Darfuria

Last weekend Mum, Tallis and I moved out of the house that I have been living in for too many years, and moved to a bigger house closer to town, and civilisation. It was all rather unexpected and quite sudden, but we managed to get it all sorted, and now I’m lying on my bed in my rather box-filled room, due to a lack of furniture and storage space. Things are slowly getting sorted, and they are coming together nicely, but there is one thing that is very, very annoying.

Our internet connection.

Now, the landlord of the house asked that we don’t get a phoneline installed, and that if we want an internet connection, he suggests that we use an unsecure wireless network that we can find in the neighbourhood. He actually suggested we do that. I think we should request it in writing, so that we can show the estate agent, or the judge, or who ever. We went against that and called Virgin, as there was already a cable box in the house, and they could get us connected much quicker than having a BT line put in the house, and then contacting an ADSL ISP. So, we called Virgin on Saturday, and they said they could have us connected on Tuesday. Tuesday came, and UPS delivered the world’s biggest box, which contained the modem, router, TV box, etc. I plugged it all in, called them asking us to activate the modem, and sat and watched blinking lights… for hours.

We called them again, and after several “we’ll call you back”s, we discovered that a signal wasn’t being received at our end. I investigated the box on the front of the house, which is where the cable is fed from the CATV box on the pavement, and discovered that the cable from the street to the house had been cut. I was tempted to attempt a make-shift repair, but doubted it would work. So, this means that we have to have an engineer sent out to put in 3m of cable, and they’re not able to do that until the 10th of July, which is pretty damn poor service if you ask me.

Hopefully by the time that comes I’ll have a new desk sorted, my guitars will be on the wall and my clothes will be packed away. We’ll see, though.

Earlier this year I bought tickets for myself and Tallis to go to Download festival. I’d never been to a festival before, and had heard that whilst Reading has the better line up, Download has a much nicer, friendlier atmosphere. Reading tickets were sold out anyway, so instead of searching around for them, I settled with Download. Time passed, and eventually last Thursday came. Tallis and I were all packed, tent and clothes, not much food and nowhere near enough money.

We jumped on the train to Derby, which is home to every yellow car in the world! As some of you may be aware, us youths enjoy playing a game of “Mini” or “Yellow car”, where, upon seeing a mini or yellow car, you punch everyone else in the arm before they can do it to you. Fortunately I stepped in and shouted “I hereby ban the game ‘Yellow Car’ in Derby” and claimed that citizens of Derby are very bitter about the whole game and play “Pink Car” instead.

We jumped on the shuttle bus which would take us from Derby train station to Castle Donnington, where the festival is held. Naturally I jumped in and spoke to everyone as soon as I could, but unfortunately when the bus arrived, we all got split up. We carried our bags around for ages, through fields of thousands of tents, trying to find a spot to pitch ours. I think the whole camping aspect of the event could be a little better organised, but never mind. Eventually we found a spot in White Camp. I didn’t really get the opportunity to take a good picture of the sheer quantity of canvas housing, but it was truly epic.

As there weren’t any bands actually playing on Thursday, the campsite just opens early, we wandered around the fairground and gasped at the prices of food (£4 for a burger, £2.50 for a drink).

Unfortunately throughout the duration of the festival, we didn’t really socialise with anybody. I wasn’t overly bothered about that, because contrary to what I’d heard, the atmosphere didn’t seem that great at all. The entire place was infested with your typical loud, annoying teenager, with a few older people that clearly hadn’t grasped the concept of growing the fuck up, which really disappointed me. I didn’t go to Download for the line up, I went because the atmosphere was supposed to be really fantastic. There were a lot of thefts, a lot of loud, annoying people and there was a lot of violence. I think the entire experience would have been much nicer if more of my friends could have put aside their “I’m not going because the line up is shit” attitude, and come along. Never mind, there’s always next year.

