Steff.me

It has been quite some time since I last ‘blogged’ anything, so I’m going to do a rather extended post into what I’ve been doing. The main reason I’ve not posted is because I’ve been fairly busy with summer holidays (not that I went on holiday) and University.

During the summer I tried to spend as much time as possible away from the computer, not that that happened much, and with my friends. It’s fairly annoying being so far away from everyone I’ve known for years; everyone being spread out from home for University now obviously. For the summer, the whole three months that I have for holidays, I tried to spend as much time with them. It’s a shame that it really had to end and University had to start; I don’t much care for anyone in particular here in University bar the odd couple of people (Pip, Nick…) and it’s quite disappointing to think I spend more time here than I do at home.

Another reason I haven’t been writing here is because my laptop broke. My gorgeous PowerBook G4’s hard-drive got damaged after I dropped it… again. I’m incredibly clumsy when it comes to this thing, it seems. It’s nearly two years old, so I’m getting myself a new Mac this Christmas - still deciding between a 24″ iMac and a MacBook Pro. Anyway, I replaced the PowerBook’s hard-drive myself and upgraded it to a lovely 120Gb from Mac Upgrades. It’s doing well so far, the only irritating thing being the fact I misplaced one of the screws and so I’m missing one in the right side of it. Not that anyone else would notice, but it bothers me. The only reason I had to replace it myself is because Apple Support wasn’t very helpful at all. When my mother bought the laptop, she didn’t bother with extended AppleCare and so we only had the year cover, I don’t blame Apple for not really wanting to help out that much but charging £29.99 for a phone call in which we received, ‘You could try a company in Cardiff by the name of AT Computers.’ wasn’t exactly what I had in mind. That very abrupt answer came after about an hour of phoning around various Apple Support numbers being redirected and put on hold constantly. I’m not overly pleased with that.

Before I actually replaced the hard-drive myself, we did give AT Computers a try. They had my PowerBook for two weeks and then phoned to say we could come pick it up as it was fixed. Uhh, wrong. They had, and I quote the invoice here, “Re-Seated the RAM”. What has that got to do with a broken hard-drive? After I sent them an e-mail that never got a response, my mother decided she’d take the laptop back up there. When she got there they told her “There’s no point in actually giving this to us, it’s going to sit on the shelf for a couple of weeks before we even have a chance to look at it and then we can’t say for sure that we’ll actually fix it”. Don’t you just love tech support? So I did it myself. I ordered the parts from the site above and it took about fifteen minutes (I’m useless with internals of a computer), fumbling around to find what I was doing. It wasn’t too hard, at all!

I also lost a lot of time this summer thanks to a new ‘hobby’ that is World of Warcraft. It’s been a while since I’ve found a game that I actually enjoy. I think the last one was Shenmue on the Dreamcast; such a fantastic game! As I refuse to buy an XBOX or XBOX 360, I’m sort of missing out on playing Shenmue now - but oh well. World of Warcraft has actually eaten up some of my nights and a good few hours of my day when I have nothing else to do (or can’t be bothered to do anything else). I just wish I hadn’t chosen a silly class on a Normal (PvE) server. Nevermind, eh.

So, to summarise, my summer consisted of Apple really annoying me, tech support really annoying me, lots of alcohol, seeing my friends a lot (pubs, Lazer Zone and bowling.. woo!), my girlfriend, World of Warcraft and lots of sleep. I even wrote an essay for my University while drunk at 3 o’clock in the morning; the amazing bit is I actually got a two thousand pound scholarship for it. Which I’m quite happy with!

Anyway! That’s about it. To me, it was a great summer, however I hope I haven’t bored anyone too much with it! It’s just a shame it had to end and that University had to start.