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.

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.

I haven’t been to a concert forever, so I went browsing around for future concerts to see if anything would catch my interest. Lo and behold, I noticed Bone Thugs-N-Harmony were playing here the 15th of October. I just rediscovered my previous love for them a few weeks ago when I heard their newest album by accident. I remember I used to listen to their E 1999 Eternal album way back when I liked hip-hop in my younger teen years. Strange how your music taste changes over the years. I remember when I got into metal after my hip-hop period, and I had the whole attitude of “damn I gotta get rid of my horrible hip-hop listening past now that I like metal” etc.. I think it took me a good few years to realize that it was pointless to try and block out certain genres for no reason, and that you should just listen to whatever you fancy without worrying about that sort of stuff. Ah, the teenage years…

Well anyway. So even though the tickets were ridiculously priced (~50 euro), I couldn’t help myself, and bought one for myself. It’ll be nice to get out for a night and enjoy some music, it’s been way too long since the last time.

I thought my utorrent was acting up today, because instead of my normal max speed of ~880kb/s or so, I saw that I was getting 1.1mb/s while downloading the 720p version of last night’s Prison Break season premiere. It was no fluke however, as I discovered that my ISP has upgraded our speed once again, from 7mbit/1mbit to 10mbit/1.25mbit. Fucking sweet!

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

I received my camera on Saturday, so I’ve been playing around with it since then. It sure is quite different from your normal point and shoot cameras, and pure heaven to use compared to my old one. Still learning and experimenting, it’s been fun so far. If you should ever want a digital SLR camera, then I can only recommend you get this one, as it’s pure awesomeness.

I’m still rather clueless when it comes to real photography, if you want to call it that, but I feel I learn something new every day at this point. It should become a nice hobby. I remember I really enjoyed the few times I got to use one of the cameras at our disposal (a Nikon D70) when I did my civil service. Specially fun to have one of them published in the internal magazine, even though I didn’t get the credit for it. I think the hardest part will be (and has been) how to get a proper sense of the interaction between shutter speeds and aperture stops.

Anyway, today I ate 16 packs of PEZ refills for breakfast. I’m completely addicted to them — I buy them all the time, whenever I see them in the store.

I got my Canon Digital Ixus 7 years ago when it first came out, and I’ve been stuck with it ever since. It’s safe to say it’s pretty worn out and wonky by now. The battery lasts about 10 pictures after recharging it, not to mention that the camera is simply old technologically and function wise.

Figured it was time for a change. I just noticed I had received my tax refund in my bank account today, around 1000 euro. Awesome. I quickly browsed around for the cheapest place to buy a Canon EOS 400D (or Digital Rebel XTi if you prefer), along with a 18-55mm kit lens and a 1Gb CF card. It’s now on its way to me, yay.

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.