Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

As you may have noticed, Nerd Fed has changed slightly. Well actually only two things appear to have changed at the front end – there is now a search on the right hand side and the text at the top has changed slightly.

The reason is that I finally got round to upgrading to pLog 1.0.1 (previously we were running 0.3 or something like that). The real changes to the script are at the back end though, and it looks a whole lot different to before.

The admin panel looks much better. The old one wasn’t actually that bad although the improvements are huge. It’s a much more slick and cleaner interface now; I no longer have to be jealous of Blogger.

I’m tempted to start a second blog just so I can do some track backs between them ;).

Finally! After ages working on the site, re-designing it to fit in with other things, many crazy projects, a VPS (which I will talk about in a later post sometime because its soooo cool), Celeb Storm has finally taken to the internet in full flight. Well, as far as I know.

It’s totally integrated (well pretty much) with Rawice which launched version 2.0 of the site last month and so when that update it updates Celeb Storm with the end result being that it should actually get updated.

Two routers on one network, that is crazy talk. It is indeed but the problem is that with everyone trying to provide out of the box home network solutions at cheap prices, routers are bundled in with everything. It seems these days you can’t buy a networking hub without getting a router with it.

Picture the situation. A few years ago you bought a Linksys 4 port switch / cable router so you could connect several computers to your internet connection. Now you want to go wireless with your laptop and so you buy a wireless access point. However it comes bundled 4 integrated wired ports and a router too. It happens, it happened to me.

They can co-exist quite peacefully though. That said it isn’t plug and play. I never expected it to be though. I thought when I got the first router it wouldn’t be but that plugged in and worked fine pretty much straight away. And to be honest, this wasn’t much harder.

First thing you want to do is to plug your new router into a separate computer disconnected from the network and head to setup. Here you want to change its address on the network.

The main problem I had was that both routers were trying to use port 192.168.1.1, which was not a good situation. So I connected the second router to my laptop and changed its port to 192.168.1.5.

Then you connect everything together. In this case I connected a cable into the uplink port of my first router and plugged the other end into one of the standard network ports on the second router. I’m guessing you can also plug a cable into a standard network port on the first one too, though I didn’t try that.

As only one actually needs to route internet traffic and such I then went to my second router and disabled the local DHCP server. This one was basically just acting as more ports to my main router.

And that is all you need to do? Simple huh? Well actually save the relaxation for when you actually have it working as you know how reliable technology is ;). Once done, sit back, log onto IM and brag about your advanced network.

A while back Channel 4 showed the first Lord of the Rings film, The Fellowship of the Rings. While I was watching it I think I wrote a load of points about it as I have just found a text document full of them. So obviously I thought where else should I dump them other than Nerd Fed?

I have to say, if I was the dark lord, I would not have messed it up. I mean he has huge armies at his disposal and he gets beaten by some little four foot creature, it’s pathetic.

They get caught before Buckleburry Ferry – the rider is right next to them – how did the Nasgul fail to take them out?

I mean, they even got a stab at him at Weathertop and still they couldn’t kill a little hobbit creature.

They had him again when they were chancing that woman on the horse. I mean there were 7 of them all coming at her from different sides and she got past them all.

Then when the water came down the river they didn’t try to get out of the way. At first they stud around and then later then decided to ride down the river. Surely you would ride up the bank to saftey?

NOTES
What are the ods that a falling ring would fall in Frodo’s finger as he fell back in the Prancing Pony inn?

Gandalf managed to escape on the Eagles – so why didn’t they keep them for the journey?

Is it me or are elves simply Vulcans with longer hair?

Do they not have any form of guards at the secret meeting of the council? I mean how did 3 hobbits spy on everyone else without any noticing.

I have three pieces of coursework to hand in on Friday. We only do a total of three for ICT in the year. I am on study leave now, I should be revising. But that is ICT for you, nobody ever gets anything done in that department, it’s like there is some kind of force surrounding it.

I really have to question the marking in it though. I was reading through my training manual which I wrote for my coursework and on the lesson plan after introduction and health and safety it says vicious sack beatings. I had forgotten I had written that so it was really amusing but then I thought – this has been marked. Why did nobody pick up on that?

I mean if I hadn’t have gone back to re-write it, it would have gone off to the examination board like that. Would they have noticed? I’m not sure though I am tempted to leave it in and find out.

