A few hours after I stuffed my face with Belgian fries some cunts stole both of our bikes. We’d bought them in Houston and shipped them to Antwerp last May. Someone is going to make a bunch of money off them because they were awesome cruisers that you can’t get here. You fucker. 
I have a box of letters I’ve keep since receiving my first postcard when I was 5. I’ve carried this box everywhere with me overseas, and every now and then I have a look through and read them for a quick reminisce.
I have some pretty embarrassing letters in that box, including one from the guy I lost my virginity to written on red and white Mickey Mouse paper and quotes Iron Maiden lyrics. I have every single letter my best friend, Pip, has ever sent me, including one from Christmas in 1991 where she told me she got Would You Lie To Me by Charles & Eddie on cassingle. And the cheesy GnR postcard she sent to me from Scotland when we were 13 that started off our tradition of only sending each other the most lame and cheesy postcards ever.
I found a random letter from a guy I had forgotten I even used to be friends with called, I think, Alan Cook. I say “I think” because the letter is addressed to “Corg Snorg” and signed “Big Mobby”, and I had trouble remembering what the fuck that was all about. It’s weird the names we all gave ourselves and each other. If the letters weren’t addressed to Corg Snorg, they were addressed to Mopper and Ani-Bop. I think Pip gave me 50 nicknames at least.
I have no idea why I’m talking about this. Brain no worky.
I bought my iBook 11 months ago, and last week decided it was time to buy AppleCare. Tonight, my applications suddenly started hanging, so I reboot and guess what? Nothing. I can’t boot from CD, I can’t run Disk Utility or Disk Warrior, I can’t hook it up to the PowerBook as a FireWire drive, and when I go into Change Startup Disk my volume isn’t even showing.
So, I call AppleCare, that I so intelligently spent £199 on. I have to call an 0870 number, which isn’t even free, and I get to wait on hold for 30 minutes. The first time I end up getting routed to a voicemail box that doesn’t have voicemail set up on and I get a charming voice that says, “Goodbye” and then dial tone. I call back two more times and never get through to a person. I decide to call the Sales line to find out if they can tell me how long the wait would be or if they can put me through, and the woman who answers has an American accent. She’s in America. She puts me through to the AppleCare line which happens to also be in America. I speak to a person in about 5 minutes, and the hold voice actually tells me that I can expect to wait 5 minutes, not some totally annoying montonous Irish twat who keeps telling me every 2 minutes in between Christmas carols (what the fuck, it’s April) that someone will answer my call soon. He runs me through some tests and confirms that my computer is indeed completely borked, something I already knew when I called, but because he’s in America he can’t arrange for my computer to be fixed. He gives me a case number which I probably can’t even quote because who knows if the UK people can even access it in their system.
I now have to take my computer into the “local” Apple technicians which are actually a 20 minute walk into some weirdly desolate area east of the city. I can expect to wait around a week for my computer to be fixed, and I am pretty sure I will have lost all my data. This includes the originals of all of my photos over the past few years, including the modified originals of my photos from my trip. Luckily, I have a backup of the actual originals, but I will have to go through everything again to redo the levels and whatnot for printing. I will have lost all of the files I’ve saved over the last year, the desktops, the icons, my system preferences, my software, my address book, although thankfully my bookmarks, email and cropped photos are stored on a server.
As of right now, AppleCare fucking sucks ass. It is an incrediblely large amount to pay for a service that involves you calling a helpdesk that isn’t free, only to wait on hold and never speak to a real person or even be able to log a fault. If I didn’t love the way OS X works and how portable my iBook is, I would seriously consider going back to a desktop PC with Windows on it. At least then I could just go to the store when my hard drive or video card breaks and install it myself. And I’d also have Counter-Strike.
The worst thing is that P and I now have 3 broken Apple computers: 1 iBook, 1 older PowerBook G4 with a broken logic board, and 1 brand new PowerBook G4 with a broken RAM slot. P has also had loads of problems with his iPod randomly losing all data.
