Eriq’s Blag

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

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.

Stayed up till five. Woke up at two. Sat up at two thirty. Messed around with my tablet for a couple hours. Got out of bed at five. Went to  a pub for dinner. Heard “I Kissed a Girl” playing there. Reminded of Emma’s ringtone. Stayed up till five again despite my mom telling me I have to get up before two PM. Oh well.

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.

I spent most of my time awake failing to comprehend the equations I was writing. Then I stayed up too late again playing games…

I woke up at eight or something and figure I should get up. My mom wanted to take me to the larger super market she found. Guess what, I didn’t. When I finally got up and finished my shower. My dad’s colleague had come over and they decided to try the food at a pub around the corner. I got a Chicken BLT…without the LT. It was ok, the potato wedges were better. The fudge cake was so so. Next we walked over to Waitrose which reminded me of the Tesco back in Lewis with it’s little cafe on the side, but wasn’t quite as big. I found a cheap bottle of sparkling water and a five pack of Cadbury’s Curly Wirly’s. I later ate them all on one sitting. When we got back my dad told us that he had found a guy at  Spitalfields flea market selling fur hats with Soviet insignia. I had wanted to change into my shorts and cool down after the walk back lugging heavy bags, but I wanted that hat. In short, it was exactly what I wanted: sturdy construction that will let me wear it when it gets cold and a red and gold star insignia. Twenty pounds, maybe a bit expensive, but it’s a sweet hat (Trung pointed out that Fran has the same one, oh well). Then my parents left to go see a play and I suggested to Trung (who was up surprisingly early) that we the Half-Life Two mod Synergy. Unfortunately his computer’s IP keeps changing which means he has to forward the port each time. I tried to fix this, but forgot about the DNS server the first time so he logged off due to loss of internet, goo thing he has a laptop. We eventually got it working and finished the map we had been playing. It had a rather unimpressive ending. We didn’t know what other maps we could play so we gave up and went to TFTwo. At first it was a bit slow. Then it picked up and I got seventeen points in one life as a spy; a new record.  We didn’t do too bad, but out team lost that game. The next game was very different. Trung recently stopped caring about team stacking (known good players banding together on the same team and dominating) seeing as people have started to follow us onto teams. We were happily slaughtering the other team when one of them decided to complain. He said that a number of us (including the “SED fags”) always teamstacked. Now, this obviously is a little offensive. So we asked him why he thought that. He didn’t make a very compelling argument as we told him that, in fact, we don’t always stack, sometimes Trung likes to play on the weaker team for a challenge, so we kept dominating them. He told us to grow some balls and play on a weaker team for once (it was clear he wasn’t listening). When the next game started, I randomly chose a team. Two of the leaders from the last game were on the other team and we had me and Trung. The complainer didn’t join a team and left after a short while. Later on while playing someone tried to votekick the clan (at this point out fourth member had joined the game), when I asked why he didn’t respond immediately, but apparently he said he didn’t know this server was for clan practice, which as Trung told me is meaningless because we aren’t a scrimmage team and additionally it was one of the Lotus Clan servers. Either way, he didn’t get any support in kicking us. It’s nice to be hated, it means they fear you. I can’t wait until Emma starts playing and we have four member of Silent Earth Dirigible playing at the same time.

In Soviet Russia, hat wears you!

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.

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.