lunar.soliloquy

So it's been about a month since I've posted on here, and it seems my blog gets more attention when I -don't- post anything for a period of more than more than 2 weeks than when I'm say, blogging every few days. It's hard to tell how many people actually read this since I never hear anything about my blog both on the web or irl unless it's to ask "why haven't you been posting lately Jeffrey?" According to the stats tab I have approximately 30 followers but I don't entirely trust it since I often access my blog from multiple places and all that traffic could simply have been me checking to see if anybody's been leaving any comments and sometimes reading over my own posts again. I'm surprised at the unexpectedly large number of people who actually read this thing since I feel my life isn't particularly interesting, and less so with me being in Rotorua and all.

So what's happened in my life in the past month? Well if you must know I got the OK from my dad to put together a computer for him and I spent most of the Christmas break doing that. By that, I mean researching parts, searching TradeMe for them, and waiting for them to arrive while reading up on things I should know before assembling a computer. Annoyingly, I spent about a week running into various problems which sure as hell tested my patience. I initially was working with some old parts I was trying to salvage from dad's old pc but it turned out that there was very little I could actually use from it so ended up having to order new ones. The only thing I managed to reuse was his old IDE hard drive which the new motherboard still supported, which was good since it meant I could keep all dad's files. Initially I thought I'd be able to use the same case but I painfully discovered that it wasn't ATX format so I had to order a new one. In the meantime I thought I'd assemble the rig without a case just to see if all the parts worked, and they did, after many many attempts of reseating the graphics card which I suspected to be a bit faulty.

The big problem I ran into was when the case did arrive, and after putting all the parts in, realising the graphics card was playing up again. Thinking to reuse the same method to get the card to go again, I reseated the card a couple of times, and after a couple of tries a huge spark exploded in my face and I immediately realised I'd broken something. And yeah, I did. The CPU fan stopped going and the mobo was making high pitched beeps meaning the CPU was overheating so I turned it off quick. Defeated, I sent the rig into town to get it fixed - at a cost of $90/hr for labour I was lucky they managed to find out the problem (broken motherboard) within just an hour. They ordered in a new mobo and graphics card for me and got everything up and running as smoothly as it should have been had the graphics card not been faulty. Argh, bung graphics card ended up ruining my first computer building experience =( but some good lessons learned for my next computer building project which will be for myself when I get back to Auckland. Sure, getting set back $200 for something silly like that hurts (I had to pay for the parts I'd damaged, of course) but if you think about how much you'd spend for a computer that good - 2.67GHz x2 CPU, 2GB RAM, 512GB dedicated graphics RAM, 160MB HDD - being able to play Starcraft2 for that much isn't too bad. Of course, dad did pay for most of it but it's his computer anyway lol.

Work's been pretty steady with not too much happening but I've been kept quite busy which has been good. I think I've made a bad name for myself among a few of the patients here for missing their veins for venepuncture. There was this one guy who raged pretty bad at me for missing him twice but it's not my fault if his veins are crap. My hit ratio's gone up to around ~90% now so I'll only miss, say, 1 in 10 patients or maybe 2 max on a bad day.

Ah, dad wants to head home now, I'll continue on with this post tomorrow (no internet at the farmhouse T.T). Laptop's running outta battery too. Sigh, last day of work tomorrow. Can't wait to go back to Auckland next Tuesday.