Archive for July, 2006

SATA or Serial ATA is what most hard drives are moving towards these days. While the technical details differ them from the traditional IDE drives the main thing you need to know is that they have smaller cables and so are a lot less fiddly.

Other than the cable going to a different point though it’s much like installing an IDE hard drive. Once you’ve grounded yourself you want to slot the hard drive into a drive bay and screw it in place.

Secondly find a spare power cable running from the power unit and connect that to the back of the hard drive.

Finally you need to connect your SATA cable. SATA cables are small and thin with little flat connectors at the end. Connect one end to the bottom of your hard drive and the other end goes directly onto your motherboard. These vary in location depending on your motherboard so have a check around.

Once it’s in, put everything back together and boot your computer up. If the computer doesn’t recognise it you may need to get software from your hardware manufacturer to pick it up (though it should pick it up automatically).

I think my brain has turned to mush. I’ve just scanned through 3,000 news stories about who Lindsay Lohan is dating, how cute Angelina Jolie’s kids are and what Britney Spears’ plans are for the rest of the year.

I came across this article on News.com about Jessica Simpson’s new single being sold in MP3 format. It could be the first step forward in moving towards selling music over the internet without DRM.

Which would be a much welcome change ad it would bring online music one step closer to being the same quality as buying actual albums. While there is still the issue of quality it does solve the issue of copying your music collection onto your different players and such and the whole having to have licences which you then of course have to back up and risk losing.

I also read a little bit more about it on the Yahoo Music blog and was also pleased to learn they are keeping Firefox compatability in mind with regards to LaunchCAST (currently not Mozilla compatible). Having to have IE hanging around for LaunchCAST was one of the reason I stopped using the service.

I’m not sure whether to be happy or upset. My second interview with McDonalds took place about an hour ago and it did not go well at all – they gave me a job. So yeah, I work at McDonalds now. Still once you get past the impact of that it’s probably a good place for me to work.

Firstly, I’ve never worked before. And because they employee idiots and losers they have a solid training program designed for chimps so it will be really good experiance as my first job as I won’t be expected to know anything.

Secondly they have lots of stores so even though I’m working at the Colton one over the summer I will hopefully be able to transfer to a city centre one when I move into my uni accommodation and so my job will still be in walking distance (indeed closer than the Colton one from where I am now).

Thirdly, I love grease in my hair. It holds my hair in place and I think it actually looks better. I know a pretty much everyone would disagree with this but the fact is most of you are kidding yourselfs – hair jel is just a grease substitute, there isn’t really any difference. But anyway yeah, I was worried how much hair jel I would have go through because I would need to wash my hair fully before work every day. But this way it will just re-grease at work :D.

So yeah, it should be interesting. I start on Monday. I don’t know what the pay is but I can’t see it will be much above minimum wage if at all. It wasn’t like I was going to turn a job down based on pay though as I have to get minimum wage whatever job I do which isn’t going to be so different from any wage I am offered that I would turn a job down based on that so I haven’t been asking.

I’m in the process of launching a new Billy Talent fansite entitled This Suffering. I thought it high time I got one online given how much I love Billy Talent. There also doesn’t seem to be much in the way of fansites for them already online either which sucks, they are really underappreciated.

I’ve updated the description for my blog. I can see some potential for it being a rotating phrase to suite my mood every few weeks or months without it really having a major impact on my blog. Though for my current one, who am I kidding, I’m really 20 :(.

Today’s activities have been interesting. I spent this evening chatting to Claire at the Quilted Llama which was fun. I finally got registered with Gilds too and I have training coming up for that. Tomorrow morning I have an interview with ISS for the student advisor jobs though which I really need to nail in order to secure my residency at Ellerslie :o.

Recently I’ve been doing some research into internet pornography and obscenity laws. Or at least trying to. It’s almost impossible though. Our law is so fragmented an inaccessable the chances of you actually understanding or even knowing what the law is in one particular area is slim to none.

So far I have found the best resource available to be the vague information on Wikipedia. To say the internet is so rich with information it seems to be somewhat of a wasteland of legal info. The websites that claim to offer legal information actually offer very little of it and the official sites that claim to actually have the law for some reason never return useful results when you’re looking for it.

I’ve spent the afternoon hunting around the inner bowls of the Brotherton Library trying to find information but it’s not easy. The acts of parliament are only available in bill form. And only from about 1960 onwards. Which is great when your looking for the Obscene Publications Act 1957.

Though from what I have gathered so far on the law including the internet, books and parliamentary papers, all pornography is illegal under English law. I mean, the fact that there isn’t actually any pornography law at all and it’s just law about obscenity applied to pornography using terms like material that would “deprave and corrupt” is bad enough but the bits of law that do exist seem to either just be ignored by the entire country or ammended by some mystical event that then wiped everyone’s memory and all records of said event.

I’ve been checking out del.icio.us just now and gone as far as to install the Firefox buttons and everything. I’m not massively happy about it taking up space in my browser as it makes my URL field smaller but it does seem like it could be useful. I could do to bookmark things rather than just leaving the browser open on a page for a few weeks.

I do like the who else bookmarked this page thing. I added a random blog I came across and several other people have already saved it, it will be interesting to see what they have put about it.

So I went down to Gilds to get registered yesterday and was told the two people that do it were not in, so come back tomorrow. So I went back today and was told they don’r register people on a Friday and I needed to come back next week!

Today has been an absolute joke of a day so far even before that. When I got up I found my computet had restarted. Power glitch maybe? The result is all my software was offline including my downloads so there is bandwidth wasted and my music was obviously off too. My desktop seemed completely screwed because of it because I had to pull the cable out the back to get it to restart.

Plus last night Firefox crashed with loads of pages I had kept open to come back to over the course of the past week. This is after me and my parents had a big talk about finances for next year and how I was utterly, utterly screwed.

Also in computer related problems, the coding I was doing for a client turned up to be a massively bigger job than I thought it was going to be and far more flustrating as well. It managed to cause no end of problems and ate up most of my morning.

As for job hunting, as my the fact I am going to yet another agency, it’s being completely unsuccessful. Both my interviews I had with The Woodman and Iceland turned out to be go nowheres and still place after place that said they would get back to me has failed to do so.

It’s getting to the point where I am running out of money to job hunt. The amount I have spent on buses without getting anywhere is just silly. It’s also destroying my summer plans. If I had a job I could just go do the hours I have and spend my free time working on projects. But because I don’t have allocated work time and free time I can’t focus properly. And even when I can get focused on something by the end of the day I’m usually too depressed to do anything other than to go to bed anyway.

I’m in dire need of a plan. And a breather in which I have the time to write one. Which would require me getting a job and there seems to be a worldwide conspiracy preventing that. The rare escapes I do get (ie my social life) are about to get slashed as Fonze is probably going to bail on them as he’s almost as broke as I am so there goes any hope of enjoying even a small part of my summer (ironically named a holiday).

I’d like to say that it’s just a temperory problem and I just have to hold out until I go back to uni. But given I don’t have a job, my holy grail of uni accommodation may be in jepody. When factoring in how bad the summer was going to be I thought I had it covered but I didn’t consider what would happen if you removed hope from the equasion.

I don’t really know what to do now. I could go home, go to get and listen to Seether. Go home, go to bed and watch DC or TNG. Or reject the idea of going home because home is depressing and stay in Eniac indefinitely. They are all good options I guess.

Every now and then someone comes up with an idea for a product that was such an obvious business opportunity that you wonder why nobody has made a serious go of it before. I’m talking about Heatseak the pornography browser :p.

This is the kind of thinking most of the pointless Web 2.0 start-ups I mentioned in my last post need.