Satire has always been part of my coursework. For instance by hardware unit still says go to Tools > Internet Options and wait for the administrator restriction box to appear confirming that you are unable to complete section E3 of your coursework due to a zealously protected network.

Still, things like this should not slip past teachers eyes. I know they have a lot of marking to do but maybe leaving it until school has actually broken up to require everything to be handed in is not the best policy.

Welcome to Hardware Tutorials! Over the next however long it takes me to get it sorted, various tutorials and such will be posted on the site to help people get to grips with everything from installing a printer to installing Windows (not strictly hardware but there you go).

With the subscription to WoW now officially on hiatus I decided I would test the waters with these crazy new online DVD rental services – for those in the dark you pay a fixed monthly fee and you can rent as many DVDs as you like – you get to keep so many at home (usually 2 or 3) and you get new ones when you return them.

I was torn with which one to go with originally. Blockbuster was the
obvious choice as they offer a good deal. Worth noting here is that
Amazon suck – it isn’t unlimited rental, even their big package only
lets you rent 6 per month. However I ran some searches to see choice
and Blockbuster was pretty much beaten.

Problem is there are a lot of films I want to watch that aren’t mainstream. I ran a search for a few items (some of them stuff I have I just wanted to search range) – American Graffiti, THX 1138, So Little Time as well as others and the results showed quite a different so I decided to go with Screen Select.

I was slightly skeptical of them. Before I would have gone with them although their customer service didn’t get a great write-up. My experience so far hasn’t been so bad. I phoned them once and the person I spoke to was fine. The system was down so she took my details and phoned me back which was good.

The selection is pretty decent; I managed to hit 70 items on my list. Dispatch wasn’t fast though. Although they offer one day turn-around to members it is slower for new customers – two business days. I registered Wednesday night and they failed to get them out by the end of the week so they weren’t displayed until Monday (ie, today).

I had around 6-7 things on high priority, the three they sent me were all on that list. That said there is no priority system other than a high, medium, low so you end up with lots of things on each priority levels rather than being able to order exactly. Also, when you add stuff it automatically goes onto medium priority so a lot of the time I had to go to my selection page and change it.

Of course the true test of the experience will be yet to come. The three disks they have dispatched to me are scheduled to arrive on Wednesday (I was hoping they would come tomorrow, I could maybe watch one and mail it back so I get the next one before the weekend). No doubt I will be blogging about my experiences later.

In re-telling this story I hope to be able to use the experience one day in some form of screenplay. It’s not like it hasn’t happened before but I’ve just never blogged about it before. It is kind of ironic that we had the "April shows" on the 2nd of May though. I mean what is all that about?

I went out about 20 minutes ago. Storms over, we can go down to the co-op knowing that the rain will continue to ease off. I mean who ever heard of an eye of the storm that lasted two hours? Ok, that was a joke ;). That was long gone but it seems the storm had three waves. Now it has all but stopped. Unfair.

I mean it rains, then it stops and now I have no excuse to skip media. Well providing I can find something to wear, I’m not big in several sets of clothes. Well actually I have loads but I only wear the ones I am in the mood for at this time of year (currently stuff in various shades of red).

We decided to run it up the hill from the Co-op and made it as far as school. There comes to a point though were there is little point running considering how wet you are. On the plus side though my hair is cool when wet, I could shake it dry like a dog.

There is something cinematic about heavy rain though. I actually have a scene in my ultimate film with rain (although its raining blood not water and that film is for another post). Still though, I’ve been inspired somehow. Scary I know, I hate nature but there you go.

Quick post – The Death of Faith is some wierd play that was just on Radio 4. Although strangly it was actually good.

It just wouldn’t be exam time if I was working towards my exams. I try but there is only one thing on my mind right now – my upcoming summer project in the form of a big celeb portal. It has been in development for a while though I finally secured the domain, Celeb Storm, earlier today.

Until now it has simply been known as Project Frog Net. Which I am still using for the test website as the main site is just displaying a holding page as I don’t want to launch the official site yet, just get the domain into the search engines.

The development isn’t going that well though. I want the site to look fantastic and, well, it doesn’t. The site looks good but it just doesn’t feel like a major celeb portal like MSN Entertainment or IGN. It really annoys me when I can’t get designs up to their standard. I know they have loads of designers and stuff but still.