Lots more stuff, so lots of things to complain about I guess.

Having got in contact with the insurance company and Acer, someone is coming around to pickup my laptop ac adapter on thursday. No doubt Acer will get the high circle of their hierarchy to run a large quantity of diagnostic tests on the power supply, and then call me to tell me it’s broken. They won’t just do the simple thing of sending me a new one in the mean time.

“… Yes… I really want to be wasting my time complaining about my laptop, instead of enjoying it, and calling you to get a new power supply. No, I’m not trying to fucking scam you, it’s actually. Fucking. Broken.”

I bet they’ll have it in one of their miltary-guarded labs for a few weeks before I even hear anything. Not only that, it costs around £55+ to buy a new one of these. I was hoping to get two, now I’m not so sure.

Anyway.

I got a load of stuff delievered today, one of those things being a Western Digital 500GB SATA drive. Mmm, very nice.

Now, the majority of us know that 8 bits = 1 byte. 1024 bytes = 1 kilobyte. 1024 kilobytes = 1 megabyte. 1024 megabytes = 1 gigabyte. 1024 gigabytes = 1 terabyte, and so on and so fourth.

However, recently a lot of us have become the victim of the new calculation. Marketing companies will now calculate it as all of the values being 1000, not 1024. So you’re losing 24 bytes per kilobyte. Now, that may not sound like much, but my brand new 500GB harddrive was only, infact, 465GB.

So the manufacturers are making money out of you by tricking you into thinking you’re paying for 500GB, but you’re only really getting 465. It was still a sweet deal, but people just can’t be genuine anymore. It’s all about the money, and nothing else.

Well, after a long period of time of my laptop being broken, we finally sent it off to the insurance company. I was delighted to hear that they couldn’t repair the motherboard that the drunk hippy broke, and that they were going to replace it with a laptop that was around £200 more expensive, and of course, 2 years newer.

“Awesome”, I thought, as I waited until I got paid to pay the £50 insurance claim. A good deal, I thought. A pretty top-of-the-range laptop for £50. After all the shit that has gone on this year, and how crap it has been, things were finally starting to look up. I got paid and paid the £50. The laptop was delivered today, as intended.

Now, the first problem I encountered is that Acer don’t actually supply you with any disks, aside the piece of shit Norton Security 2006. When you boot the PC you get taken to their stupid manufacturer Windows installation, and you’re asked to complete the installation by entering some details and such. After that one of their pieces of software boots up and installs and configures all the stuff you don’t want. Bluetooth drivers, Internet Explorer settings, etc.

So, having let that get on with its business, I went to reinstall my own copy of Windows XP Professional. Now, being the organised person I am, I Googled and asked some people if it was possible to install the retail copy of Windows XP Professional that I have from CD, and use the legitimate code on the base of the laptop. They didn’t see why it wouldn’t be possible, and neither did I. However, thankfully, from my search results, people who had tried this had problems. So I learned that I couldn’t do this.

It’s funny how you pay over £900 for a laptop, and you’re paying for the Windows license, yet, you don’t get the disk so that you can reinstall Windows on your own machine. Well, I apologise for not being a n00b. I’m so sorry for not wanting to put up with your bull-shit setup with partitioned drives, and hidden partitions, and Norton fucking Security Centre, you twats.

So, having learned that, I then went about trying to strip the laptop completely of any unnecessary software before I installed my own stuff. Surprisingly I managed to get most of it off, and with a few clicks, also sorted the partitions. Things weren’t looking so bad.

Then, after I’d downloaded and copied stupid amounts of programs to be installed to my desktop, I realised that my power supply wasn’t working. I had about an hour and a half left of battery life remaining. I looked around at the PSU on the floor and saw that the LED indicator wasn’t on. Also, the LED on the front of the notebook wasn’t indicating that my it was running from mains. I checked the power supply and it was stone-cold, so to speak. I unplugged it from my multi-extension and tried it in different plugs. I also took it downstairs and tried it in a wall socket, but to no avail. I replaced the fuse, and that did no good.

So, power issues. Too often have I seen this, already, with Acer laptops. My last Acer notebook had a power issue, although this was due to a part of the motherboard being broken off. However, the battery life was terrible.

I’m going to take the power supply into work tomorrow to see if the tech support guy can give me any help. I’ll also be calling Acer to complain about the quality of their laptops, and be asking for a replacement. I really can’t be dealing with my laptop being sent off now that I’ve only just got it. It’ll take weeks.

I mean, this really is pathetic form. I thought the laptops were tested before being released from the factory. Well, they say tested, it probably means that after a machine has pieced it together, and another has done the installations, another checks to see if the lights come on, and calls that “working”.

These guys really are the parasites of production, the mosquitos of technology manufacturing, and they deserve to be bitch-slapped with a machete for their completely bad form and poor service.

Over the past couple of days I’ve been entering a load of survey results into a database (which I had to design) at work. I’m nearly finished with this, with about 25 pages to go, having done 120 or so.

The survey was generally to collect information on councils in Dorset, for whatever purpose. Now, having gone through over 100 of these I must say that far too many people are completely shite at filling in surveys:

Some of them were edited in the word document which was attached to their e-mail, and then printed. Others were printed and then written on.

