual things.

She’s currently staying at my place for an undefinite duration, unfortunately not a very positive reason behind it. Last monday she asked me if she could come over, it sounded like something was up, which was confirmed when she got here crying. Long story short, she hasn’t had the easiest life in the world and doesn’t have the best relationship with her parents, and this time they had a bit of a serious fight and she just couldn’t stand staying at home any longer. So yea, not sure how long she’ll stay here, but I don’t mind it one bit at least. I just wish I could do something, I feel a bit helpless in it all. I can’t really do much more than feel sorry for her for having to put up with everything and let her stay as long as she needs to. Apart from that, the last week with her has been rather nice, she seems to be dealing with it all in a pretty good way luckily.

After ordering a new power supply for my computer last month, I decided to also upgrade my computer a little bit in the process as I had a little money in the bank left over from my birthday/christmas. Considering that my computer is getting quite a few years old now, it was a nice little noticable upgrade, just by buying some current mid-level parts.

EPoX EP-9NPA+ 939 —-> MSI K9A2 CF-F Socket-AM2+
AMD Athlon 64 3200+ 2.0GHz —-> AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+ 2.8GHz
TwinMOS PC3200 DDR-DIMM 1024MB —-> Crucial DDR2 BallistiX PC8500 2048MB
Leadtek 6600GT 128MB —-> XFX GeForce 8500GT 256MB

Of course I had to run into problems… ugh. Any 3D game would freeze the computer completely (no way to alt+tab/ctrl+alt+del/whatever out of the game) at seemingly random times. I did all the driver updates I could possibly think of to no avail. Even though it’s a silent card with no fan, it’s definitely not a heat issue either as it has been barely warm to the touch even after heavy gaming sessions. Another strange thing was that it refused to output 75hz on my CRT monitor. I took it out and replaced it with my old 6600gt card and it worked flawlessly, so I’m currently stuck using my old card. Gonna try replacing the XFX card and see if it was something with the card itself, or if it’s some weird compatability problem, hopefully I can replace it with another silent card in the same price-range from where I ordered it. Luckily, with the CPU and memory upgrade, my old graphics card does the job quite nicely in WoW, which is pretty much the only 3D game I play anyway.

Currently reading A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami, lovely so far. Only the third book of his I’ve read, but I’m already in love with his stuff, can’t wait to read more of it.

Early this week my power supply died out on me, again, only 1 year since it happened the last time and I got a replacement. The first one I got lasted about 2 years before it died on me last year, then when I received the replacement because of the warranty it was defective on arrival because of some messed up cable connection, and now it has died yet again. Needless to say I didn’t bother replacing it again, and I plan to stay far away from any NorthQ branded products in the future. The most annoying part was that I was doing the current daily heroic dungeon quest (say what?) in WoW, and just as we reached the trash mobs before the last boss my computer just faded into complete blackness and silence. Hopefully the random people I was grouped with didn’t assume I was an asshole that just quit without saying anything.

I ordered a Corsair VX450W, and it didn’t take too many days before it arrived here and I got my computer up and running again. So far so good. As a sidenote: the Corsair VX450W is the best smelling computer part I’ve ever received. Don’t act like you don’t smell your packages too.

Yesterday I went out with a couple of friends and had a few beers, it must have been months since I last got drunk, ’twas nice. Definitely noticed the lack of drinking as I laid down after coming home, as even after just a six pack or so my head started spinning in that god awful way it only does when drunk. You know when you can’t control your vision and it keeps shifting to the side, then sort of “resetting” before it start shifting and drifting off to the side again? Well whatever.

Also, today was my birthday, yay me.

Well howdy there. There isn’t really much to update I’m afraid, that is not to say that I haven’t had a good time these last couple of weeks, because I certainly have. Tina has stayed over for days on end, on several occasions during the last few weeks, and it has been really great having her here. Watched movies and played lots of WoW together, as usual — and it has been fun.

Christmas was rather uneventful. We’ve usually had a couple people from the family over during Christmas eve, but now that my dad passed away it didn’t really seem the same, so it was just me and my mom and uncle together. Strange how as a kid I was looking forward to presents like crazy, but now it’s not quite as exciting (not that I mind getting them!), and now it’s more fun to figure out gifts to give to other people instead. I fulfilled the male stereotype (i.e. being boring and unimaginative) and got Tina some sexy underwear. My oh my, did she look tantalizingly good in that.

