Sunday of my Life

Microsoft now have their global search engine up and running, and you can plug int otwo city names nad get directions on how to go between them. Sounds simple, no?

No

Follow these directions

1. Go to http://mappoint.msn.com/DirectionsFind.aspx
2. Select the country ‘Norway’
3. Enter as your starting city ‘Haugesund’
4. Enter as your destination city ‘Trondheim’
5. Click the ‘get directions’ button

Now… if you’ve followed these instructions precisely you should have directions between two cities that are situated a small distance apart on the island country of Norway. The statistics for this journey (copied straight from the search engine itself)?

Total Distance: 1685.9 Miles
Estimated Total Time: 47 hours, 31 minutes

47 hours and 31 minutes to travel what is probably 100 kilometers. Way to blow, Microsoft! Y’all’ve done it again, managed to make yourselves the laughing stock of the Internet!

(Oh, BTW: For the terminally lazy here is a screenshot of the map they provide)

To be honest with all of you, this is something that has been on my mind lately. One of the side-effects others have been noticing in me from my medication is its effects on my memory.

I don’t remember things.

Seriously.

Someone will tell me something, and ten minutes later… *poof*… it’s gone. I have trouble remembering:

1. Faces and names
2. Things that I have to do
3. Things that I have to tell people
4. Things I meant to put down on this list
5. How to spell words
6. The proper usage of some words
7. The list goes on….

It scares me, it really does. I’m no longer relaiable in how I do things, I can no longer be relied upon to remember things said to me or meetings that I’ve had. I don’t think I can really describe how much fear this fills me with. I can see the difference between what I was and what I am now. I can see the changes this medication has wrought in me; some good, some bad. The bad does not outweigh the good though, and there are some parts of me that I don’t want to go back to being, so I’ll continue wth the medication despite what I can see changing in me.

In a year or two I’ll (hopefully) be employed in an industry where my job will rely upon me remembering everything and so by then I must work out a system whereby I can keep track of what I’m supposed to be doing, and remember that I am keeping track of it. If I cannot do that, I don’t think I’ll even pass my course, becuase as my memory goes, thereby also goes my concentration, my attention span and my organisation skills. Without those I have no hope at all. Partially this post is just me getting my thoughs and fears down inot some kind of format, partially it’s a call for help. I can’t be the only one out there who has trouble remembering things. Are there any practical solutions for a guy in IT to use for this? I’ve tried writing things down, but then I forget that I’ve written them down. I don’t know what I can do but, by God, I need to do something!

Shamelessly stolen from BBSpot we how have the top 11 list for RPG Office Supplies:

1. Striped Tie of Resist Management
2. Mouse of Negate Firewall
3. Large Potion of Replenish Toner
4. Blinking Hub of Brilliance
5. Rusty Wand of Postpone Deadline
6. Potion of Manager Detection
7. Amulet of Blame Reflection
8. Ring of Pager Control
9. Scroll of Create Intern
10. Coffee Cup of Holding
11. Wand of Project Cancellation

There… if finding this funny doesn’t prove once and for all that I am a complete geek, I don’t know what will…

Aside fomr quoting lines from Star Trek/Wars at y’all.

And here we have the thrice-memedom that I shamelessly stole from Dorothea’s livejournal stream

THREE NAMES YOU GO BY
1. Adrian
2. Skaarjj
3. Hey, you!

THREE SCREEN NAMES YOU HAVE HAD
1. Skaarjj
2. ShadowFox
3. TranceyRien

THREE THINGS YOU LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF
1. Quick to learn
2. Never forget a number
3. Mistakes are not generally repeated

THREE THINGS YOU DON’T LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF
1. Quick to anger
2. Real problem with my weight
3. Slow to trust people

THREE PARTS OF YOUR HERITAGE
1. English
2. Scottish
3. A family of thieves from way, way back

THREE THINGS THAT SCARE YOU
1. The dark
2. Losing control of myself
3. Losing control of myself in the dark.

THREE OF YOUR EVERYDAY ESSENTIALS
1. Books.
2. The Internet
3. My computer (with its e-books and connection to said Internet)

THREE THINGS YOU ARE WEARING RIGHT NOW
1. Olive-drab 3/4 lengths
2. Steel-rimmed glasses
3. A sheen of sweat, becuase damn it’s hot in here right now

THREE OF YOUR FAVORITE BANDS OR MUSICAL ARTISTS
1. Tim Freedman
2. The Whitlams
3. Evermore

THREE OF YOUR FAVORITE SONGS
1. “Up Against The Wall” The Whitlams
2. “Make The World Safe” The Whitlams
3. “400 Miles From Darwin” The Whitlams

THREE NEW THINGS YOU WANT TO TRY IN THE NEXT 12 MONTHS
1. Passing my Cisco CCNA Final, that sounds fun.
2. Finally completing all the designs for this blog
3. Driving

THREE THINGS YOU WANT IN A RELATIONSHIP
1. A relationship
2. Fun
3. The ability to co-exist peaceably with mutual interests, respect and an understanding of the need for personal space.

