Eriq’s Blag

Somehow I managed to completely forget to post anything for the last three days. After we got back from house sitting I attempted to play TFTwo only to find that we had literally run out of internets. I was unaware that our service was capped at twenty five gigs and I had managed to go over that. With four days left in the month, I had to pay five pounds for five more gigs. I did almost nothing yesterday as I had stayed up late the night before, but in the evening my dad and I went to see Surrogates which was a cross between Die Hard and I, Robot. It wasn’t terrible, but it also wasn’t mind blowing. One thing to note is that no matter where you go, movie theaters suck. They overcharge you to watch ads that they are being payed to show you. I suppose they have to pay to show the movies, but fuck them. Then I stayed up late again watching Farscape. Again I got nothing done today. I got Trung Left 4 Dead and Garry’s Mod for his birthday and we played through a couple campaigns. When we tried to play GMod, he kept getting kicked from servers claiming he was logged in from another location, despite the fact he wasn’t. Hopefully that will fix itself because he can connect in TFTwo just fine. Now for more Farscape.

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.

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.

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.

I’m on my tablet because I don’t have a cable or adapter for my laptop yet so I’m going to keep this brief. The flight from SF to Atlanta was uneventful. From there to London was also uneventful except for the old guy who couldn’t breath for a bit causing mild panic among the flight attendants. When we got to customs it turned out my dad fucked up and we couldn’t legally stay until the date we has planned because my mom and I weren’t on the visa and guest visas are only six months (we would be going two weeks over). The woman kept telling us how fucked up and that the British were very disappointed with us. I can’t legally get a job. We’ll see what happens in terms of deportation. The internet here is a bit fucked. There’s a modem and a wireless router, but the modem is also a router which I think prevents the wireless from assigning more than one IP address so only one device can use it at a time (others have to use an ethernet cable). Possibly three times daily Jack the Ripper tour groups of fifty plus people go by outside. There’s a group down there now with a rather loud guide. I haven’t gone out yet as I hadn’t slept much in the past twenty-four hours. I took a nap. Oh yeah, there’s an HDTV; it’s shiny.