Annoyingly a lot of the bands I wanted to see clashed with a lot of the bands that I’d not heard of, so I didn’t really get a huge opportunity to expand my listening taste. However, the bands that I did see (Seether, Disturbed, Motorhead, Judas Priest, Kiss, Alter Bridge, Biffy Clyro, Bullet for my Valentine, Incubus, The Offspring, Black Stone Cherry, Apocalyptica, Within Temptation, In Flames, Coheed & Cambria, Pendulum, Amon Amarth, The Wildhearts, Children of Bodom) were absolutely fantastic (with a few exceptions).

However, the entire festival ended with a huge anti-climax for me, because Jimmy Eat World and Lost Prophets were the two bands finishing on the main stage on the last day; two bands I absolutely loathe. I didn’t conform to the common activity of throwing bottles at bands I don’t like, instead I left Tallis to see the bands she really likes and went to see some of the other bands playing. I caught Children of Bodom, who were good, but I’m not a huge fan of them, and would have much preferred to see a band that I like on the main stage. Apparently Lost Prophets had quite a big firework display to finish off the festival, which I would have like to have seen had another band been playing. It’s nice that the people who do like those bands got to see them on the last night, but as I paid for both of us to go to the festival and everything, it would have been nice if I could have enjoyed the last night.

Monster, an American company were one of the sponsors at Download. They brought along a bike show, and the most fantastic energy I’ve ever had. It packs something like 35mg of caffeine per 100ml, in a 500ml can. It was so very nice.

The food, whilst expensive, was awesome. The large yorkshire puddings filled with gravy, sausages and mashed potato for £6 were extremely tasty. Pancakes with chocolate and marshmallows, falafels with salad and humous, burgers, chips, potato wedges, pasta, pizza, icecream, Belgian waffles; it was all so very good.

The journey home was a dull one. We woke up on Monday morning, got our tent packed and sorted by 9am, and got back to Derby train station for around 10. I had booked traint tickets with RailEasy, and because I didn’t have much money to spend, I got the really cheap ones, which meant that our train home wasn’t until 18:30. We decided to risk it and jump on the 10:24 train, but had to get off or be fined around £150 to travel to Exeter. We got off at Birmingham New Street and had a 7 hour wait in front of us, with 20p between us. Toilets cost 30p to use.  I actually recall lifting my head from my arm in the waiting room, looking at Tallis and saying “I’m hungry… and I can’t afford to poo!”, which is honestly something I thought I’d never say. Thankfully Tallis managed to contact her Dad, who wired £10 into her account, so Burger King was enjoyed, as was using the toilet facilities, which, I have to say, weren’t worth 30 pence. The 7 hours dragged as there is absolutely nothing to do at the train station. I didn’t much fancy hiking around Birmingham with all of the camping gear either. We were both tired and stressed, and looked awful because we’d spent 4 days at a festival, gathering a dirt tan, without showering. Eventually the train came and we got home, Subway in hand, anticipating the luxury of a shower and a bed.

Download was certainly a remarkable experience, though perhaps not the same as I was expecting. I suppose that’s the problem of imagining what the experience is like before you get there; even if it’s better, it’s not the same. I’m glad I saw the bands I saw, and I learnt a lot about going to a festival. Next year I’ll certainly go to another - whether it’ll be Download or something different, I don’t know.

More pictures here.

Isn’t it odd, the way good things come in blocks?

6 years ago, I think, I moved to the house I live in now with my Mum. I didn’t want to move here. Hell, I don’t think she wanted to move here, but we had no choice, we needed a house. Through the past 6 years I’ve lived here, and not really liked it that much, but, it has made me the person I am. I think that had I not moved, I wouldn’t have become anywhere near as creatively focused as I am now, and I doubt I’d have any of the computing skills I have now, had we lived somewhere closer to civilisation. So I’m not complaining, just setting the scenes.

Due to the kerfuffle that went on last night, it appears that we are moving house to somewhere closer to town - something I’ve wanted to do for far too long. Obviously this news has made me ineffably happy, but it has also made me realise how good things come in blocks. This morning I was contacted by somebody who has owed me money for two months, saying that he is just about to pay it.

