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Year View| Summary| Highlights| Month View| Friday 22 July 2005 (Day View)

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22.07.2005 – Friday 22 July – Joe’s & Uni

Morning

• I headed out to Joe’s, where he somehow saw me coming through a solid metal sliding door. I unpacked and, having my priorities right, put the hard drive I took up north into the computer and started it. Unfortunately, my USB hub then went insane and the computer randomly reset. I figured that it was overloading the power supply, so removed two DVD drives and tried again. This time it worked but I didn’t have a modem, and trying to install one resulted in a BSOD. I re-seated the modem, which seemed to make it happy, and now have the hard drive sitting on the top of my PC and can listen to great songs like “Technologic” by Daft Punk – the song itself is repetitive and boring, but the lyrics are brilliant: “Buy it, use it, break it, fix it. Trash it, change it, melt – upgrade it. Charge it, pawn it, zoom it, press it. Snap it, work it, quick – erase it. Write it, cut it, paste it, save it. Load it, check it, quick – rewrite it. Plug it, play it, burn it, rip it. Drag and drop it, zip – unzip it. Lock it, fill it, curl it, find it. View it, coat it, jam – unlock it. Surf it, scroll it, pose it, click it. Cross it, crack it, twitch – update it. Name it, rate it, tune it, print it. Scan it, send it, fax – rename it. Touch it, bring it, obey it, watch it. Turn it, leave it, stop – format it.” I think that pretty much sums up the life of most IT students.

Evening

• This uni before uni begins thing isn’t that good – I feel as though I’ve just completed an assignment. I’ve just spent hours at uni fighting broken computers, to make an Apache, PHP and MySQL auto-installer which isn’t drive specific and is small enough to run on the limited space we’re given at uni. Apparently something big broke at both ITEE and ITS today, meaning hardly anything worked, usually right when I needed it. Running programs tend to do strange things when they go to swap some of themselves into memory and find they’re no longer available. Ironically, after being told that the IT folk were quite unhelpful, overworked, and would not provide any assistance, meaning lecturers have to get people like me to do their job for them, I was told I could personally install my stuff into the lab image if wanted. It would be nice to turn off all the annoying Windows things, like the firewall, auto-updates, desktop cleanup popup, etc.