I just got an e-mail informing me that my Mac Mini has been sold for £200. I’m happy with that, I only paid £300 for it.
I just have to find a box big enough to fit the Mini, Keyboard and Tiger box… lets hope Royal Mail can deliver the goods in that area. God I’m so witty!
So yeah… RESULT!
Archive for August, 2006
So I just listed my first Mac on eBay. Go see if you wish to purchase it 
(UK only).
The Mac Mini served its purpose in breaking me into the world of Apple, slowly. During the times before I had the iMac and Macbook Pro, I used it as a secondary computer or more of a media centre. I had all my music stored on it, photos, videos etc. I used it like that because my PC was threatening to crash constantly, and I hated having my music inturrupted, and I didn’t want the hassle of having to back up my music and media before formatting the PC - which as any PC user would know is a common occurrance 
. Apart from that, Sof used it occaisonally to go on MSN, or rather, kicked me off my PC and I used it to feed my internet needs.
It really didn’t stand up to any gaming though - not with its 256mb of RAM and 32mb Radeon 9200 GPU, lol. I installed WoW on it once, and the installer warned me that there wasn’t enough RAM to run it smoothly. However it did run, and the best framerate I think it acheived was 15 FPS… hehe. But nevermind, Marble Blast Gold, and Nanosaur 2 were excellent! [/sarcasm] .
I think I’ll miss it though, it did make an excellent server. I had it running httpd, mysqld, pure-ftpd, vnc, sshd, etc - and as far as I recall it never crashed once. It was really good. I guess it was never under any actual load though, lol, which is probably why it didn’t keel over and run out of RAM or something. The only thing it couldn’t do was run the teamspeak server, since there is no server binary compiled for Mac OS X, and Fink was extremely horrible to work with.
I now use an AMD Duron 800mhz server running Fedora Core Linux 5. It suits the needs I have.
And so I say goodbye to the Mac Mini, and I thank it for all it did for me, gradually introducing me to the better life that is OS X, never hiccuping while doing the things I asked it to do… You will be missed…
So Alton Towers was yesterday - I would have posted something yesterday, but I was knackered. The bus journey was 4 hours each way! I’m pretty sure thats the fault of the driver though… It really shouldn’t have taken that long at all.
But anyway, we got there and had fun. We started off with the River Rapids, which broke down while we were waiting. We got rather soaked - apart from Truman who managed to stay as dry as… a really dry thing. I think Sofie and Yin got the wettest - poor them… lol.
We then went on Ripsaw - but unfortunately they weren’t doing the “we’re gonna spray you in the face wit jets of high pressure water” thing because it was “too cold” - pussies. Girls are fine on Ripsaw, but guys - watch your ball sacks! The restraints system it uses can cause extreme ball sack crushing problems if you’re not braced for it. It’s not only a shoulder brace that comes down, but also a bar comes forward to hold the shoulder brace down, and it pushes really tight in the area of the gooch.
After that, we must have been cursed, because we spent an hour queuing for Air. During the queuing Air broke down twice. They sent empty cars around countless times, and finally when we were nanometeres from boarding the ride, they told us that it was broke and that they were closing it. The bastards. We were ripping shit out of the rides mechanics and stuff while waiting, jokes such as “They closed it because the atmospheric lighting wasn’t working”, “Here comes Mat the Maintenance Man with his bundle of keys to fix the ride” and “There’s your problem, there, the fat guy on the track”. And who could forget the ‘Meercat’. I can’t really explain this one, it was a spur of the moment thing, and involved popping your head above the queue and doing a meercat impression using your hands as mock ears. Yin seemed to find it hilarious. 
So that was the River Rapids and Air that broke on us. We did, however, get a free Priority Pass for any ride (excluding Rita), which we used to get on to Nemesis. So in effect we queued an hour for Nemesis - which was awesome. It was a short ride, but it was just non-stop g-force.
Then it was decided that we should go on Rita - which was on the otrher side of the park. So we hopped onto the SkyRide, which is some kind of gondola transport system around the park. Going with the cursed theme, it stopped, with us suspended about 150ft above some senic garden. I don’t think Sofie was too pleased about this fact judging from her reaction when it stopped. Bean and Truman had gotten into another car and were slightly behind us, but still suspended too. I could see Truman waving like a nutter from where I was. He was clearly rofling about the break down.
Anyway. Rita - The Queen Of Speed. It’s name is a well chosen one, and sums up the ride perfectly. I thought 0-60 in 3 seconds was fast on the Aerosmith ride in Disney. Rita puts that ride to shame. Try this: 0-100 in 2.5 seconds. I think I left a kidney behind, and it made Yin’s lips bleed Now THAT’S fast.
I just had a thought… I should have posted the ride photos. I’ll do that when I get home and have access to my scanner.
After Rita we went on Oblivion twice - the queue was almost non-existant - it was awesome. Oblivion is another of those rides that can’t really be explained, you just have to experience it yourself. I think the best way to describe it would be freefalling and being able to SEE were you’re falling too. I have a photo of that one too, so I’ll put that up.
And that was the whole day. It’s a pity that most of it was spent travelling. Four hour journey there, four hour journey back…. The driver was a knob to be fair. We stopped once on the way back - for 10 mins. We were all starving and needed to stretch our legs, and the twat said “No burgers or chips”. That ruined our plans. We were gonna get a burger and chips. But noooo, not allowed. So we weren’t happy. Then on the way back into Cwmbran, the driver took a completely random, non-direct way to Cwmbran bus station. Instead of going straight there and saving about 15 mins, he went around Llantarnam, and wasted a load of time. Noob. Noob bus driver.
