Eriq’s Blag

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.

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.

We had lunch at the club with the English relatives again. Lunch was meh. Afterward we drove forever to get to their house. It apparently took forever because of a football (soccer, duh) match, various road work and diversions (look! a unicorn), and the buying of a book of notes on another book. On the way we passed a bunch of idiots posing in the middle of the crossing at Abbey Road. When we finally got there we re-met my…second cousin once removed? My father’s cousin’s daughter. She’s now thirteen, slightly older than I was the last time I was here. She had the pre-requisite amount of makeup for a thirteen year old. After chatting for a bit my (I’m going to just call him my uncle) uncle got down to business, that being his website. Apparently he had some Indian guy working for him, making a website, working on fancying up his PowerPoint presentations, and something else. My uncle felt he wasn’t getting what he was paying for and made it known. In response the guy up and quit leaving his website leaning to the left and generally broken. It is his hope that I can fix this. After retrieving and changing the passwords for the control panel and the FTP account. We talked about what he wants. Nothing too fancy, but professional. I think that I can do that…I hope. I never tried to sell my coding services because I didn’t feel they were up to snuff and people would get upset and call it shit…like what happened to this Indian guy, but his really wasn’t all that great, hopefully I can do better. We then took the tube home and decided to give the fireworks down at the Thames the finger. Over the course of the day I had been rebuilding my N810 internet tablet as the backup I had used had stuff I didn’t want and some junk files that messed up Bluetooth syncing. By the time we got home, I had most of the applications that I wanted installed. I then tried one last ditch attempt to get my tablet to show up as a networked computer on Windows. By chance I found a number of installs claiming to be Samba, a Unix network filesystem that I had heard people throwing around when I first tried this. After a bunch of fooling and googling around I found info telling me what I should do to get it to work. Meanwhile my tablet had showed up in the network browser, only it wouldn’t let me open the folders as the root user so I had to figure out how to add a user. It worked. I was happy. Then I tried deleting a file. Copying a file. I didn’t have the permissions to do it. I think googled everything I could think of to give my new user read/write/execute rights. Nothing seemed to work. I thought I’d reboot it and try logging in as root again. When it came back up it was still using the same user “eriq,” damn. Oh wait, it just let me delete a file. Apparently restarting did something. And now it works. I have two wireless drives that I can easily move stuff to and from–so much easier than the USB cable or taking the Micro SD card out of the Mini SD card adapter out of the hard to get at slot on the tablet and putting it into the Micro to SD card adapter and into the reader on my computer. Wireless is awesome.

P.S. (Access N810 over network with samba server) If that sentence there brought you here looking for a way to get that working, leave a comment.

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!

Watched more Farscape. Played more TFTwo. Both were good.
P.S. PK Tech Girl is an episode of Farscape. Where they meet a cute Peacekeeper technician and fight frog people.

John and Gilina

Cute, eh?

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.