1. I had a crazy headache which i could not shift. That’s the truth most days, but today was unusually bad – and that’s saying something.
2. I had a cabling nightmare on my desk, so i kept knocking things over.
3. I went to get myself a new phone and found out that the o2 shop salesman had told me something untrue. I couldn’t upgrade my tariff online and then pick up my free phone, i could however buy a phone i was supposed to get for free.
4. I ordered my new free phone online, a week after i would’ve if the salesman had been honest with me.
5. I found out my phone was out of stock.
6. I tried to cancel my old gym membership, but was told i had to send it in writing and would still be charged for another month.
7. I tried to buy some t-shirts from threadless.com but realised i had to activate my new credit card first.
8. I ended up taking out card protection for the aforementioned credit card, which was a smart idea but even more outgoing cash.
9. I realised that i have two or three preorders coming into fruition this month, which is even more money.
10. I preordered Leopard which is superb but cost more than i thought it would.
11. My new Skullcandy headphones turned up – but they weren’t the way i expected them to look.
12. I got abandoned for lunch, again, so i ended up getting really lousy food – which i can still kind of taste, and is still kind of making me feel sick.

So yeah. It’s not been great. My head still hurts.

Edit:

Just incase today wasn’t bad enough.. I just bit my lip really badly, blood and everything. Go me!

I answer the door to find a woman wrapped in one of those corporate branded outdoor shellsuit jackets, the ones that look like they would burst into flames if you walked past a radiator. She was trying to sell some kind of house exterior work, i didn’t catch the specifics and that’s no big loss.

She tells me that the company is doing some work nearby, and asks if i’m interested in a quotation. I’m body language go away but say i’ll take a leaflet. She umms and ahhs, then explains that it would be a better idea to phone me with a quote. At this stage i want rid of her, so i just say okay.

She asks for a name, and i repeat one a few times before she gets it right. By the fourth iteration i’m just flat out laughing at her, not in a cruel way.. it just didn’t seem to be working out. After the name she asks for my address.. Hang on a second.. “My address? You came to my house! Surely you know it!“, she replies that she’s just canvassing the street, and didn’t notice the number.. “It’s right there, in big black numbers” i say, pointing at the sign next to the door. She writes down the number, and then asks what street. My laughter has not subsided.. “Are you joking? You came down the street! You said you’re doing work nearby!“.

After pointing out the street name signs sitting not far away and explaining that i’m not going to give her a contact telephone number, she leaves… she leaves me with a terrible impression of her company.

I’m of the belief that if i do want work carried out, i’ll do the groundwork myself. Find a company, look for positive reviews, ask around, whatever. I’m hardly going to have structural work done to my house just because of a random salesperson standing at the door. Consulting a pile of leaflets is what i do when i want to pick which takeaway i’ll order dinner from, not when i’m looking to spend thousands of pounds.

If you’re going to cold call people in person, why not try something like this:

Hi, I’m from Acme Building Company. We’re doing some work for one of your neighbours. It’s our policy to inform all the nearby residents just incase you have any questions, and to make you aware of the building work going on. What we’re going to be doing is [insert task here], it’ll take [insert timeframe here] and shouldn’t inconvenience you in any way. If you’d like i can give you our card which has a contact telephone number for any questions you might have.

That way you’re impressing people by treating them with a little bit of consideration.. and if those people decide to get some work done they might well call up “that nice lady who left her card”.

Ah well.

Yesterday i completed Bioshock – so my blog goes back to regularly scheduled programming. I’m not sure what game i’ll play next, but i doubt it’ll captivate me as much. We’ll get back to that in a while.

You’re wondering why i’ve referred to the ending of Bioshock as “sick”, well i’m not referring to the games ending.. i’m referring to the pathetic state i’ve been in for the last couple of days. I took a one way train to Phlegmsville, and they made me the mayor.

The nice thing about taking some sick time was that i got some stuff done. I built a new bed (which will hopefully help with my aching back), completed Bioshock, tidied up, cooked, and watched some movies/tv shows i had been saving.

