Well, today, my first day back at work after a one week 'holiday' (which included a nice job interview with scary scary people, but then I'm scared of people), is over.... The letter of resignation was handed in this morning (woo!), and I shall only be at Paston Chase for another 4 weeks (ending on the 16th Sept).

I'll be leaving Norwich and moving to the insanely strange place called Brighton. I might post further details later, if I get round to it.

You may remember that about a month ago, I posted about some thunderbugs getting in to my laptop screen, I phoned Acer and got assigned a number and told to phone City Link to arrange collection... I finally got round to phoning City Link on Monday, the laptop was collected on Tuesday, and I'm now typing this on it... with a bug free screen!

Other than the first time I sent the laptop back, the rate at which they have fixed it and returned it has been very prompt. The difference between the first time and the other times? Simple, I had paid for an Acer Advantage warranty when I bought the laptop, I failed to state this the first time I returned it, and thusly I waited a month to get the laptop back...

So, if you want a speedy service, and no courier charges... with a quick turn around... Buy Acer and the Acer Advantage warrenty.

Anyways - on to the chips that I bought on the way home!

Argh, my laptop screen is being attacked by evil black things, there's now 2 of them in the screen, it's not dead pixels as earlier on I was watching as one roamed about, I think that they are both now dead, but they're on the inside of the screen as far as I can tell. I have a shiny new CaseID from Acer and will be sending the laptop back on Monday to get them removed, hopefully without them charging me for the screen, as technically there's nothing wrong with it, other than 2 evil little black things roaming about.

As quinophex runs Ubuntu Hoary, and I happen to have a pbuilder set up to build hoary packages on my slaptip, I've compiled up freeciv2 packages for hoary from the current debian sources (v2.0.1). To grab them add:

deb http://www.sommitrealweird.co.uk/ubuntu/ hoary freeciv2

to your /etc/apt/sources.list file. They're straight off compilations of the debian sources in a hoary pbuilder, and it all compiled cleanly, and it was working for the quinophex.

Thought I'd blog it just incase anyone else was interested (it's insanely addictive).

Thanks to Noodles, Dave, Becca and John for coming out for some birthday drinks last night. Many thanks for the shiny present from Mr Noodles. Maybe soon my head will forgive me for the Lagavulin and Port :)

Lalala, tommorow is my 0x18th birthday (24 for those that don't speak hex), for anyone in the Norwich area, I should be somewhere in the region of the Fat Cat pub from ~ 8PM in order to have some nice beer, all welcome, as always :)

Yesterday morning my ikkle sister gave birth to her third child, a 2lb 5oz baby girl called Jasmine. Ikkle sister is still in Nottingham City Hospital at the moment, which is where they sent her last Friday, due to lack of beds in other hospitals that could cope with a baby being born under 28 weeks. She's not sure when they're moving her back to a sane county, like Suffolk, but she's hoping that it's sometime next week.

Right, the laptop was picked up on Tuesday for repair... The laptop is now back in my possession, having got back from the repair centre. I'm quite impressed that Acer seem to have fixed the problems they were having last time I sent back the laptop, or maybe it was because I made sure that they knew I had the Acer Advantage warranty.

Hopefully, this time, it'll stay working ;)

Wooo!

At approximately 1.30am this morning, the trackpad stopped functioning on my laptop, it's still detected, but it can't be used, at all, ever. To go with this, the DVD drive that was apparently "replaced" is still not functioning, at all... So, in a moment of insanity, I phoned Acer again, this time going through with my Acer Advantage stuff, and so it should get through the other end a little quicker than last time (I hope so, 2 months is a lonnnnnng time).

Tommorow morning, between 9am and 1pm, a nice city link man shall be once again picking the laptop up and taking it away to be delivered to the people at Acer. sigh, bettings on the wait this time, guys?

Ho hum,

Laters.

Bill Gates, of Microsoft fame, is going to be knighted. Can anyone understand what the hell he's done to deserve that? Of course, ripping money out of our education system so that they run Microsoft Windows and Office is a worthy cause, and obviously one that I fully support </sarcasm>. But seriously, why the hell should he get to be a KBE. Have the standards really sunk THAT low?!

/me wanders off to vomit in the corner for a bit.

OK, I've got the telly on in the background at the moment, working on some evil php and then BT's new broadband advert came on... "Share your photos almost instantly with BT's 2M broadband", it said. Now given that all BTs offerings appear to have a consistent 256k upstream, and to share photos you're going to be using upstream bandwidth, not downstream, how the hell is it going to be quicker to share photos with BT's 2M offering than it is for me to share them from my shiny Black Cat Networks 512k connection? Having bounced around the BT site lots to check that I wasn't going mad, I eventually found the bit that says that upstream is 256k, on the other hand I also saw all the evilness that is the bandwidth caps. And thus ends my short rant of rantyness about BT. For now. Probably.

Well, been working at home for the last couple of days, currently sitting at my dad's, but will have to be back in Norwich sometime later tonight ready for the company meeting tommorow. Now have my own ikkle desk at my dad's that sits in the corner, with my back to the telly. Much goodness.

It's getting close to pay day again, under 2 weeks to go now... If I can manage to not spend much more this month, I should eventually actually have some spare cash next month... wooo! Though, that should really go on the credit card bill (booo!).

