I've just had a big conversation with Mum about moving out.
I'm not sure if I feel ready yet to discuss it here, so I'm making this post mainly as a reminder to myself to talk about it more in here at some future point.
In other news, my laptop is back. It actually came back on June 28th, but I hadn't posted about it until now. It would have been back a whole week earlier but I needed to do something and I forgot to do it for an entire week. Oops.
Yay laptop!
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On Monday, we finally got our phone line working, and with it, our Internet connection, which had been activated on Friday but had lain dormant until the phone line was fixed. (Turns out this place had two separate phone lines running to it, and BT had activated the wrong one. We were completely unaware that this was the case, having not found the socket for the second line - which was in my room. Apparently that one had been working all along. The engineer who came out got it all fixed for us, though, by switching the service from one line to the other.)
Which means I have Internet access now - real, full Internet access. :D ( I'm currently having some technical issues, but I have a workaround for them, so it's all good. )
In other news,
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nall and
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eclective arrived last week - Corin on the 17th, and Nall on the 18th (bringing an
explodingferret with him). Ferret's been here all week and is still around for now, so we haven't yet seen how everything's going to go with just the three of us. Ferret has sorted several major problems for us so far, though, which I'm not sure we'd have been able to do ourselves. (Including replacing a hardwired wall socket in the kitchen with a standard three-pronged one, allowing us to replace our current washing machine with a washer/dryer that we had ordered and then failed to have connected due to the hardwiring.)
The graphics card in my computer is on the blink and has been since before I moved; I tried to get it fixed before I moved, but there doesn't seem like there's much that can be done. I do, however, have workarounds for this that allow me to carry on a semblance of a normal life, as long as I don't actually use my video card for anything more than basic functions. (So, no 3D, essentially, which rules out most games; even the ones which don't use 3D, because most of them use something like OpenGL, which has to be done in software rather than relying on the hardware acceleration I would normally get.) I also have disturbing patterns on the screen but I can live with those until I get a good card.
Examples of stuff I can do given the above:
* I can watch movies and YouTube, but I can't scale them without experiencing a drop in frame rate. Meaning, no full-screen movies for me. (The drop isn't actually too bad because I have a pretty good CPU, but it's definitely noticeable.)
*
I can (as far as I can tell so far) play games in DOSBox fairly normally, though again I have the frame rate issue if I go full-screen. Scratch that; it depends on the game. Curiously enough, Quake is better in this regard than an old Mille Bornes game I have for DOS. It makes sense when you realise that Quake by default uses a lower screen resolution, whereas my Mille Bornes game uses a high-resolution mode. (DOSBox scales to get it to *my* full screen, though, so I still have that problem.)
* I can't do anything involving OpenGL at all without experiencing a massive decrease in frame rate from normal. This is because I'm having to rely on OpenGL from the software renderer included with
Mesa, and while my CPU is good, it's not designed for this sort of thing; that's what hardware acceleration is for. (for those wondering, when glxgears is maximised on my 1680x1050, 32-bit colour screen (but with a bit of space taken up by the window decorations, kicker, etc), I get 14fps. You can imagine how much slower it'd be with a *real* app...)
* I can do everything that I could before that doesn't involve the card's advanced functions - IRCing, browsing the Web, Skype'ing, using virtual machines, etc. Most things, in other words.
So for now you can consider me back as normal for purposes of online-ness. I may be offline more than usual in the new home anyway because I have things I can do now rather than being on the computer all day. For example, I need to find laser hair treatment places, and I need to go shopping more, and such. (We're currently out of toilet paper, we're running out of milk again, I need to buy a dressing gown and some more shampoo...)
So, yeah, life's pretty busy. :)
I'll probably write more later but make it access-only for various reasons. For now, though, I'm off to sleep as it's now 2:40am and I've apparently spent a whole hour on this entry. ;p 'night!
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So, I guess people are wondering how I'm doing, hmm? There's a lot to talk about in this post, so I'm doing something rare and putting it under a cut. Do read it if you can, though.
This is a repost; I originally composed and wrote this on my phone, but for some reason all the newlines disappeared, making it unreadable when it was posted. I sent this from my phone to the laptop and leeched off an unprotected wifi signal for a second to post this. >:D
( Summary: Clothes and shopping and toilets, oh my! )
Anyway, that's my big update of doom. As I said before, I'm posting this from my phone. We don't yet have a landline service as far as I know, therefore no Internet. (Hence my note in the last post.) We'll start to have useable Internet on the 17th though, yay. :)
Anyway, signing off now. *salute*
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Only one day away now.
Just a general note to say that for the first week after the move, I'm likely to have limited Internet access, so you may not hear from me a lot.
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In a moment, I will walk out the door of this building, and from that point on, I will no longer be an employee at TNAUK.
Then there's the weekend, and on Monday, I will move to Reading to begin a new life.
Wow.
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optimistic
weird