Eriq’s Blag

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Stayed up late again and slept in. Didn’t go with my dad to drop off my application for a tech internship, but apparently it’s a chopshop where they take recycled computers and rebuild them for non-profits. Dismantling and rebuilding computers? Hey that’s what I’ve been dong since I was six…at least the dismantling part. Our landlord finally gave me the DSL info so I fucked around with the routers and managed to get the newer one working. Yay! My dad also got a wireless printer, which was unnecessary because the router has a networked printer server setup thingy. It was easy to set up on my laptop, but I wasn’t able to just pick it up on my dad’s netbook so after fifteen minutes of fucking around I had to share my DVD drive and then fuck around some more because I had to turn off password protection on shared folders. Got that working and then tried my mom’s laptop. Unfortunately there’s no Linux driver for the printer and no substitute, so she’ll have to use the netbook if she wants to print. Then I finished off Batman:TAS. I started watching episode eighty-six and realized something was wrong. Right off the character art style looked different and not in a good way. Something was missing, maybe they were less detailed. Whatever the case it was wrong. I looked it up on Wikipedia. After eighty-five episodes they stopped. They went on to other projects like Superman:TAS. Then a while later they came back and made twentish new episodes, but this was The New Batman Adventures. It really was new. So I stopped. Wasn’t worth watching a cheap knockoff even if it was by the same people. On to the next series: Farscape.

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.

Almost a week here and I still haven’t done much. Went shopping for food again today, but mostly swore at the router which has apparently decided it’s going to fuck off whenever it wants. There’s another one here, but I can’t test it until I get the password for the DSL. A new wireless DSL modem/router would cost forty-five pounds (seventy-five dollars). I managed to eat an entire box of Cadbury’s Fingers in pretty much one sitting. I’m going to get fatter this year, but maybe it’ll help when winter hits. A tech company that my dad recommended me to sent me an application for an internship, but the PDF wasn’t a form you could fill out on the computer and send back, not exactly promising. We also don’t have a printer so I can’t print it out and send it. My dad says he plans to buy a printer tomorrow. We’ll see.

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.

It was hot and sunny today. This fact disappointed me. We had lunch with my dad’s cousins, their children, and their parents. They belong to one of those country clubs. My parents got somewhat dressed up, but told me that jeans and a t-shirt were fine. Turns out it wasn’t the kind where they turn you away or give you dirty looks if you don’t look the part. My second cousin is sixteen, but is now taller than me. For dessert I had a Mars Bar ice cream bar, this requires further examination. After lunch we went for a walk around the club. In the process I realized I had lost my day pass for the train. When we got back the the clubhouse I found it where it had fallen out of my pocket when I had taken my tablet out. I promptly lost it again in the same manner, only realizing half-way back to the tube station. Next we visited my Father’s colleague whose family we are friends with. On the way we found a grounded adapter for my laptop (using it now). That was rather uneventful. By this point I was over the heat/sunny weather. On the way home we went through Brick Lane and had dinner at a Bangladeshi restaurant. Just about every restaurant was Bangladeshi and just about every one was completely empty. After we got home I spent a good amount of time trying to figure out how to fix the wireless. I thought that I needed to turn the modem/router into a gateway so that the wireless router would give out IP’s. I took a break while my mom checked her email (this was on my dad’s netbook) and plugged in my laptop and hooked it up to the HDTV. I tested Farscape and Batman:TAS. Despite the fact they are very low resolution they both looked just fine which is sweet. I then spent another few hours trying to get the wireless to work only to realize there was nothing I could do and that, in fact, it did work, but it was very flaky/finicky. Then I played some TFTwo. My laptop can play it at ten-eighty on full settings, but sitting on the couch, I can’t actually see anything. The lag wasn’t too bad, but because of the flaky internet, it looks like I might have to deal  with frequent random disconnects. Seeing as it’s three thirty in the morning, I should probably go to bed.