Eriq's Blag » non-awesomeness

Day Twenty Six: Oxford

Selkcip — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 00:28:13 +0000

I’m starting to get lazy with these. I just don’t feel like going into extreme detail. Maybe that’s because I’m writing them late at night right before I go to bed.

My dad had a lunch meeting in Oxford today. I had to get up early so we could catch the train. We spent the day walking around the city. Saw a chalkboard Einstein had written on and the cameras of Lawrence of Arabia and Lewis Carroll. Then we ate lunch at the pub where J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis hung out together. Last we went to the natural history museum where there were a bunch of stuffed animals (the dead kind) and souvenirs explorers had brought back from their exploring. I have to get up early tomorrow because I have to go to work, bleh.

Phantom Shield

Shield Caption

Einstein's Chalkboard

Day Twenty Two: Sleeper

Selkcip — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 00:36:40 +0000

Slept till five something. Spent a couple hours trying to clone my tablet’s OS. Failed. Got out of bed at seven.

Day Twenty: Four Hours Later

Selkcip — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 23:40:48 +0000

I went to bed at four and was woken up at eight on the dot by screaming children outside my room. The dining room is the next door over. After giving up on going back to sleep. I got up and went to breakfast. I made the mistake of saying I wanted tea. I don’t like tea. Then I noticed the orange juice. My mom said she’d be back later and we’d go to the camera obscura that overlooks the Avon Gorge, but that didn’t happen. I played TFTwo until Trung went to sleep. Then sat around for a while before looking for a towel so that I cold take a shower. I got in the shower and tried to close the door, but it decided to fall off its rail so I tried to put it back on, but it didn’t work. I ended up closing it and hoping it would fall on me. Then I sat around some more. Eventually, I went looking for my mom, who decided to come looking for me as well. We went to lunch at a cafe. I got a tuna melt and a ginger beer. Again, ginger ale is nothing like ginger beer. I came back to the hotel and started working on a model that I’ll likely never finish. Around six my mom came back we set out to meet my dad somewhere for dinner. That’s what I thought. Turns out we were meeting him at a reception after his conference. This put me in a foul mood because I didn’t want to stand around and wait for him; I had been working. We eventually got dinner at a posh restaurant called The Shed. The burger was meh, but the chips were good. Still pissed, we walked along the harbor to find some ships my mom wanted to see. We eventually found them. They weren’t all that exciting. Though the replica sailing ship was tooling around the harbor with people on it. On the way to catch the bus back a group of teenagers passed us. One of them attempted to engage me by saying he liked my glasses. Maybe that’s some English insult, maybe they were just stupid. I ignored them. I found out that Fringe is back, but to watch it on Huku I had to install an automatic proxy finder cause it’s only available in the US and the proxies I tried didn’t work. That’s something to look forward to.

Day Eighteen and Nineteen: Fending Off Failure with Pistols in Bristol

Selkcip — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 02:42:56 +0000

I forgot to write something last night because I had to get up early to catch a coach to Bristol. No big loss, I didn’t do anything noteworthy. Today I woke up feeling shitty from not enough sleep. Got ready to go. Took the tube to Victoria Station (every time reminds me of the Tommy song). Walked to the coach station. Got some ice cream and waited for the coach. Sat on a cramped coach for two hours with my ass asleep and a twenty-something talking audibly on the phone the entire way (got some pointers for my accent). Caught a cab to the Bed and Breakfast where we are staying. Got my own room, but the wireless doesn’t work. Had to get a power line adapter. Went out for walk. We went to a cafe. Got lip and a shitty muffin. Then went to look at a suspension bridge from the eighteen hundreds. We passed where a funicular had been, but was now bricked up. I scraped myself trying to throw money into a donations bucket. The fifty pence went too far. It was a bridge alright. On the way back on the other side we saw some people on a metal overlook sticking out of the side of one of the gorge walls. Turned out to be the exit to a somewhat disappointing cave which one had to pay to enter. I’ve seen better and I did not trust the balcony. Got some more ice cream when we came back up. On the walk home we discussed how one goes about finding hedgehogs. I saw a squirrel. Walked back into town to find a place to eat. Smelled something good. Weren’t sure, but figured it must have been the Indian restaurant we passed. Either way it was good. Continued to walk along the high street. My mom kept stopping. Got back and found a cute girl and her parents waiting for the proprietress. Was worried I’d have to try and play TFTwo on my lap. Realized I could move the set of drawers. Played for a while till Trung and Sofa left. Watched Farscape until three in the morning.

Day Seventeen: What Am I Doing Here?

Selkcip — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 01:18:05 +0000

I have no clue. My dad got a desk which means I don’t have to put a shirt down on the glass table to play games. It’s kind of shitty though, cause there’s a wooden shelf where your feet should be.