The bad thing about taking sick time is that it’s even more quiet boring moments to sit around feeling sorry for yourself. I think the worst part of having a cold is tearing your nose to pieces with all the tissues you go through. That, and everything seems to aggravate you more than usual.

There was a period of time not too long ago where my health was constantly on the rocks. Every time someone i knew caught something i was guaranteed to get it. I ended up taking loads of time off work because of it, and just generally felt like crap. So i did some research into immune system problems. As well as switching my diet around (which i’ve been doing quite a lot of this year) i decided to cut out caffeine and cut out sugar. I also decided to drink a cup of Rooibos tea with lemon every morning. The difference was quite evident, i didn’t get sick at all.

But, there was a problem. See.. i love coffee, and i need caffeine. Sure i could handle not having it, but it didn’t mean i wasn’t depressed when i thought about my plight. To make it harder, people at work started drinking more and more. I didn’t mind so much when they would nip down to McDonalds and buy a cup of their coffee imitation drinks, but after a while they came back to the cafetiere and better than usual coffee. It didn’t take long before i broke. Ordered some fresh grounds from my favourite supplier. Ordered a bag for home too.. It wasn’t long till i was buying myself a can of Red Bull on Monday mornings.. It wasn’t long till i was giving up on my morning tea. Of course, the first illness i encountered hit home, and now i’m lying in bed blogging about it because i feel hellish – as well as stupid.

Ah well, onto happier things. A couple of days ago i was forced to buy something i’ve wanted to buy for a while, but never really needed to. A couple of 500gig hard drives. The 500gig Seagate Freeagent external drive that i’ve been using as an archive is full now, and it’s about time i got a real media server running in here. So i have my old Windows machine sitting gutted on the floor. I think it’s a 2.4Ghz AMD processor with 768MB of RAM and a couple of 80gig Western Digital drives. The plan is to take everything important off one of the 80gigs, and install Ubuntu on it. Then stick the two 500gigs in there, followed by a third next month. That’ll hold me over for a while.

As i mentioned before, now that i’ve finished bioshock i have nothing else to play. Out of the 13 xbox 360 games i own, there are only 3 i haven’t finished.

• Kameo – The underwater control mechanic really annoyed me, so i gave up.
• Test Drive Unlimited – The only way to “finish” it is to achieve everything, and i’m not that much of a driving game fan.
• Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter – I liked it at first, but the missions became frustrating because of the complex controls and the game failed to capture me. Playing Rainbow Six Vegas really put me off continuing GRAW because it’s nowhere near as enjoyable.

Blue Dragon is out now. I downloaded the demo hoping for an exciting new RPG. I was immediately put off by the graphics, and put off even further by the strange dragon combat mechanic. But boredom brought me back to it, and i was a little more patient with it. I guess i could probably enjoy it if i play it from the beginning. I’ll buy it, but i don’t think i’ll buy it for it’s current £39.99 price.

John Woos Stranglehold is out soon. The demo is exciting. It’s like a next gen Max Payne in Japan, which is such a good thing. I can’t imagine it’ll be very captivating (though even if it was, i doubt it could’ve been close to Bioshock of Marvel Ultimate Alliance, so does it really matter?). But it might be fun for a while.

Two Worlds is out now, and i don’t know much about it other than it looks like a cheesy Oblivion clone that belongs on a PC.

It’s tempting to just buy C&C3.

Oh, but i get my CoD4 beta invite on Friday…

You know you’re working too hard when you start having an existential crisis over variable variables while sitting in the first class section while zooming across the country in a train, and complaining that your code has become “way too abstract”.

Yeah.

The good news is that i have my collectors edition of Bioshock. Though there was some drama getting it. Since i had the day off work today i asked a friend to collect my copy. The shop enthused to me a few days ago that there would be absolutely no problem with that. But, you’ve guessed it, there was. Some employee didn’t want to hand it over, because my friend did not have a receipt. I had to call them from home to explain that i was the first pre-order. The line started with me, and that in the front of his ringbound pre-order folder he’d find a hand written slip with my name on it (which he did). So, long story short, i got my copy. Six inch big daddy statue and everything.

I haven’t played it yet, because i’ve been forcing myself to work. How’s that for willpower?