As for new years eve, I completely slept through it, go me!

Bought myself a nice Christmas present; The EC Archives: Tales From The Crypt Volume 1 + Volume 2, along with Vault Of Horror Volume 1. I remember reading “Iskalde Grøss” as a kid (it was the norwegian name for Tales From the Crypt more or less — though it was actually composed of various other E.C. Comics series as well. A sort of potpurri of horror comics if you will), and how incredibly awesome the drawing and writing was. I was pretty young at the time (wohoo for kind parents that never really set any limits) and they scared the shit out of me, but I still read them. Ah, good times. Can’t wait to get those in the mail and reminisce.

Hmm what more? Well I’d tell you all about my awesome WoW adventures now that I’ve reached lvl. 70 (current level cap), but this post is boring enough as it is, so I’ll refrain from that.

Happy new year etc.

Funnily enough, even though I’m a complete nerd and spend my days in front of my computer, I’ve been able to keep myself away from World of Warcraft all on my own, despite its attractiveness. Then I actually go out in the real world, be social and meet a girl, and then on Satuday I found myself installing WoW. I started an undead mage while Tina guided me through the most basic things in order to get me started. She started a new character as well, and an hour or two later she told me it’d be nice to sit next to each other and play together, and asked if it wasn’t too late to come here. Of course I said it was alright, so she hurried to get her things together in order to catch the last bus going here somewhere around midnight.

Finally here, we tried getting internet to work on her laptop, but to no avail. The network connection icon would just say “retrieving network address” or whatever it was, and stall for a minute before it failed to get an IP address. I’ve had the issue before with another computer, but I can’t remember what the fuck had to be done to fix it. We tried my mom’s laptop, and it worked instantly on that. Figured I’d try copying over WoW to that computer even though it’s not exactly a powerhouse, but when Tina tried to log in she got a message about how her account has been authenticated before with the Burning Crusade addon, so she couldn’t use the normal WoW. And of course it was impossible to download Burning Crusade anywhere without running into problems with logging in and such things. So eventually we just gave up, which really sucked. I had looked forward to playing with her, it would probably have been the most romantic thing I’ve done in my life, hah.

It was nice to have her spend the night here anyway, we watched Seinfeld, I played WoW on my own a bit, and then we hopped into bed and enjoyed each others company there. Woke up insanely late on Sunday, then like our times together before, we just relaxed together in bed, cuddled and whatnot. Eventually she had to leave, so I followed her down to the bus terminal and said good bye. This last week has been an incredibly happy one.

I never really got into the whole RSS thing, I’ve always preferred to visit the author’s page and read the text in its intended design, and to sort of get a feeling for the differences between blogs, aestethically speaking. Firefox’ and Opera’s feed managers leaves something to be desired, which didn’t really help the cause any further either. I’ve known about dedicated feed readers, both programs and web applications, but I never got interested enough to ever check it out. Using Opera, it has been easy to check up on blogs manually so to speak, as I keep a folder with my blog bookmarks, which I then use the “open all folder items” option on to open all the various blogs in individual tabs. That solution has worked perfectly fine for me so far.

Today, for some reason, my view on RSS changed. I believe it was the single simple mention of Google Reader in a blog that triggered it, though I’m not sure why it was anything special this time. Either way, I went to check it out and put all my feeds in Google Reader, and I pretty much instantly deleted all my bookmarks, and I’m now using Google Reader exclusively to keep up with blogs. I must admit it is a rather lovely way to go on about it, it makes everything so easy to keep track of. If you read more blogs than is good for you, you should definitely check out Google Reader, much love.

I decided to check out Dexter some weeks ago, and so far it seems quite entertaining, but I’m still not completely sold. Unfortunately my Dexter viewing was cut short by the recent release of the Nip/Tuck season 4 DVD rips, which were quickly consumed. Season 4 was wonderfully entertaining, like the previous ones has been as well.

No idea why, but this week I purchased two domains, elastomania.us and elastomania.ws. Will see what I’ll do about those. I was thinking of creating some sort of skintatious/kopasite page where people can host their levels and have the whole automatic updating thing going on, but I don’t know if I’ll have the energy to create such a thing.