In a way, it irritates me.

As somebody pointed out, it does sound like I’m saying “Good things are happening, for fuck sake!”, but that’s not what I’m getting at. Why do all of these good things have to happen at once, like you’ve just been shot in the colon by someone wielding the HAPPY FUN DAY gun? Why can’t they be spread out gradually? I suppose it does wonders for the mood you’re in, but honestly, life and karma has an odd way of treating people; or perhaps it’s just me?

Anyway, it would seem a lot of changes are afoot. I’m off to Download festival with my wonderful better half tomorrow, and when I get back everything might be in boxes. Hopefully including the cat. I really don’t want to leave him behind. In a way he’s one of my closest friends, and I bought him with my very own £15 that I saved when I was 9. He means a lot to me.

You know when you get really fucking angry and you wish you could actually do some sort of crazy Dragonball-Z adrenaline-type thing, and practically explode with spiky blond hair and destroy a fucking city? Yeah, that’s how I feel after using Vista. The developers of the world’s most pathetic operating system should have barbed wire fed through their mouth, out of their arse and be fucking flossed to death.

It was recently Tallis’ 18th birthday, for which, amongst other things, she got a laptop. It’s quite a nice machine, running Windows Vista, which, after the experience I had with my Vista laptop, I didn’t think I’d have a problem with. However, I bought an OEM Vista disk for my laptop, so I had my own install on it, which may have played a part in how well it worked.

Anyway, when Tallis was using my Vista laptop, I enabled sharing on her user folder (C:\Users\Tallis) so that I could transfer pictures and music from my XP machine to the laptop, so that she had them on the laptop. To do this I simply enabled the various file sharing preferences in the Network and Sharing Center, and then right clicked on “Tallis” in C:\Users\, clicked share, enabled sharing and allowed write access so that I could actually copy files. From then I could simply type \\Tallis in the run box on my XP machine, double click “Tallis” and then open Pictures/Music/whatever and copy + paste the files I wanted, no problem.

I was just playing with her new laptop, which has a fucking horrible Vista install on it, courtesy of HP. I followed the same procedure, but I was unable to access her user folder in the same way. When I disabled sharing on the “Public” folder, it disabled file sharing completely. Eventually I shared the Music and Pictures folders, and was presented with a completely different sharing window. When I did that I could access those folders on the network, and write to them perfectly. With sharing enabled on those two folders I tried enabling sharing on the entire user folder. That worked, and I was able to browse her user folders. With that working I disabled sharing on the Music and Pictures folders, but left it enabled on the user folder. When I did that I was unable to access the files.

So, on my Vista laptop (running Vista Home Premium SP1 that was installed by me) I was able to share her user folder in 5 simple clicks, and that was that. On her Vista laptop (running Vista Home Premium SP1 that was installed by HP) I was unable to share her user folder unless folders inside the user folders were shared, which seemed a little pointless. Why share folders twice?

Also, I noticed that the directory tree is completely different. Before, when I typed \\laptop (my Vista laptop) in the run box, I would see “Tallis”, which was her shared user folder. Now, when I type \\tallis, I see “Public” and “Users”. Public obviously displays the shared Public folder, but Users displays “Public” and “Tallis”. Public once more displays the shared Public folder, and Tallis displays the shared Music and Pictures folder that I shared before.

What a huge pile of shit. Why, oh why, is file sharing across the network this difficult and long-winded. On XP it’s not brilliant, but it is a simple matter of right clicking a folder, clicking share, and that’s it. No problems. No hassle.

On another note, the developers of the Creative website need to go through a similar procedure as the developers of Vista, with the whole barbed wire floss thing. Downloading software for their MP3 players is stupid. They have a search function, which allows you to “search for software”, yet when you type in the name of a piece of software they developed, such as “Creative Media Explorer”, you get no search results.

Dear lord I wish I could just recolonise this world with people who aren’t so ridiculously pathetic.