Chris Worfolk's Blog

Today I achieved what we have dreamed about for generations – playing World of Warcraft in a lecture. Ok, well most people don’t dream about that but it’s quite a commonly held belief that lectures are boring and gaming is one great cure. I managed to get the game working (I say managed, it worked straight away, I just needed to fiddle with some display settings once it was running :p) on my new laptop and indeed it runs quite well. So I took it into lectures today and during AI22 connected to the wireless network and got some game time in. Mission accomplished :D.

Next week… surfing porn while in a lecture ;).

Someone has to comment on this. Kieran and Heather! Heather lives next door to Kieran and she shares the same music interest as Keiran and all that jazz. Fair enough you may say, not much going on there but then on Saturday night, Kieran turned down watching Lara Croft: Tomb Raider in order to spend time with Heather! That’s crazy, everyone knows Lara is the queen of everything (as well she should be). It’s only a matter of time until they start dating when one changes their Facebook connection to “in a relationship with” and the other accepts it.

While I’m posting about other people I also want to comment on Matt’s post concerning the Llama. Let’s clarify a few things. I didn’t get sick of the Llama. Everyone else did but I’ve always loved the Llama even with their “other” customers and lack of food. It’s still like the nicest bar in Leeds.

Ok, so this morning or something (the request was there when I got home) someone added me to MSN. She messaged me at like 1am and started introducing herself. She asked for my pic, showed me hers, she’s hot. Really, hot. She explains how she used to do a bit of cam work and that she was always horny.

This is new on me. I’m used to bots trying to chat me up over IM but why a real person? She was a real person, she would have passed the Turing test with flying colours. Ok, two options. She’s still working cams and looking for a big sale, or, it’s Gaz.

Well, going with the path that she is actually a female and not one of my friends with a fake MSN account, she eventually points me to two forums she hangs out on. One of them is down though. Then she asks me for a link. What is going on there? Why isn’t she trying to sell me something?

At this point I’m still going with the “it’s someone with a fake MSN account trying to screw with me” theory, after all, they did ask me to send them some dirty pictures of myself and who would seriously want me to do that? The obvious answer to me is someone who would want to plaster it over Facebook.

So I’m left with these two theories. That or she is actually legit. But then what are the odds of some ex-stripper randomly getting my MSN address and trying to chat me up? Let’s me realistic here, not high. She makes another comment about being horny every day. What am I supposed to say to that? Congrats? Good for you? Please explain why you are chatting to me?

The conversation moves on again. She thinks I’m a little disconnected and suggests we play 20 questions. I ask her where she is from and she replies Manchester. She’s interested in my music taste and shares my love of Feeder and Billy Talent. She went to an AFI gig, hmmm. She explains that she works at Sainsbury’s. Why would you lie about that? This seems a little too deep in for a sale. She seems geniune. We continue chatting. She likes reading and even names her favourite book. She knows her stuff.

After chatting for about 2 hours she explains she needs to go to bed as she has to be up for work at 12. She tells me she’ll speak to me next time we’re both online and ends the chat with “bye xxx.”

Seriously, what just happened to me? Was a very attractive girl just chatting to me for 2 hours? I mean think of the evidence against this. It’s me, things like this don’t happen to me. She is attractive enough to be a stripper. She wants pictures of me. Everything screams at me that something is not geniune. Except our actual chat. Could it be that I have become so jaded with the constant spamming that attacks my inbox, forums, blogs and instant messenger accounts that I now mistake everything and everyone for a fake?

I take a brief pause from narrating my life to scare the crap of myself thinking today is Sunday night as my clock says, and thinking I have missed a shift at work tonight before realising it’s past midnight and it’s now Sunday morning rather than Saturday night. Not quite the climax to this post I was hoping for.

It’s been a weird day. I’ve actually got a bit of work done today which was good. I’ve updated my VPS, I’ve done some coding and and in the category of less-productive things that got done I’ve installed WoW on my new laptop (it works fine too!) in preparation for in-lecture playing. The productiveness has lifted my spirits a little though I think it’s probably just one of the many eyes in the storm that is my life.

The first thing I did before coming to post on my blog was go into WHM and restart Apache because it had crashed again. This is the second time in the past few days indeed it doesn’t seem a week can go by without something on my VPS going down.

I raised a support ticket with PowerVPS but it seems that all I do these days is spend my life emailing hosting companies and domain registrars in between spending my life on the phone to credit card companies. Celeb Linkage is still down after probably months now and RegisterFly’s 2-3 hour rapid response team haven’t got back to me for days.

Which is really not what I need when I have lost almost all motivation for my online empire, one of the few things that I actually give a crap about in this world. Especially now I seem to be estranged from most of the others.

Online tech is not the only defective technology however. My brand new laptop with it’s “2.0Ghz” processor doesn’t seem to realise it has that kind of power. As if it’s long boot-up time wasn’t enough, when I inserted my World of Warcraft installation disk I was told that my computer did not meet the minimum requirements for the game which requires an 800Mhz processor. And don’t even get me started on the touch pad.

Following on from my two shifts at work this week of which one falls outside of my availability, I have three shifts next week of which one again falls outside my availability even after telling James I only wanted 1-2 shifts per week. Because that’s what I really need, another weekend with no time off to be constantly bouncing back and forth between home and uni.

As for uni I now once again have loads of coursework to do. I know a lot less about UML then I need to for the exam. Exams which are drawing ever closer. As is Christmas which I am severely not looking forward to. Plus this Tuesday is the last Christianity Explored which I’m really enjoying (the course is ok but the people are great).

I’m angry at the moment. CuteFTP which I’m trialing at the moment is disappointing, VNC just refuses to work with any kind of Linksys network and Thunderbird is still providing to create a wonder of software could suck soooooo much.

And I just got an email from one of the forums I am registered on (I never use, the admins are teenagers who are fans not webmasters – there is a massive difference between a webmaster who is a fan of someone and a fan of someone who is a webmaster of a fan site) who have announced they are going to start pruning the forums.

You don’t need to prune! This little project named phpBB is quite good software and can handle more than a few thousand posts! Everything is paged, the script is designed to handle losts of posts, text takes up hardly any database space. On the reverse site you delete old topics people want to reference, end up having to hold the name debates over and over again and remove any usefulness of the search function.

And seriously, start playing WoW!

I want to play World of Warcraft again! You other losers need to start playing so we can all form some kind of big alliance guild and I don’t have to quest alone like some pathetic loser. I command you!

So no less than 12 days after I ordered it my new laptop has finally arriived! I’m still getting used to the compact keyboard and how tiny everything on the screen is (it’s running the same resolution as my 17″ TFT and bare in mind it’s a 12″ screen, I would alter it but then I would loose widescreen).

It’s so portable it’s amazing and runs at a decent speed. I’ve spent the day filling it up with the apps I need though there are plenty more I need to get.

I am also debating over what to do with regards to the email situation. I was switching to Thunderbird but having used it for a day I’ve found out how bad the software actually is. I much prefer Outlook Express, it lets you know what’s happening, it orders things sensibly, the download mail button actually does something it’s those kind of fancy features I like. And the amount of false positives my spam filter is bringing up is silly. Worse still, when you say something isn’t spam it doesn’t even move it back to your inbox. It just leaves it there in junk.

Still on the bright side it’s all wireless and can be placed on a surface without overheating, indeed on carpet. Might have to do some late night chatting in bed tonight. It’s also been a small distraction from life in general which has been considerably less enjoyable over the past few weeks (and it’s not like it was on a high starting point to begin with).

In response to Katers17’s kidnapping, I have counter-kidnapped Mr. Worfolk to bargain for Kate’s release with.

“350”>

Bored of struggling with SE20 coursework and still dreaming of my new laptop which still hasn’t been dispatched I did an inventory of the software on my current laptop so I knew what I had on there and what I needed to install on my new laptop so that I could trash my Windows install on my old one and still have all the software I needed.

The approach I’m going for is very much go free software (open source for the most part) all the way. I’m planning to switch from Outlook Express to Thunderbird and Power Archiver to IZArc. I’ve never used IZArc so I’m hoping it will be good. I generally use Power Archiver at the moment as I bought a licence for that but I’m not massively impressed with it.

I’m still strugging to find some software r eplacements though. I currently use AceFTP which I love. It’s simple to connect using quick connect or you can store your site’s details you can easily lockstep directories (a MUST for any FTP client I use), has tabs for local and remote (multiple connections and transfers), allows me to heavily customise my collision actions. I need an FTP client with all that plus I know some FTP clients offer server to server transfers and on-server file editing which would be wicked bonuses if such software that is free exists (though I’m very tempted to just pay for CuteFTP as it does have all that or so it would appear from the website).

I also want to find a program I can stick icons together in. IconCool Editor is good software but it’s not free. I need something I can easily copy and paste an image into or import from a file and output an icon for my website’s shortcut icons / favicons.

I also need an office suite. OpenOffice is obviously the leading contendor but I prefer Microsoft Office over OpenOffice. I don’t use Excel and PowerPoint as much as I used to so that’s less of an issue but I occasionally use Access for the old websites still running Access databases. Although Base can apparently handle those. So I should be fine with Openoffice.

Then there is also my graphics editing software. While most things can be replaced by free alternatives I don’t see how I can get round this one. Fireworks is really, really good at doing what I want it to do. For the stuff I do it’s probably by far the best software out there. I’ve used PSP and Photoshop and I still think Fireworks is way ahead. But the hippies over at Adobe want money for it. Maybe I should try chatting up the sales staff.

So yeah, if anyone wants to preach how great their FTP client, icon editing software or even vector based graphic editing software is, I’m all ears.

A naked girl stuck her fingers in herself then pulled them out and placed them on my lips. If you’re under 18 stop reading this post now as it sure as hell isn’t suitable for you.

I started the night off at Christianity Explored. The Halloween festivities had somewhat drained the audience to the point where instead of having three tables we were all around one. The total attendance list excluding the people who run it was in impressive one – myself! Surely that has to be a sitcom “half a dozen Christians and an atheist” given the stuff I am doing with atheist soc the irony is quite amusing. As is the duality between the sweet and innocent Christian stuff and the night’s later events.

Afterwards I went home and changed and headed to The Old Bar to meet Phil and Michelle. Norm turned up too and about 10:30 we headed down to the Red Leopard for the student night. For those not in the know, the Red Leopard is a strip club.

It was one hell of a night. We ended up spending about £250 between us but it was so worth it. I didn’t realise the lap dances would be so full on but I am definitely not complaining! When you experiance such things as I described in my opening line it was worth every penny. Plus we took another step in the corruption of Michelle who not only went to the club but had two dances. What a night.