In other news, i’m really enjoying a show on The History Channel called Human Weapon and the latest episode airs tonight. Sadly that’s “tonight” in America. It’s already “tomorrow” (01:46) here in Scotland and i’m shattered. I don’t think i can stay up till it hits the torrent sites. Bleh. As you can discover by clicking the link i’ve provided, it’s a martial arts show – a subject i have much interest in.

Oh! My new connection got enabled today. Brand spanking new ADSL2. It’s rated for “up to 24mb” but at the moment i’m getting just over 16.

I spent ages staring at:

Till finally i got desperate and called up and asked for an ETA. I was told “sometime before 9pm”, which was lovely to hear except that i called at mid day, so i had anything up to 9 bloody hours to wait. Thankfully it kicked in just after lunch, and it wasn’t long before i saw:

That’s one point six MEGABYTES a second.

We’ve always suffered from slow connections here in the UK, because we were dominated by one telecoms company. In America there has always been a lot of competition to drive prices down, so people have been used to things like “free local calls” for as long as they can remember. We on the other hand got to enjoy extortionate prices and dial-up internet for wayyy too long. It all began to change when Ofcom (or possibly Oftel at the time) forced British Telecom to give other companies access to it’s telephone exchanges. Other companies could step in and install their own equipment. Offer their customers new exciting things. Provide some much needed competition.

The horror of dial up still lingers in my mind during dark and stormy nights, no matter how much i try to suppress the memories. When MP3s became popular, and we were all stuck on 32kbps or 56kbps modems it was a luxury to download a couple of them. We were so used to the speeds that it was common parlance for us to refer to 1 megabyte of data as “five minutes”, seeing as that was how much time it would take to download. A three megabyte MP3 would have taken fifteen minutes to download. Though i shaved off quite a bit of time because i insisted on using external modems (because internal “software” modems shared your CPU, and could cause a fair bit of slowdown.. or be affected themselves if you were doing something resource intensive like.. playing tomb raider 1) and had a high end ISP.

The point i’m struggling to make is that these recollections are ingrained in me, and it still boggles my mind to think that i can now download in two seconds, something that would’ve taken fifteen minutes when i was in school.

Sick.

When we first had access to DSL in my area i signed us up to an ISP who happily stuck with their unlimited use policy. This was important to me because now that i had ultra fast broadband (512kbps.. yeah) i planned to download everything i had ever desired. We stuck with this company for years, slowly upgrading as the tech was available. Eventually we got to a claimed speed of 8mbps (though in actuality we weren’t getting nearly that much bandwidth), and with that speed bump i learned that the company had changed some things around. Most importantly their policy regarding usage. No longer did you have the luxury of “unlimited”, now things were very much limited. 13 gigabytes of downloads a month before they’d start imposing limits on your account. Thirteen gigabytes a month!! To put that into perspective i just checked my modem stats: The modem has been running for pretty much dead on 12 hours, and in that time i’ve downloaded just over 12 gigabytes.

So we’ve established that my monthly limit was lousy. But that wasn’t the only problem. The ISP also implemented strict traffic shaping. Traffic shaping is the notion of detecting and categorising different types of network use (like web surfing, video use, peer to peer downloads, gaming, etc) and allowing them certain percentages of bandwidth use. Web traffic for example would be given the largest percentage of the network traffic because it’s the most important, but peer to peer downloading would be given the smallest because it’s disruptive to other users and potentially criminal. It’s all well and good on paper, but it is absolutely disgusting to fire up a torrent and discover you’re getting something like 800 BYTES per second. Not megabytes, not even kilobytes.. just bytes. I could fax the data and get a better transfer rate.

To contrast that, here’s the transfer rate i got in bittorrent earlier today:

Yeah. It’s a big difference.

I’m rediscovering what it’s like to have a bit of freedom on the internet. I can download new game demos on my Xbox 360 without feeling guilty. I can watch streaming videos. I can download linux distributions. Freedom.

I got a bit carried away with my ranting here, it’s 02:21 and i really should be sleeping, this was only going to be a tiny quick post. Heh.

Goodnight.