As some of you may know, this site (and countless previous other sites) used to reside on the domain Asphyxias.net. Well today, I thought I’d go and see if anything had been done with the domain since I gave it back to the registrars to reregister. This is what I saw:
http://asphyxias.net (Not safe for work)
I can’t help but think that I would have made a lot more money if I had done the same thing . But seriously, I never thought that domain would ever host material like that .
Suffice it to say I lol’d a lot.
Yesterday was the day I went paintballing for the first time in my life. Yeah, more like PAINballing… I was fortunate enough to be invited along by Richard and some of the other people who work at Wilkinsons in Cwmbran (woot.. ).
The day started off with having to wake up at 7am. Christ. I didn’t even know there was a 7am. Needless to say, staying up until 3am the night before wasn’t the best idea. Paintballing on 4 hours sleep is what I would deem close to suicide… lol.
So anyway, we made a stop off in Newport to pick up Bean. I’m surprised the mini buss still had wheels by the time we left. To be honest, one of the highlights of the day was to seen Bean running across Caerleon roundabout, like a madman, with his thinning hair flopping in the breeze and Truman in close persuit. Classic.
This place was in the middle of nowhere. We had to trek across acres of land, over mountains, across seas… Yeah I went too far, didn’t I? But it was a fair walk from the carpark to the place itself.
One of the other highlights, in my opinion, was when I picked up a small set of overalls to wear. How would I know they wouldn’t fit? I’m small, why shouldn’t they fit? It was a sight to see me packed into childs overalls. If only someone took a photo .
After being given the whole talk about not taking your goggles off or risk getting blinded, etc, etc, etc, we went off to play our first game. IT was called Speedball. Basically you’re put in a field with several baracades made from barrels and told to shoot the shit out of each other for 10 minutes or until one man is left standing. Mayhem. The barrels are stacked so that there are relatively small holes between the barrels, which you can see through. I was looking through one of these holes, and got shot in the eye! I shat myself. These paintballs fly at approximately 120mph and I got shot in the eye. It was that point that I was actually appreciative of the headgear we were told to wear. Unable to see for the rest of the match, I was shot out pretty quickly. I got shot in the forarm first time.
I’ll tell you this now. The first time you get hit with a paintball is something different, you can’t brace yourself for it, because you don’t know when it’s coming, and you can’t compare it with anything you’ve felt before - that is unless you’ve been hit with something other than a paintball at 120mph sometime in the past. It broke the skin slightly, leaving a purple graze.
We were instructed at the beginning of the day, several times in the space of a few short minutes, that we were NOT allowed to remove our headgear in any way, shape or form, unless we are back at basecamp. We’re not even allowed to remove it in the deadzone (the place you go once you’re out of a game). We were told that the penalty for removing your headgear would be expulsion from the rest of the days games. Well, I don’t know why, but while I was in the deadzone, some guy removed his headgear. After the marshal had just drilled it int our heads. All it took was a quick (and I mean fast) mobile phonecall, and the manager guy game over within about a minute, and the guy was taken back to basecamp. Never saw him again. I bet they incinerated him.
So as the day went on, we played various styles of game. I think my favourite was Castle. The scenario was a basic attack / defend, where the defenders have to prevent the attackers from rasining the flag in the castle. Being part of the defenders was the best bit. Hiding behind baracades, making a break for it to get little closer while under heavy fire. It was one of the most exhilerating things I’ve ever done. I managed to get to a baracade that was rather close to the castle. While there, I took out somewhere around 5 of the opposing team. I shot one of them in the ass, through a window, from ground level, while he was up on the second level of the castle, from behind a baracade. We later agreed that it was Richard that I shot in the ass! Score! I also managed to get shot in the face 3 times during that round. It’s a good thing headshots don’t count. Although I couldn’t see very well, and one of the paintballs hit me in the mouth guard, spraying paint into my mouth. Not nice.
Throughout the day I was shot multiple times in multiple places, but none of them were especially good shots. What I mean by that is that none of them left any good bruises to show anyone. The worst one I got was on my left shoulder, it looked pretty good last night. But it’s faded slightly since then, and if I took a photo it probably wouldn’t show.
I ended up running out of paintballs in the last round and had to sit out. I think it was for the best really, since in the last round, half of the blue team decided they didn’t want to be sore losers and joined us on the red team, leaving the blue team with a huge disadvantage. Not to mention the switchers were a bunch of loud, moronic drones with Welsh chavvy accents who couldn’t fire a paintball gun to save their lives. Seriously, one guy broke his gun. Explain to me how you break a lump of solid metal without launching it at a wall at high velocity? Damn apes.
Somehow we lost the key to our locker somewhere along the line. We had to ask the person the kiosk if they could open it for us, and they had conveniently misplaced the “master key”. By master key I think they meant the gorrilla with a hammer. So we asked the manager guy, and he said he’d help us out, that it wasn’t a problem. He then proceeded to talk to everyone in base camp and shake their hand. It wasn’t until almost everyone had gone, that he told some dolt in a florescent jacked to open the locker. Which he did - using bruteforce and a screwdriver. We could have done that. And it wouldn’t have taken the half an hour it took for the guy to stop piss arsing around and do it!
Well anyway, I got home and fell asleep at around 10:30pm - which, for me, is early. I didn’t wake up until 2pm the next day. It was then I discovered that I was immobilised. As the title says - my everything aches. I’ll attribute this aching not to paintball wounds, but to the fact that yesterday was probably the most excersise I’ve done in 19 years…