With the typed-answers survey, most people wouldn’t even bother deleting the ……… which is where you’re supposed to answer, so it’d push the rest of the information down a line making it very difficult to read.

With the written-answers survey, it was often done very quickly in the worst possible handwriting. Now, I don’t have great handwriting at all, but if I’m writing something that has to be read by someone who’s going to use the data, then I’ll try my hardest to make it comprehendable.

I’d say over 90% of the people who filled in the surveys so far haven’t bothered to take a second and think about the person who’d have to read these (myself and my boss), and therefore they just did them in the quickest time possible.

A few of the surveys had questions next to the questions, as if to show they didn’t understand. An example of this is:

“If your council does have e-mail, is this via broadband?” ???

Now, okay, I understand that not everyone is “computer literate”, but surely if you don’t know the answer to a question – there’s someone you can ask? I had to go and edit my table and form design to include the answers “n/a” and “uncertain” in the dropdown boxes, just to accommodate the useless information from these idiots.

Also, a lot of the people wouldn’t bother reading a lot of the questions, or putting a strikethrough irrelevant answers. Also, a lot of people would answer the same question twice with two answers, like this:

Is this a permanent council e-mail address? Yes
or
Is this the clerk’s own e-mail address? Yes

Wow, thanks for that very useful answer.

This simply goes to show that if each of those individual people had spent an extra 30 seconds or so, it would have saved me atleast twice the amount.

Ignorant fuckers.

This is a bit of a pointless post, really.

Two of the things I’m really looking forwards to:

[Nightmare Before Chrismtas 3D]

[The Pick of Destiny]

Yep. Two movies. I love Tim Burton & Danny Elfman, and The Nightmare Before Christmas is one of my favourite movies of all time. Therefore, I’m really looking forwards to the 3D release of it. And Jack Black is amazing in School of Rock, so there’s no reason why The Pick of Destiny isn’t going to be funny.

I don’t really have much to say in this post. Instead I thought I would make a simple picture of what seems to be the opinion of a lot of people.

Now that I’ve started working, I’m expected to ‘contribute to the household’ at home by paying things like rent, my own busfair and money for lunch. I just started working, and got a week’s pay a few weeks ago. I’ll get a month’s wages in a week or two.

I completely understand why I’d be asked to pay rent and the likes, but it just seems to me that the moment you get money, you have to lose it straight away. I mean, yeah, sure, I’m still going to have money left, but the amount I’m losing is still quite a lot.

I’m going to be losing £80/month on rent, £80/month on busfair and £60/month on food (or there abouts). That’s almost 1/3 of my wages, which is quite a lot, if you ask me.

When I attempt to explain this I simply get “you’d be spending more if you were living on your own”. When I hear that I just think “yeah, but if I was living on my own it’d be worth that amount of money.”. Call me inconsiderate but I really don’t think that living at home is worth £220/month to me. I don’t think living here through the daily arguments, dispute and hostility. The lack of conversation, intelligent topics or anything else which doesn’t go on here that should to make it a better place is worth that amount of money. It makes me think that my Mother decided to have me (well actually I don’t think she did) and therefore she should be here to support me until I choose to do so myself.

The only reason I want to stay at home is so that I can save the money I’m working for to be able to afford the things I want; the things that people have never been able to afford to get me becuase our family isn’t the best off. Now that I’m staying at home it almost seems like it isn’t worth it. At the end of the day, I don’t want to stay in this damn country, and it feels kind of shitty to know that I’ve got to work for a month, feel ill because I’m getting up every morning when I’ve never been good at mornings, and then give that much money away to live with one of the people that brought me into this world.

Now, I’m not saying that I don’t want to contribute to the household, because I do believe that I should pull my weight, as such, and I realise that if I were living alone, it’d cost me a lot more. However. if I were living alone, I wouldn’t have to put up with all of the arguments and everything else that’s shit that goes on in this house. My problem isn’t really with the money I’m going to be losing (even though I think it’s a lot), it’s the atmosphere I’m living in whilst I’m losing that money.

Also, it’s not as if I thought I’d be a greedy bastard and keep all the money for myself. It’s just, after 5 years of not being able to get the things I’d like to get, when I finally get the chance to be able to do that, it’s as if someone is taking that away from me. Well, slowing it down, atleast.

I know posessions are only posessions, but they also lead to memories, and thoughts, and feelings. Not all of my money-spending plans are item related, either; I want to travel…

Recently I’ve been looking around at new monitors. I like my 17″ CRT, but it takes up a lot of space, and it’s quite old. So I think it’s time for a new one.

However, having spent a lot of time looking at new monitors, I’ve noticed that the plauge of the widescreen is dominating the computer market, just like it has with the TV market.

Sure, widescreen is nice, and I see the point in it. However, I like to have a square screen; especially when gaming.

Widescreen tends to make people look fatter and stuff on TV, and it takes a little while to get used to.

When doing things like video editing and design with Flash and Photoshop then more width is very useful, but then, so is more height. However, when you’re playing a video game, I find it’s better to have a square screen.

I just find it annoying that widescreen displays have to completely dominate the market. What about those of us who don’t want widescreen? What do we do? It’d be alright if it was 50:50 or something, but it’s not.

Stupid widescreen.