On Tuesday I had to help my mom and uncle with staining a house in Jessheim, where my uncle lives. Absolutely horrid work, but it felt sort of good to do something physical, even if it left me sore for days. Using a paint brush up and down with my mouse arm didn’t exactly work out too well. We only got one of the sides done, along with cleaning and scrubbing the three other sides, so the plan is to go back tomorrow and stain some more. I really really hope it rains tonight so it gets postponed.

Also, bought some more books!

• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
  by Lewis Carrol
• The Great Gatsby
  by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Beowulf
• Stardust
  by Neil Gaiman
• Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch
  by Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett
• It
  by Stephen King
• Don Quixote
  by Miguel De Cervantes

Before I headed to sleep last night I had prepared to do an install of Kubuntu on my system, and deleting Windows XP once I had everything set up and working. When I woke up today (or tonight rather, as it was 1:30am) I put in the Kubuntu DVD I had burned the other day before and proceeded to boot from it. A minute or two later I was booted into Kubuntu because of the live CD, and started on the installation part seeing as everything seemed to be in working order. 30 minutes later everything was installed and I restarted the machine and booted into Kubuntu again, this time “for real” so to speak. I knew I had a few hours ahead of me setting everything up, but what awaited me was pure agony.

The first issue I ran into was getting dual monitors working. And people wonder why Linux isn’t more popular… Having to manually edit the X.Org config file to get dual monitors working is not something you should have to do, but there I was. Random googling solved the issue, after maybe 30 minutes or so of work my second monitor came to life. Next up, installing Opera, my favorite browser of choice. Uh oh, what’s that dpkg? Did you say “package architecture (i386) does not match system (amd64)”? Really? Oh great. Yea, granted perhaps I should have taken the step to do some proper investigation before I downloaded Kubuntu, but seeing as I have a AMD 64-bit CPU, I found it obvious to download the amd64 labeled iso. But unlike Windows, running 32-bit applications on a 64-bit kernel is not possible. Well, not without 5 hours of work in config files and/or installing stuff with debootstrap-chroot-whatever-the-fuck.

Well Firefox was installed in the mean time, maybe there was some hope about finding a Opera solution later on I thought. So next up, partitioning my NTFS drives and moving stuff around so they’re all formatted as ext3. Guess what? KDE’s partition manager sucks ass and is the most unintuitive application ever. I did an apt-cache search for another partition manager, but alas, all that was available was a command line thing. Not something I was in the mood to work with, I don’t want to see a line that countains any of the words mount, dev/sdx or fstab ever again. Please get away from me. I just want to move my files from my NTFS drive over to my ext3 partition and then format the NTFS drive to ext3 when I’m done moving stuff over. Why make this simple task so incredibly hard?

Later I discovered that the joy of getting the dual monitor setup working was to be short lived. It does not work very well. You know what operating system handles dual monitors perfectly? Windows XP. It’s pretty much flawless. Watching a video in VLC on the secondary monitor and going into full screen mode should do just that right? No Sir. It goes on the main monitor, and in the wrong resolution at that. KDE’s task bar is of course on top of the video all the time, not to mention the titlebar of the video window as well. Full screen? More like 90% screen.

And you know what’s really quite intolerable? Having to manually edit the X.Org config file to get extra mouse buttons working. Then KDE started behaving even more weird, maybe because of TwinView, I don’t know. Popups from programs, including errors, would show down right on the second monitor, way out of the screen’s viewing area, making them both impossible to read and close. Applications kept starting up hugging the upper right border of my main monitor and I started getting pissed off. I rebooted and got back into Windows XP again, and I felt so insanely relieved.

I really want to migrate completely to linux and use it every day. I want to get rid of Windows. But it’s just not possible. Sure, all these bugs and annoying behaviours I ran into could probably have been solved with several hours of google searches and asking annoying questions in help channels on IRC. I don’t want to do that. I want an operating system where all my mouse buttons work, among other things.