TWO TRUTHS AND A LIE (in no particular order)
1. I am always bright, chipper and happy
2. I am working harder on being bright, chipper and happy
3. The medication does help, more than it hurts

THREE PHYSICAL THINGS ABOUT THE OPPOSITE SEX (or same) THAT APPEAL TO YOU
1. Eyes.
2. Understanding
3. A nature that lends itself to mindless adoration a desire to help and solve problems.

THREE OF YOUR FAVORITE HOBBIES
1. Programming
2. Roleplaying
3. Scale Modelling

THREE THINGS YOU WANT TO DO REALLY BADLY RIGHT NOW
1. Eat Lunch
2. Go and get some dental work done, beucase lucky ol’ me lost a filling, which seems to be developing into an abcess to judge by the pain behind my ear.
3. Have money… and icecream…. or icecream filled with 2-dollar coins… that’s be good. Or possibly chocolate money.

THREE CAREERS YOU’RE CONSIDERING
1. Network Administrator
2. E-Security consultant
3. Network Data Cabling Technician

THREE PLACES YOU WANT TO GO ON VACATION
1. Madison, Wisconsin, US of A
2. Mount Eccles, just past Leongatha, Victoria, Australia
3. Portsmouth, England

THREE KID’S NAMES:
1. Kayleigh
2. Michael
3. Amelia

THREE THINGS YOU WANT TO DO BEFORE YOU DIE
1. Watch the fall of Microsoft
2. Have enough money in an account that I can live off the interest it generates.
3. Learn to actually program well and with some semblance of speed, instead of little pieces here and there.

THREE WAYS I AM STEREOTYPICALLY A BOY
1. *Fart* he he he… (only occasionally though)
2. I’m bored… what can I build?
3. Nerd… totally and utterly. Glasses, Hair, Attitude, Knowing the names of more than 20 Star Trek-Episodes and able to recite Star Wards word-for-word.

THREE WAYS I AM STEREOTYPICALLY A CHICK
1. Is there anything I can do to help?
2. Dont. Touch. That. OK… you touched it…
3. Fussing over my sisters’ appearance before she goes out and/or assisting in the selection of proper jewelery and styling of hair.

THREE CELEB CRUSHES
1. Denise Richards, just cuz.
2. Angelina Jolie, the original Miss BYO-collagen
3. Drew Barrymore, a divine beauty

THREE PEOPLE WHO HAVE TO TAKE THIS QUIZ NOW
1. Tim Freedman
2. John Howard
3. Ziggy Zwakowski (former CEO of Hell$tra Telstra)

Seeing as how I’m more drugged than usual at the moment, having found a pain killer I can take with my anti-depressants (it’s strong strong stuff, so I shall be sleeping soon) a quote or two comes to mind:

“When true genius walks among you, by this sign shall you know him: The dunces shall be in confederacy against him”
– Swift

“We all carry scars, both physical and mental. What defines us as people is this: Do we let them marr us, or enhance us?”
– Unattributed

The second one: I know who said it, but they’ve asked I not attribute it to them. Those who know why it is know, and those who don’t, won’t. So there

Yes ladies and gentlemen, the Ruido Grande is on tonight, at the aforementioned place in the big image. I may or may not be there thanks to complications, we’ll see what develops as the day flows on.

Dorothea has recently been putting up on Caveat Lector a series of posts on fighting referer spam and bandwith hogs that endlessly trawl your site with bots (ignoring the stringent rules you, or she in this case, laid down in the robots.txt file, of course). Find linkyness below:

Killing Referer Spam

Latest Bad Referer

Brandimensions

Raft Of New Blockees

More To Ban

Hell, if this interests you, then I’d suggest subscribing to her Spam Specific RSS Feed with your news aggregator. There will be much goodness to come in this section, I can feel it. It’s already got some invaluable stuff in there that I am using to protect Sunday from these bastard sons of a bastard’s barstard’s barstard. (Guessed I don’t like spammers of any kind yet?)

Sign up, read. Play, fiddle, learn (as one of my friends says). You’ll be glad you did, trust me.

