A little belated…
So Christmas was good – everything went swimmingly which was a little unsettling actually! No mad rush, everything working pretty much ok… felt rather odd. After Christmas I went snowboarding for a week which was fun, but we didn’t get very far due to bad tuition and then illness within the group. Four of us went – my housemate and me snowboarded and our two friends skied. I’ve skied twice before but never snowboarded and my housemate hasn’t done anything. We went to school on the first day, thought the tiny French instructor was a bit pants but kinda resigned ourselves. However that evening the rep was advising someone else to use the instructors we were using rather than a rival one as the rivals were “Very French and kinda just point you down a hill and let go”, and we realised that was what this tiny instructor was doing. So we put in a complaint. They made us go to the lesson the next morning but we left after 1 hour as she didn’t speak a word to us (hard to tutor if you don’t actually tell your students anything!). The school agreed to exchange our schooling for 2 hours each of private lessons, which, as housemate was then poorly the day after ended up being on our last day. Still we learned a bit and hope to practice on some indoor slopes here – it’s a nice skill to have as it opens up your holiday options. When housemate was ill I got to ski for half a day which cheered me up, but I felt very smug about the comfort level of snowboard boots vs ski boots – soooo much more comfortable!
So that’s that. Back to work. Fun fun.
I fixed my computer today – it had started to rattle and I knew it was a fan but as I have 6 in total (3 chassis fans, PSU, CPU and graphics card) that didn’t really help. Opened it up today and identified the culprit – my 8cm silent Akasa was no longer silent – some kinda bearing broken I assume – and the slight wobble was amplified by the metal of the chassis. Luckily I have spares, so have replaced it for a non-silent one with blue LEDs lol. As it’s in the depths of the case the LEDs are fairly pointless but eh. Gave it all a good hoover too.
Oh and it and my laptop are now both running Ubuntu. I switched the laptop over as it is Windows Vista and takes well over 15 minutes to get going. I was so pleased with the speed of booting that I installed it on the desktop too. Some little niggles – I can’t watch DVDs on the laptop in Ubuntu, and on this desktop my Wacom mouse only scrolls down (regardless of which way you move the scroll wheel) and Petz only runs with errors, but today when I was fixing the fan, the ability to boot and shutdown the PC in seconds was brilliant as I did it about eight times trying to identify the problem with the fan. I still have dual boot on both so Windows Vista is there if I need it, but tbh for my primary activity of coding and surfing, Ubuntu wins.
M says it’s only time before I switch to Mac but I resist.
Oh and I’m trying to learn Python. Got a book on it for Christmas so that’s my little hobby at the moment. I was trying to write a program that would help me write PHP scripts quicker (simple search queries that the site is full of) but think today I might just write the same “program” in PHP itself as that’ll take a few minutes lol.
Oh dear – Spock is eating a fan power cable (on my bed, not in the PC). That is sub-optimal.