Plan for Tom Bampton

[13:45] <Guest221> man, I can't believe it's almost the end of January

As Brian Richardson, masquerading as Guest number two hundred and twenty one, so rightly put it ... "man, I can't believe it's almost the end of January."

The first month of 2005 has been somewhat rocky yet has flown by way too quickly. Most of it seems to have been spent without a computer, which has caused me to get way behind with the work that is piling up on my plate and my pile of dodgy and pointless home made hardware to increase.

For those still unaware of my plight, a couple of weeks ago both my main machine and my linux box decided to die at the same time a couple of weeks back. This left me with no computer on which I could do any gamedev, no internet, and thus no contact with the outside world. I actually had to go outside to get contact with the outside world, can you imagine that ? Not only that, I also managed to somehow smash a crystal off a friend's motherboard thus causing their crappy onboard sound card to die. My mum's computer, which I was using for brief moments to check my email and order things from the net, then decided to kamikaze it's hard drive. I managed to avert destroying yet another computer with liberal application of scandisk and leaving the room while it was chugging away. Unsurprisingly, for that week I was known as the Bringer of Death to Computers and all computers no matter how stable would cower when I was near. This was not a good situation to be in considering the line of work I'm in.

Of course, I ordered a new computer the day after my computers died. Or rather, the parts with which to build a new one, which turned out to be a mistake, as the curse still riddled me and no end of teething problems ensued. The worst of which was Windows deciding it would call my boot drive G: and not let me change it. That was nice of it. Have you any idea how annoying not having a C: drive is? Some software won't install, and some software wont work properly once it is. The most annoying of these problems was programs such as Nero and FTP clients that use a Windows explorer like interface lose all their icons, which makes browsing for files extremely difficult. I hadn't realised how much I relied on the visual cue an icon gives, especially when looking for folders, til then. There's a lesson to be learnt there in interface design.

After realising that the lack of a C: drive was too big a problem to ignore, I stopped installing things and reinstalled windows. Unfortunately, but this point I'd already spent a day or two installing things, so reinstalling getting up and running again took a lot longer then it should have. I still dont have everything installed now.

Most of my prolonged computerless absence was spent behind a hot soldering iron. The little thing I built for the PIC BBS GID mentioned in my last .plan has sprouted a couple of temperature sensors (one thermistor and a DS1820), an LCD and probably some other things I've forgotten. A while back I had found and downloaded LCDSmartie , which is a little program that drives an LCD connected to the computer using either the parallel port or a serial port. It seemed like something to do, so I knocked up a little Matrix Orbital serial LCD simulator and ended up with something roughly equivalent of their serial LCDs, and hooked it up to the PIC via the serial port. It was quite cool, seeing my uptime and disk usage on a LCD. Even cooler was seeing it tell me what im listening to in winamp, complete with spectrum analyser. For about 5 minutes, anyway, then it got boring. Part of that could be because of the laptop, though I hooked it up to my new computer this morning for a laugh and was sadly disapointed to find it got boring even quicker. I turned it off when I left the room to make tea and then forgot to turn it on again.

So, all in all, a pretty crappy month. Now the only problem is I'm so behind it's not funny. I'll be burning rubber in February, apart from the last week of it when I will probably be incredibly inebriated (it's my birthday at some point towards the end of feb).

To leave on a good note ... yesterday was a good day. Not only did I partake in the enjoyable task of paying large wads of cash into the bank, but I celebrated by going to the bakery and purchasing for my sole pleasure 1 Prawn Sandwhich, 2 Cream Cakes and 4 Apple Danishes. The prawn sarnie and cream cakes were consumed whilst on the phone to a friend that I was making jealous by talking loudly about my haul of confectionary, and 2 of the apple danishes were consumed shortly afterwards. No, I wasnt a complete pig, I ate the last 2 today.

I would populate this .plan with a bunch of pictures of my computer-less antics, but I cant be arsed to get them off the camera and upload them at the moment. Sorry.