A day of reckoning

Today I am due to sit my ITIL exam. Early morning train after borked night of sleep is not condusive to an alert brain. I want to go home already :p

Extra Curricular activities – part deux!

So, an update on my neighbours computer. He re-installed it from disk himself and it is now working correctly! RESULT!

Unfortunately, two new computers have arrived to take the place of it. Rubbish!

I’m not sure what the deal is with these machines, I’ve not even turned them on yet, but we’ll see what happens. The chap who dropped them off doesn’t really know what is going on with computers (I fixed his HP, stupid digital tattoo nearly cost him dear when the guy in the computer shop couldn’t fix it and suggested he did a massive upgrade instead. Good job douche bag). Saying that, he’s the guy who fixes my cars so we’ve come to an accord with regards to helping each other out. Lets hope that Sony Vaio’s have a recovery partition too!

Somewhere around fixing these machines I also need to do some extra study for the ITIL exam that I am due to take. ITIL is monumentally boring. I can’t stand the study material for it and it really isn’t vital to have the qualification to do my job. Shame that it is requested and valuable on CV’s. There are too many uses of the word “service” and it gets all melted into one big mess of acronyms and irrelevant descriptions. This has led to us finding any excuse not to do it at work. We’ve considered what we’d do if we won Euro Millions tonight (166 Million! We’d be happy with 100k, we’re not greedy). I think that I would still come to work, I would definitely buy a new car, I’d want to move house at some point and I would love to design my own. Past that I’m not sure what I would do.

We also looked at a video of the Red Crab migration of Christmas Island. Check it out on Youtube, it is insane!

Back to the grind.

Extra Curricular activities

Why do people who don’t know how to use computers have computers?

I find myself struggling to understand why I should have to fix the niggles and virus outbreaks of every person I know (generally for little reward) just because they cannot be bothered to learn how to maintain their machines themselves? In honesty, I don’t mind helping people out, but would it be unreasonable to expect people to do a simple computer literacy test before being allowed one? The number of times where people bring me machines saying “I didn’t do anything, I don’t know where this virus has come from?”

So, I had an instance of this last night, it cost me two hours of my brief evening time (although I have made sure my neighbour is going to do some work for me on the house). He’s got a virus that redirects all search engine results to random sites. I can’t work out what is going on with this as I made him back up his files and then did a factory reset on the laptop. This hasn’t helped and this issue is still present. It doesn’t appear to be happening on his other machines though?

I have spent my morning this morning dealing with the power on and reconfiguration of the virtual environment after an emergency power down last night. This is actually easier to deal with than “can you remove this virus and not delete all my files?”. If anyone reading this has any experience of this redirect issue (my current thinking is that it has also infected the ghost restore partition that is on this dell laptop) please let me know. As it stands I’ve told my neighbour to re-install from disk (we’ll see how he gets on with that haha). I’ll post again on this issue I’m sure. Until then, wish me luck!

My recent acquisitions – Borderlands – Child of Eden

So what am I playing at the moment and why I hear you ask?! (ok, you didn’t ask, but hey, you clicked the link so I will take the liberty of assuming you are at least in some way interested!). My recent acquisitions and hence time-sinks in my rapidly depleting “free time” are below!

Borderlands:

So it is that time of year again when the lovely people at Valve put on a Steam Sale. Thanks for battering my wallet again.

Borderlands is the culprit this time around. I’ve not played it until recently (I tend to be a bit behind on games generally, we’ve got 2 small children and hence not a lot of disposable cash). Purchased for the princely sum of £7.50 with all 4 expansion packs this should give me a large slice of gaming per £.

If you’ve not tried Borderlands, its an RPS (role play shooter) which basically wants you to go places, kill stuff and hoover up loot. I liked games like Diablo/Torchlight where the constant pursuit of better gear is the driver to continue onward and having played many MMO’s this kind of gaming instinct is now almost built in. The combination of this with shooting at, amongst other things, midgets with shotguns is enough to send me into gaming bliss. I’m not sure how long it will hold my favour but I am looking forward to digging in and exploring the lovingly crafted world of Pandora!

Child of Eden:

My Mrs is very generous. She bought me a Kinect! The bundle included Child of Eden which I have been looking forward to as I’m a fan of Rez (RezHD on XBLA is awesome!). We unpacked the device as soon as we got home and Kinectimals went on first so that our daughter could play with “Tiger” (as an aside, she now shouts “xbox, play disc” in an attempt to make it work even when it isn’t plugged in. She’s less than 2!), but once she’d gone to bed I was eager to give it a go.
It is one of the most immersive experiences I have had in a while. The combination of light, sound and movement gets me to the point where I zone in completely and I think the Kinect really assists in  this fact. It is a great experience and the devs have been sensible and put in a mode where you can’t die so the other half had a go and really enjoyed it too. It isn’t the longest of games but I can see myself going back to it again and again and it really is beautiful. Thanks Mrs!

 

Please forgive my slightly rambling style, I’m still trying to work out exactly how/what I want this blog to be, bear with me, it’ll become coherent soon!

I feel that I have been somewhat forced into this!

So good morning/afternoon/evening.

I’ve been a lurker of blogs generally for a long time and I’ve never really felt the compulsion to write anything myself (mainly due to the fact that I don’t feel that I necessarily have anything particularly interesting to write about!). Today this has changed. My partner has taken it upon herself to create this blog for me and goad me into writing!

So what am I going to write about? Well my passion is technology and gaming, So it looks like a good place to start. I’ll make a start at lunchtime today, you’re probably going to read about Borderlands (thankyou Steam sales!).

Until then I shall depart, as there are systems in need of administration and we’re trying to work out why CommVault is not deleting snapshots in our VM Environment!