The laptop is still working (yay!) and still has a damned nice keyboard (IMO), now, if only I could get it to go to sleep in linux nicely... If I throw it in to S3 mode, the kernel dies on me (as I wasn't expecting). Oh, and I suppose I should also take a look at getting some battery status out of this beasty, there are apparently people that have managed it, I should look at the kernel patches sometime when I've got time.

The work project is ticking along, but needs lots more done to it by Friday afternoon (scary stuff), and to be completed by Monday. It's been a nightmare of a project, but at least it looks reasonably pretty at the moment.

Anything else? Hrm, dunno, probably.

Right, we now have back in my possession my shiny laptop, and it even appears to be working, lunchtime shall tell me for sure, when I throw HL2 at it which is the reason it went for repair in the first place.

I'm currently sitting using aforementioned laptop, which still had my shiny nux partition, which should probably be apt-get upgraded RSN, and have it already all set for doing the devel for work, it's much more usable than my work desktop that dies at random points during the day (mainly due to syncing 2 80G USB drives).

So, all in all, it's a good morning... now, if only Scam would actually send the bits for my new desktop, all would be well with the world.

As I can't (yet) re-whinge about Acer (need to pickup the laptop first and check it), I think I shall whinge about Scan... Last week I placed an order with them, around about Monday, and was given a delivery date of Wednesday, I then got an e-mail from them saying "Sorry, due to blah blah blah crappy excuse, your order has been delayed", which I then got again on thursday, friday, saturday, sunday... I'm waiting for todays now. SIGH. Looking on the tracking system, it's not even been "picked" yet.

See, why can't everyone be as nice as the people at Advance Tech? They managed to phone me to check some changes to my order, and, not only that, managed to deliver stuff to me the next day.

That's all for now, maybe later a posting about something more interesting.

It would appear that my laptop has been repaired! And not only that, they've shipped it back to me... Of course, they didn't tell me they'd shipped it back to me, and so I have to go pick it up from City Link tommorow, but hey, I FINALLY GET THE DAMNED THING BACK!

YAY!

Right, having now talked to them, they're now trying to get me a replacement, woo, but they're awaiting "Authorisation", and they won't know about that till Monday. SIGH.

In other news, 90% of my new box arrived today YAY! Can't use it yet though, as the graphics card hasn't arrived yet, and I haven't got a suitable one to use. Ah well, at least that lot should arrive before monday, assuming that scan aren't being shite.

I'll snap some pictures of the bits that have arrived later, just cos I can :)

Right - it's now back from the other repair centre (that they no longer use) and in the proper repair centre. The nice man on the phone said that he'd write an e-mail to downstairs, and print a copy and take it to the manager saying that it should be rushed through or a replacement sent, so, hopefully, I should see it before the end of this month (fingers crossed).

That is all.

Well, having phoned acer again, the laptop is now back in the "awaiting parts" stage of the process, apparently it's awaiting a new "LCD cover". sigh someday I might get it back, you know :)

In other news, I might have accidently ordered myself a new desktop box, a nice shiny AMD64 3000+ jobby (939 pin version, muchly nice), 512M RAM, 120G HDD, Dual Layer DVD writer... you know the usual type things. That should arrive sometime this week... so at least I should have something that works RSN :)

That is all. Might update later in the week if there's some more news on the slaptip.

Right, here comes the summary, around about the week before the 9th of December my shiny new AMD64 laptop developed a fault with it's DVD drive, it still being under manufacturers warrenty (I only got it in August) I phoned up and organised it to be collected on the 8th December, I followed it through City Link and noted that it arrived at the destination for repair on the 9th December 2004. This, I thought, was quite damned good and speedy, City Link went up in my estimations and all was well.

I left it a couple of weeks, then phoned Acer to find out what was happening, they said "We're awaiting a shipment of parts", fair enough, I thought, that's not so bad, hopefully I should get it back shortly after christmas. Nope, phoned again between christmas and new year, still awaiting parts, then they shut for a bit (from ~ 30 December to 6 January), phoned again after this period, still awaiting parts. Phoned basically every other day for the next couple of weeks, to see if there was any progress. Nothing, still awaiting parts. That was until this week, magically, the parts arrived, and on Wednesday I was told that it would be going through testing Thursday, and that if it got through that, I should get it back on Tuesday. Phoned Thursday to see what the outcome of the testing was, they hadn't actually yet tested it, (after I eventually managed to get them to look in to where it was, this is now becoming a time consuming task, as I have to explain to whoeveritisontheendofthephone what I was told the last time so that they can find anything out). So, phoned today, went through the ritual explaining to them where my laptop was, and, lo and behold, we found out that it had failed the testing.

Of course, being the efficient people they are, they can't actually tell me what it failed on, or what parts it is now waiting for. sigh.

Hopefully it'll come back sometime this year, this is starting to get a little ridiculous, we're only what, a week and a half off them having the laptop for 2 months, that's just silly.

Random wibble over, will keep you all posted on the progress of the repair of my laptop, if I can extract the information out of the guys at Acer.

I recently purchased the 3 series box set of Black Books, and have managed to watch all 3 series in the last 3 nights, it rocks. Plain rocks. Everyone should have it, good, light entertainment, easy to watch, and, best of all, it has Bill Bailey :)