At least, as far as Windows Media Player 9 is concerned there is…

Imagine a time-flow like this:

———————————————————————————————-

You say: Windows, remove the Component ‘Media Player 9′ from your system
Windows says: Certainly, are you sure you want to do that?
You say: Of course I’m sure, I wouldn’t be asking you if I wasn’t
Windows says: OK, but are you really sure that you’re sure?
You say: Just do it before I remove you and just use my Linux instalation for everything
Windows says (in a sullen tone of voice): OK, OK… removing that component now Done, please restart me.
You restart
You go about your business
After a couple of hours of uptime Windows says: Please wait while I try to update the component I just removed; and promptly chews up all of your processor time and nearly all of your RAM as it tries to access now-missing routines, files and loop ender specifiers

———————————————————————————————-

So… now the search begins to try and find out the hidden windows command I use ot totally remove their media player from my system. it has to be there, or so I hope. Oh, and the search also begins for a new media player to use for my video files and DVDs. Songs ‘n stuff don’t matter; I have Winamp for that, and wouldn’t use anything else if you paid me.

Addendum (08:01 AM): Found it. If you ever want to wipe this nasty little thing form your system, enter at the command line: RunDll32 advpack.dll,LaunchINFSection %windir%\INF\wmp.inf,Uninstall

It will ask you if you want to roll back to the version of WMP that originally came with Windows. Yes, you do. It will then ask you to restart. Do so, thne go through and remove the windows component of Media Player again, and that should be that.

So, tonight I was asleep (and yes, I know what you’re thinking “There’s a real surprise Adrain. You? Asleep? I Always through you were some weird aline hybrid that didn’t require sleep!”). Whilst sleeping I had a nigtmare. This nightmare wasn’t anything new to me, I’ve had it, or at least ones similar to it, many times before. Nightmares are a very regular occurance to me, and this one didn’t really differ in content to the others. It was the usual stuff, me confined in a small dark area, then being chased throguh pitch-black corridors by something unseen but nonetheless menacing. As with all nightmares it will usually build up to a certain point then, once the adrenaline levels get high enough, I’ll wake up sweating a very frightened, to the dim glow of the nightlight in my room, seeing the red points burning in the darkness of my television’s stand-by light and the hanging red blur (becuase I’m not usually wearing my glasses) of my alarm-clock telling me it’s far too early for me to be awake.

But.. have you ever had a time where a dream blurs into real life? It can be a pleasant thing if it’s a pleasant dream, but it’s not the kind of thing you want to have happen with a nightmare. Well… tonight, we had a power failure. Things seem to meld in perfectly together, becuase just before I woke up I was in this dark little room, and it felt like the walls were closing in on me, then I woke up, to find myself… in a dark little room. I paniced, in every true sense of the word. I had my first panic attack for a while. I felt like I couldn’t breathe, I just had to get out of there. So I jumped out of bed, and promptly fell flat on my face becuase the bedsheets were tangled around my legs.

I’m glad to say that things pretty much ended there, becuase smacking my forehead against the corner of my chest of drawers, as well as giving me a nasty lump and opening a cut on my forehead, also shook me enough to bring me back to my senses. I always keep a candle and box of matches next to my bed, so I lit it up, and there was light. I saw it, and knew it was good, so I tried a meditation technique a friend of mine taught me to calm myself down. I focused on the candle flame, only it, pouring my entire concentration, being, mind nad soul into it, thinking of nothing else but the flame, studying its light and the way it moves in the slight air currents in my bedroom. I stayed like this for a long while, watching the candle slowly burning down, inhaling the scent for melting wax and burning wick, letting the candle absorb my senses. I barely noticed the time pass, or the power come back on ( the slight surge caused by the restoration of power was apparently enough to blow the tiny globe in my nightlight though, so I must get a new one). What finally brought me out was the light of dawn leaking through my window.

I was amazed though… it worked. I was calm, and relaxed like I haven’t been for the longest time. I think I’m going to have to make this part of my usual routine, becuase it it seems to work very well for me, so much so that I can sink into it and lose all awareness of the world around me. This is quite a change to me, becuase normally my fears are centered in knowing everything that’s going on around me. Not knowing them, not being able to see them (hence the darkness fixation I have) is what frightens me. But, doing this meditation technique, I lost all awareness of time passing, of anything that was going on around me, and I found peace in it, not fear. This certainly gives me several things to think about… but for now it’s time to go and slap a band-aid on my forehead and take some betadine to the cut to ensure I don’t get an infection.

These people who can sit there and let you pour your troubles in their ear, and offer practical advice about it all, who listen to your crap and then help you pick up the pieces. How do they do it? How can they take it? I don’t rightly know, but I wish I did, because I would like to be one of them. I would like to be able to return to the world that which I have recieved in the past and brighten someone else’s life as mine has been. I don’t know if I could ever really do it, or at least do it as well as I have recieved before. But I would like to try…