The moral of this story is that all computers fucking suck.
Update: I took my laptop into the Apple service centre in Manchester. They told me it would take 2-5 days to diagnose the issue, even though I knew what the problem was – a broken HDD. Anyway, I reluctantly left it at the store, with my data lost forever. Later that day, someone on a forum suggested I tried Data Rescue X, which has apparently worked for him. I figured, what the hell, I might as well try it. It was Friday afternoon and it wasn’t like it was going to be the end of the world if I have to wait an extra couple of days if I get my data back or not.
P and I went to the store and picked up my laptop. I tried Data Rescue X, but it only managed to get some files, a lot of which were corrupt, and it didn’t get any of the files that really mattered. It also didn’t get a file structure or any filenames. While this was happening, I noticed that my HDD had magically mounted as a FireWire drive. I couldn’t drag my entire user folder over because it would error at a certain point and then hang. However, when I went into the user folder, I found that I could magically drag the folders I wanted to keep (Pictures, Documents, Movies) to P’s PowerBook. It actually worked. I have no idea how.
I then erased the drive, did a hardware test in which everything passed, and then reinstalled OS X. I installed a bunch of software, the final being Photoshop. It was then that my HDD completely borked, my iBook never to boot again. Tomorrow I will again take my computer into the Apple service centre, although this time I won’t be crying on the inside because I lost all my data. Huzzah!
Apparently Firefox has a serious hole where the last 10K of readable characters in your system memory can be viewed. This could be your most recently viewed webpages, or it could be your credit card details and social security number.
Use the below script to test if your version of Firefox is vunerable. If your browser is not secure, you will see your readable characters in the box below. I can not see your memory output from this script, so don’t worry. However, it may crash your browser, so be careful.
To update, backup your bookmarks and completely uninstall your version of Firefox using the control panel.
Download the latest working version of Firefox (Windows/Mac) and retest your browser. You should only see a series of Xs if you are secure. I have personally tested both the Windows and Mac installations listed, as some of the other nightly builds aren’t quite working.
Thanks to sh0rtie.
3½ weeks ago, I decided that my job wasn’t leaving me enough time to do the things I wanted. So I wrote a resignation letter. A week later, I realised that I’m actually kind of broke and could probably do with a job, you know, for shits and giggles. To cut a short story even shorter, as of April 11th I will be working part-time at my current job, which leaves me the rest of the day after 1pm to do the things I want to do. Like sleep. Watch Trisha. Play on my DS. Smoke opium. Those sorts of things. I guess this post about micropatronage wasn’t half wrong after all. God dammit.
In actuality, I will be concentrating on my favourite hobby – photography. This means I will actually finish resizing my photos from my Christmas “world tour”. This also means I am going to try and make money off of my photography to supplement my meager part-time wage – things you will be able to purchase and enjoy, while giving me your hard earned money to support my half-hearted artistic bum lifestyle. But I promise, These Things will not suck. I have been thinking about These Things for a long time now. These Things might even be totally fucking awesome.
I will also have time when I am not exhausted to finish writing the things I start. This does not, however, mean that I will update my website any more, although actually it probably does. To be honest, I’ve been keeping a paper journal since the start of the year, and I can’t be arsed writing the same boring things twice.
“Today I went to work. Then I came home.”
“When I came home today, there was a poo under my chair. I scooped it up with newspaper.”
I mean, it’s not terribly exciting stuff.
Anywho, (did I just type “anywho”?) I finally uploaded a few photos from my trip to New Zealand and Dubai over Christmas. I have also moved my moblog photos to a directory that can actually be viewed. This contains more photos that I post on my website because I am a cheap bitch and it costs me 35p to send a MMS. Sorry, but it’s not worth that much to me.
There is something I find horribly scary about the subway. It makes me claustrophobic and panicky.
I am too poor to have a lawyer, thus:
