Comics

A Boring Post

On 17th March 2011

St. Patrick’s Day

Today is an international holiday of sorts. That’s right, it’s St. Patrick’s Day. A day to celebrate the birth of a man who was incarcerated in Whales for a long time, then travelled to Ireland to spread a religion that would, eventually, tear the country apart.

So, every time I have sex with my wife she HAS to get pregnant?

Not in my religion. But, yes, i your religion she does.

Oh, I see.

That SHOULD be the way that argument plays out, but for some reason, it never is. Weird.

A holiday which is usually celebrated by consuming a ridiculous amount of alcohol, mass vomiting and the wearing of green things.

What did you do today smartass?

Well, over the past few days I’ve had a minor technical problem which has hindered my ability to blog, tweet, post, and other Internet verbs.

I’d ordered the components for a new PC build last week – I say “new PC build” it’s more of an upgrade, except that I’ve only replaced everything but the drives and chassis – and waited for the delivery of my new PC components on the Friday. When they finally arrived, I tore them from their packaging (like the child that I am) without bothering to check the invoice (as you do), and began assembling the pieces.

It wasn’t until after it was built and ready for it’s first run, that I noticed something was wrong.

It wasn’t booting.

I consulted the motherboard. Checked all of my wiring. Took it apart, and built it again. Checked the motherboard manual.

Still nothing.

Then I noticed a little red LED was lit up. I checked it out in the manual. It turns out that this LED lights up if there is a problem with the RAM. But it can be remedied by pressing a small button next to it. That way the system will shut down, and attempt to set itself up correctly to use the installed RAM.

Still nothing, after an hour of testing different settings. So I took the RAM out to inspect it, making sure there were not bent pins, bad contacts of even any smells coming from them. Then I realised that the RAM they’d sent me didn’t match the RAM I’d ordered.

I consulted the invoice. I was right. they had, indeed, sent me the wrong product.

I called them, the first guy wasn’t sure what to do, so told me to call the support team. I called the support team, the guy there said that it would have to be returned and that I had to call the returns department. He hung up before telling me the number to call, so I called the first number again and asked for the returns department.

Eventually, I got through to the returns department. After a 5 second phone call, I was sent an email with a RMA code and an address. I had to send it back to them, and pay for the pleasure.

A few days later, I received an email telling me that they where refunding the cost of the RAM. So, I called to find out if they had any more they could send me instead. It turned out that they didn’t even have the specific model in the first place, ad that they should have never taken my order.

Nice.

That’s the second time I’ve ordered something from this company and they’ve messed it up both times. Needless to say, I shan’t be ordering from them in the future.

Anyway, I ordered some more RAM from a reputable supplier yesterday, and it came today. So I’d spent most of the morning chilling out on the couch, waiting for delivery.

This gave me plenty of time to finish reading my friend’s story (see my previous blog post about it), and get quite far into both “Never Let Me Go” and “The Nuclear Platypus Biscuit Bible”. I would recommend both to anyone. “Never…” being a piece of very well written Japanese literature and “Nuclear” being one of the funniest books I’ve read in the longest time (think “Hitch-hiker’s Guide” meets “The Old Testament according to Spike Miligan”)

Then, exactly 1.4 billions of 6.1 trillions of 1/1,000th of a jiffy before the SpapOopGannopOlop could respond, the God-Biscuit and the Paradise Frog merged into the Rudimentary Kumquat. Seething with unfettered cosmic energies of Basic Is-ness, they absorbed the nearby binary star-system and sprouted luxurious locks of hair from every pore and concavity of the kumquat’s pulpy and flaccid body.

I mean, how can you turn absurdity of that calibre down?

Addednum

I’m publishing this on the latest RC for Firefox 4, and as such they’ve not bothered adding support for spell checking by default. I know that you can install them, but I don’t want to have to rely on Firefox to tell me that my spelling sucks, I prefer to find out on my own. A manual spell check before posting something is always better.

Also, if anyone knows where I can purchase the original (and I mean original Mirage) TMNT comics, please let me know.

If you don’t know what TMNT means, then I hope English isn’t your primary language. If it is then please, kindly load yourself into this cannon, ready to be shot into the sun.

Note To Self

Use fewer commas.
Recommend has two m’s and one c.
Literature, literally has two t’s.
Take over Universe
Buy milk

Alien Abduction, Dogs and Comics

By GaProgMan

On 27th February 2011

In Life

As you may have guessed, this blog post is about (amongst other things) the film “Paul”.

A Micro Sized Alien

Paul is a very good film, brought to us all by the masterminds of Pegg and Frost. I’ll save you from the plot points and quotes, but rest assured that it is really worth seeing.

One not so great thing about the film is the amount of sci-fi and film references – as with most of the films that Pegg has written. These range from lines from classic sci-fi films and scenes from classic TV shows. Aside from that, though, it’s an amazing film – well worth seeing.

Non-Development

On a related note, I’ve been watching all of Arrested Development recently. It had been over a year since I’d last seen Arrested Development season 2, then a friend of mine had leant me season 3. A few weeks later, I bought the DvD box set.

THEN, I realised that there’s a film in pre-production.

The Problem with Box Sets

My problem with box sets, is that I always seem to buy them at the worst times. Either I buy a box set mere days before it goes on sale, and drops to a fraction of the price; or I buy it days before the next box set in the series comes out.

My addiction is to “power watching” – watching an entire season of a TV show in a day, or in large blocks; which isn’t possible when you buy a DvD with a limited selection of episodes.

An example is Martian Successor Nadesico: When it was first released on DvD, each volume had 4 episodes on it. This meant that, since I started buying them as soon as they where released, I couldn’t power watch them. THEN 6 months after the final DvD was released, ADV released a box set.

Anywaaay

Aside from that, it’s been a pretty standard few weeks for me. I’ve been at a few interviews recently, but as always I seem to have missed out on each.

I seem to have taken a hit against my self-confidence, too. I’ve been feeling quite useless for a few weeks now. I’ve been asking myself how useful I am, recently. I also feel like I’ve been stagnating recently.

I don’t feel useful recently because all I seem to be doing for anyone is lending DvDs, suggesting music, or spreading the knowledge. I feel like I’m stagnating, because I haven’t been doing much programming recently, and I feel that my programming skills might be weighing.

Oh, well.

Interviews, Homework, Literature and Music

By GaProgMan

On 9th November 2010

In Life, Literature

Today I’ve been having a relaxed day. It started with a phone call about an interview on Friday, followed by Enchilada’s, some DvD entertainment and some light reading – so far, that is.

It seems that I’ve got an interview, for a job I know nothing about, on Friday afternoon at 2:45pm. Because I’ve been unemployed and claiming unemployment benefits for six months, they (the benefit people) have decided that they’re going to apply for jobs on my behalf – maybe they think I don’t know how to apply, or something. Either way, they passed on my details on Thursday, and the company managed to get in contact with me this morning. Because this job was applied for on my behalf, I have no clue what the job entails. The gentleman I talked to this morning said that he’d send me some information on the role, in the post. That was nice of him.

My brother had decided that we were going to have Enchilada’s for lunch. He’d even been out and bought the ingredients while I was on the phone with the gent about the job. So, we made them together – as we always do – while chatting about this and that. Although we see each other everyday, we always have something new to talk about. It was about this time I received the classic film ‘Network’ in the post. Naturally, I was enthused and my brother, not so.

We retired with our food, and sat down to watch a little Ultimate Force, and amazingly well done British TV series about the S.A.S. It stars Ross Kemp (of TV Soap Eastenders fame) as the hard bitten but loveable Henry ‘Henno’ Garvie, the leader of Red Troop. My brother has been a fan for a long time, but I’ve only just started watching it. It’s very good.

After we’d finished watching a particularly good episode – wherein Red Troop are sent into a post Soviet Era country to rescue two little girls who have been kidnapped by Russian loyalists – I streamed the new Michael Jackson song (‘Breaking News’), as my brother had not heard it yet. I’d recommend listening to it, even if you’re not a fan. Here is a link. However, I’ve been having trouble streaming it since it when live yesterday. I figure that they’re having bandwidth issues, as everyone and their mother have been trying to stream it since it when live.

After that, I decided that I would partake in some reading. The only question is, What to read?

Some of the books, I have to read

As you can see, dear readers, I have quite a few books to work my way through. I concede that the top three are DvDs, though. Still that’s a quite a few books to get through before the years end. I wouldn’t mind, but I’ve had the Charlie Brooker ones since May/April time, after a friend of mine lent me them (‘These’ll keep you busy till you find a job’, he’d said). I’ve only managed to get half way through the first of his (Screen Burn) so far. I’m on my second read through of ‘Moab is my Washpot‘, and I frequently re-read sections of Oscar Wilde’s Complete Short Fiction.

That’s not all, though, dear readers. I’ve a stack of comic books to read through, too. I’ve recently gotten my hands on the classic Shadowman and The Mask comics. The first thing I noticed about The Mask comics is that they’re completely different to the film that was based on them. I wont spoil anything for anyone who wants to read them, though. The same with the Shadowman comics. Except it wasn’t a film that was based on them, it was a very dark video game that was based on them.

Right, I’m going to sign off. I’m not sure what I’m going to read, but there you have it.

Jamie's Blog

The ramblings of a programmer with a little too much time on his hands

Tag: Comics