denyerec.co.uk

Some of you may recall the rather bizarre phonecall that prompted me to count out 60 days of my existence. Well, it expired little over 48 hours ago if my timing is right and lo, last night, I get another call from the same agency asking me if I wished to participate in a free 60 day free insurance scheme, this time to cover private medical insurance covering cancer, organ faliure, heart disease and a multitude of other nasties.

I kindly informed the lady on the telephone, who was awfully friendly, that I had begun to suspect that someone, somewhere, has designs on my wellbeing and attractive though the offer sounded, I wasn’t interested because after the 60 days I would be unable to afford to pay for the coverplan anyway.

So ladies and gentlemen, start your clocks and countdowns, I have another 60 days to survive.

Well, looks like I’d have wasted my time with the 60-day life insurance “trial”, I made it through without a scr…

…atch.

If I had taken up the offer my beneficiaries would be no richer and I would now be locked into a direct debit scheme designed to sap away the last few pounds (Sterling) that I don’t have.

We’ve not yet been visited by the TVLA and people keep asking me what I’m using for my gallery to which I reply “I use a custom script that’s not ready for release.”

I should work on it and release it but I can’t find the energy.

My site has not been hacked.
I have actually uploaded a new photograph.
*Gasp*

I intend to do this once a day and once every 2 days at the slackest.

How long this crazy enthusiasm will last, I have no idea.

musicplasma : the music visual search engine

Check it out now. Absolutely awesome for people like me who live in a bubble and find it hard to find new music due to the lack of a TV or radio.

Though I’m not convinced it’s not really due to the lack of decent current bands…

For those who remember, there are 13 days to go before I can breathe a sigh of relief and know for sure I did the right thing.

For those who don’t? Click here.

Today I had a fiddle with Norton Ghost.
It went horribly wrong.
I have a SATA HDD and an ASUS P4P800 motherboard, and oh boy once it got into DOS did things go haywire. Norton suggest using the switch -NOIDE if you’re using only a SATA drive, which lets GHOST run, but won’t let the program that reboots your PC run.

So what happened?

Ghost creates a “Virtual partition” and makes it the boot partition. It puts some files in here. If you are unable to reboot using GHREBOOT as I was, you are left in a mess. Rebooting only causes the PC to repeatedly boot off the virtual partition back to DOS, with no apparent way of gettng back to Windows.

After a lot of research on another PC, a lot of frantic questions to friends and some wall thumping, I used FDisk to reset the active partition to what I thought was the right NTFS volume (FDisk is a bit funny with NTFS volumes…) and once it (successfully) booted back into Windows, used drive management to delete the weirdass virtual partition and the 2.8g of unallocated space it seemed to have created.

I then uninstalled Ghost.

Ugh.

Some of you may recall a little while back I was building a PC and Overclockers UK screwed up the order. RMA frenzy. Some of you may also recall last week I was building a PC for myself, and EBuyer screwed up the order.
Today, I’m building a PC for my parents and, guess what…
Overclockers UK got the order spot on and it arrived bang on time.

I should pretend it’s for my parents every time I order from OCUK, they seem to get it right then.

For those of you who are interested, it’s going to be a weeny BioStar SFF box, rather nifty I thought.

bowman

That little flash game kept me amused for hours last night when I should have been doing something to make some money.

*sigh*

See if you can beat the PC with wall and wind enabled. Took me ages…