On Tuesday I finally got my second replacement PSU, and this time the cables were in fact intact. I actually put the whole thing off for a few days, I was deathly afraid of it not working when I tried it, so I curled up into a ball and sat in bed with the trusty laptop that I’ve now practically inherited from my mom instead. I really got quite used to it at some point. I’ve never been a fan of laptops, but I am now. I will definitely buy one later into the future when I can afford it, it was delightful to have something portable around.

Today I finally ventured into the real world, I opened up the package with the PSU and got to it. Lo and behold, 5 minutes later when I pressed the power button my computer actually powered up. God, what a wonderful feeling. I’m glad to know that it indeed was the PSU that was the problem as I (almost) first suspected. Had it not worked this time I think I might have started crying or something. I do consider myself quite competent when it comes to both hardware and software related issues, so when there’s something I can’t figure out I get awfully frustrated.

I then almost panicked when after configuring the BIOS the computer froze up right after getting past the BIOS boot screen with the text “Verifying DMI pool data (update success)”. I tried restarting a few times, which only led to the same text, only this time without the “(updated success)” part. Googling the text revelead a lot of forum posts with the same issues, but the amount of various fixes just didn’t help me any. I read a lot of the possible causes, and I was frightened when I read that a dead hard drive might be the cause of it. I’ve got 4×250gb SATA drives, completely full to the rim with data — losing that would have made me want to kill myself. To my extreme delight, changing the boot order of the drives fixed the issue. When the first two reorderings proved unsuccessful it was looking grim, but luckily the third time was the charm and the lovely Windows boot logo appeared.

I’ve spent the last couple of hours migrating back to my own computer, which so far has involved downloading about 10.000 mails (99%) of it being spam), and transferring the files I’ve racked up on the laptop over to my own computer. While poking around the computer when I was installing the PSU and SATA cables, my eyes veered to the back of my graphics card, and I noticed that it has two outputs, one VGA and one DVI connection. And here I’ve been for almost two years, with my CRT screen connected and my LCD screen collecting dust right next to it when my secondary computer passed away. I never thought to check if my GFX card had two connections before, god what an idiot I am. So now I’ve got a dual monitor setup, which is just awesome. It’s also made me realize just how awful CRT screen really are. God the difference between my main monitor and the LCD screen is frightening. When I can afford it I will definitely replace my CRT for a second LCD screen.

The last few hours I’ve scoured my Windows setup to see if there’s anything I need to worry about, as I am just about to replace my Windows installation with a Linux distro. Completely cold turkey so to speak. My mind is leaning towards downloading Kubuntu, but we’ll see.

I finally got my replacement PSU today. Opened up the side panel on my computer, all merry and joyful about finally getting my PC up and running again (granted, if the PSU was the point of failure in the first place). I get to the last connectors that goes to the hard drives, and lo and behold, one of the SATA power bridge connectors (that goes from one hard drive’s power connection to another one’s) is completely screwed up and mangled. The wires are exposed and the whole connector itself (the plastic part) is broken. Brand new, out of the box. Fucking wankers.

So now I have to send this one in again for another replacement, oh joy! Another week or two or god knows how long with this crappy laptop that I not only get to use at random times, but that also sucks ass.

I’m so fucking insanely pissed off right now, but still I can’t help but to smile for myself, because I’m completely overflowing with love, which makes anything else in the world totally insignificant.

A few days ago my PC suddenly died while I was asleep. After 1.5 years of working perfectly it just dropped dead. I woke up and tried to turn it on, but nothing.

My first guess was the PSU, but I tried hooking up an old one I had lying around that I was pretty sure was working, but same thing with that. My next guess was the motherboard, I couldn’t think of anything else, so I ordered a new one. An Epox 9-NPA to be exact.

Got it yesterday, but the same problem persisted. So I ordered a new motherboard in vain it seems. Back to the drawing board. Then I tried fiddling with the PSU again, and it seemed to be dead when I shorted it while it wasn’t connected to the motherboard. Now I just need to test the old one and see if that was dead too for some reason, if it doesn’t work, then I’ll get a replacement for the newest PSU from the warranty, and hopefully that fixes everything. If not… then I have no idea and I’ll just have to get used to living the offline life for a while until I have enough money to explore other components or something.

Being without my own computer is taking its toll on me. I can be without a computer for days or weeks without problems, as long as I know it’s there for me and working when I get back! Having it right next to me without being able to revive it is frustrating to say the least.