Day Fourteen: Thames Festival

Selkcip — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 01:28:31 +0000

Today we went to the Thames Festival which is essentially a large street fair along the Thames; go figure. There were a lot of people selling things that I wasn’t interested in like baskets that smelled like reed because they were made of reed. We arrived at a stage just in time for the last fifteen minutes of some sort of Korean dance/song/theatre thing. It looked Asian so I felt obligated to film it. I have about ten minutes after which I gave up. At some point I’ll upload it somewhere. After a lot of walking we eventually reached a section that was like the Santa Cruz County Fair, but didn’t seem quite so disgusting in general. I got a cheeseburger. It was pretty good. We walked a little further and found a man walking on a cylinder attached to an arm that swung it around while he walked on the outside. At this point we didn’t feel like walking all the way back so we caught a bus home. Just now while I was writing this, I managed to semi-brick my N810 tablet and had to restore it. It just finished and is booting. Shit, I have to find all my programs again.

Day Ten: Ping High Noon

Selkcip — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 02:16:00 +0000

Slept four an a half hours. Got up and found the internet had slowed to a crawl. Pining google.co.uk took one hundred and sixty-seven ish milliseconds. I thought that it was a problem with the router again so I tried switching back to the old one, but that refused to work entirely. In short I couldn’t fix it meaning no TFTwo. Trung said he was getting tired of it anyway. That the lack of teamwork was making him lose faith in humanity. If that’s all then he’s lucky. We tried to come up with another coop game we could play. The only one we both could easily get was Synergy. At this point the internet started picking up and I was able to install Synergy in a few seconds. I then had to walk Trung though the steps necessary to get the server working so I could connect. When I finally connected my ping was over nine hundred. It wasn’t long before we turned on cheats because I couldn’t really walk let alone shoot anything without dying. We played for a couple hours until he decided the sun coming up was a sign he should go to bed. Then I took a shower. Then I floated lifelessly for a while until I got the idea I would Photoshop a TFTwo dispenser into a picture from the living room window. I needed to use Garry’s Mod to get a good picture of the dispenser and I thought that I could get an addon thatwould make the dispenser have a display. I ended up getting some other addons which I was then distracted by for a number of hours. I spent twenty minutes trying to back stab a manhack (an enemy from Half-Life Two) with the spy’s knife from TFTwo (I eventually got it). I never got around to the shooping. Finally, Trung and I played some TFTwo. There were some good parts, but it ended of meh.

Like the depth.

NEED A DISPENSA HERE!

Knife fight.

Playing with the AI.

Day Eight: Mission Report

Selkcip — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 01:58:56 +0000

Mission failure. Yesterday my parents went to a flea market and saw a Russian fur hat complete with hammer and sickle insignia. I wanted it. However, I was not with them. My mom said that if I wanted to get there before the crowds did, I should get up early. I got u earlier and then we went to a different flea market…and got bagels. Then around one we actually headed for the flea market I thought we were going to. When we got there there were barely any stalls and no sign of Russian hats. We asked a man selling other types of hats and he said that there was a Russian man who had a shop on a dead end down the road, past a crossroad. We looked and looked, but missed the crossroad. On the way back we asked an antique dealer. Apparently the Russian man killed himself three or so weeks ago, but someone else had taken over his lot which is only available on Saturday when the full market is. I returned home hatless and defeated. I want that hat.

Day Five: Same Old

Selkcip — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 01:03:32 +0000

My alarm didn’t work and I got pissed at my dad for waking me up. I promptly fell back asleep. My mom woke me up again at three to yell at me for not changing my sleeping habits. I took a shower and when I came back found my window and window shade open. She did this back home too, I fucking hate it. I grunted and attempted to close them. I couldn’t unwind the shade cord due to my anger and shouted at it. My mom came in and I got pissed at her. We got mad at each other and I told her to get out and she said that if I was going to sleep in late and be grumpy that she would find somewhere for me back in the States. She then left and lashed out at my dad, asking why I had even come if I didn’t want to be here, as if I couldn’t hear through the walls without trying. I then had a mental breakdown standing in my towel trying to figure out what the fuck I was doing here and with my life in general. I didn’t come to any conclusions. I eventually calmed down somewhat and got dressed as it was six and we were going to see a play at eight. I was still pissed. The play was a farce by Hitchcock of a spy novel (something like that). Performed by only four actors it was centered around that “for another character to come on, one must go off” style of comedy. It was very funny. When we got home I started to watch Alien, but it wasn’t really the kind of SciFi that I like, not that I was scared of it, it just wasn’t techie enough or actiony or westerny. Then I played some TFTwo with Trung.

Day Three: Bad Habit

Selkcip — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 00:39:36 +0000

I stayed up till four last night and then slept for twelves hours. At least it’s not like vacation where if you sleep all day you lose a day of doing things. I sill have six months in which to explore England. Our landlord came over and he attempted to fix the internet situation. I surprised to find that he actually knew what he was doing (he had putty running on his Nokia phone). He fixed a few things like the router only giving out two IPs and it giving the wrong DNS server IP. My tablet still insists on using the first IP address that the router gives out even if it was given to another computer. Unfortunately he wasn’t able to figure out why the internet cuts out randomly. It looks like it might be on the ISPs side. I hope that it doesn’t stop me from playing TFTwo.