Eriq’s Blag

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 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.

I meant to wake up at ten in the morning. I woke up at seven. I went to bed  at two. After finally figuring out where to put my laptop so as to not burn/melt/crack anything I played TFTwo for about an hour completing an entire game (getting two hundred and eighty nine points) without the internet cutting out. Although my ping was at a near constant one eighty to one ninety, it played smoothly. I’ve now determined that the router resets whenever a computer connects…or when it feels like it. I had planned on going out, but I had no money and by the time I was done with the game, my mother had fallen asleep. When she did wake up I helped her with her laptop and we eventually went shopping. The city does not smell very nice. I took some pictures on our journey to Marks and Spencer. The first thing I wanted a shot of is what is called the gurken, a large, pickle-shaped office building:

Giant Pickle

We walked through the place where (according to my mother) the Diagon Alley scenes of Harry Potter were filmed. I couldn’t give a shit, but I figured Emma would be mad if I didn’t take any pictures:

This is for you, Emma.

When we got to Marks and Spencer I found this:

Might have to get this for my birthday.

Then there was Lloyd’s Tower which looks like something from a dystopian mining facility, but whose picture is currently sideways. When we got home I fiddled around on the computer for a while and then Princess Mononoke was on and having never seen it I felt I should watch it. I did. It was of course very good and trippy. Then I fiddled on the computer some more. We’ll see how sleeping goes tonight.

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.

I missed the pilot and second episode of “TERMINATOR: The Sarah Conner Chronicles” (quite a mouthful), so I watched them instead of studying for Bio. It wasn’t half bad, the writing didn’t completely suck and the acting, well it wasn’t bad, but it is a shame that Glau (Firefly’s River) plays an emotionally and physically cold killing machine (which Harlan points out isn’t much different from River). If you don’t know who I’m talking about, then you fail and need to see Serenity, at least; it will blow you’re mind.

Oh, you remind me of the babe…

Huzzah! Hopefully I’ll think of something to make, because I really want to program. If I can’t think of anything to make in Flash, then maybe I’ll add stuff to the site, and if I can’t think of anything for that, then I’ll just watch TV.

My dad went to Texas the other day for…something. Anyway, he brought me back two things. The first thing is a blue, glass turtle; nothing super amazing. However, the second caught me completely by surprise. Last night when he got home, he gave me the turtle and said there was something else for me one the table downstairs. I was watching TV and didn’t really feel like getting up and going downstairs. Today I got up, took a shower, and sat down in front of my computer (never had breakfast or lunch), so it wasn’t until I went down to do the chores my mom assigned me that I noticed a large box at my place. The tag sticking out had some stuff written on it, but what caught my attention was “21/2 Brim.” So, I thought, “why did he buy me a hat?” I opened the box and to my surprise I found this inside:

Also, I’ve been working on my Asteroids game and it’s coming along rather nicely. Here’s what it looks like at the moment. It’s still a work in progress. Here are the controls:

Movement:

forward – w

backward – s

strafe right – d

strafe left – a

brake – space

Steering:

up – down arrow (inverted axis)

down – up arrow

left – left arrow

right – right arrow

Other:

fire – shift

first person view (more over-the-shoulder) – 1

top down view – 2

zoom (in top down view) – scroll wheel

Well I think that’s everything. I hope to write some more of my story at some point. I have a bunch of ideas, though I’m lazy so…

I just realized that I forgot to watch Enterprise because I had Driver’s ED homework. Fucker…