Rambling of a Coder

Small Things going out of hand

Saturday 27 October 2007 at 1:30 pm

Damn didn't even notice it'd been so long since i last posted till i seen Deez post in the previous entry.

Well lots of things have happened to me lately. Mostly you could say bad things with some good thrown in.
Let me start at the beginning, i managed to catch a small bacterial infection in my throat, Which alone isn't a great big thing and a small dose of antibiotics clears it up quickly. But me being me i ignore small illnesses and just suffer through them, Which was a profoundly stupid idea as it spread into my lungs and other parts. Causing me no ends of trouble with breathing, swallowing, eating, choking etc. etc. Enough that i actually ended up in hospital, and on some strong antibiotics for a week or so which cleared it all up BUT left me open to a fungal infection in my throat so yay three cheers and all that for me. Ever had a fungal infection in your throat? its quite uncomfortable and very very annoying. Anyway another course of meds and that has all cleared up now but I've been left with something called Post Nasal Drip now. Which is only annoying, feels like there's something at the back of your throat and you need to swallow/clear it.

Anyway thats a quick overview of the last few weeks bad side for me, BUT! on the bright side of all this. and this makes me thankful all that above happened to me. I HAVE STOPPED SMOKING, its been 3 weeks now since i last had a horrid fag and i have utterly no intention of ever going back to it. The cravings have long since passed too sept the occasional time, mostly when im sitting doing utterly nothing bored and i reach out for that ever present fag packet. I have to say now that i wish i'd done it long ago, i dont stink of smoke anymore and i dont wakeup with a mouth like an ashtray. Still wakeup with a completely dry mouth though but thats because of the stuff mentioned above and even thats going away.

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Construction

Tuesday 28 August 2007 at 4:38 pm

So, with the house deal turning sour and going south. And nothing else that interests us enough within our price range atm, I decided it was time to give me and the little woman a bedroom back. Till now our bedroom has basically been my space with my computers and electronics stuff and just about everything else I'm into. Wasn't a very bedroomy room.

So i decided it was time to build a dividing wall and split the room into two, Thus giving us a real bedroom and me my own space that no one can invade with stupid shit like ugly curtains etc etc. (Stuff all woman seem to want to put in rooms). It was going well i had the framework basically done till a little accident happened with the central heating and my wife's brain (Untreated wood and lots of heat = bad). Thats set me back a bit with having to resquare the timber and shit.

The Plan was to have the wall build and plastered for today and start constructing my work tables tomorrow, Obviously this isnt going to happen but i was taking my own sweet time with the work nice and slow and steady. Now I'll have to really focus on it for the next few days and get it done quick so i can get the tables build and my shit moved into the room.

In the middle of all this work it was also my kids 4th birthday, he had a great time and got lots of new toys and shit, Funnily though the toy he's played with most is the one that cost us like £2 to buy. Most inexpensive thing we bought him. Now its my turn and i have the wife pestering me what i want for my birthday. Which is honestly nothing, I'm 27 on the 30th.. and i basically have everything i want right now besides building a new PC, and that will come from my own money and not as a birthday present.

Anyway need to get back to the ole work bench and finish this wall.

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Vista x64 And Other Stuff

Thursday 12 July 2007 at 2:01 pm

So, a few weeks ago i took the plunge and finally decided to get rid of XP and upgrade to Vista x64, Course i wasnt sure how it was going to work out. know with the many many horror stories out there about vista. so i purchased the home basic version. And to put it bluntly, there's a few annoying things but i havnt had problems with running any DRM items, or those not so legal vids or that. I can still play WoW perfectly well. but i have noticed a tendancy for it to have graphics lag but not enough to stop me enjoying playing.

The only real problem with upgrading from XP to Vista is that your used to where XP puts everything, and in some blinding moment of pure bliss microsoft decided to move things about again so you have to go hunting for options.

Hardware wise, I havnt gotten my webcam, Wireless Card or my Bluetooth adapter working yet. Essencially because there isnt 64 Bit drivers available for any of them. So i think maybe some research into 64 bit driver development is required there. So if yas come accross any decent resource for this topic. the please come back and share them with me. I've seen 64 bit linux drivers for them all though. so there maybe some information to be gleemed from looking at the source for that.

Im also a bit worried about PIC development in vista x64 but havnt researched it to much as yet. Im sure that community will be on top of this though.

As you can probably tell my other hobbies are really surfacing more and more these days and im slowly getting back into the games programming to. This time i've ditched all these 3rd party languages and im slowly wading through and trying to learn how to use Microsofts XNA and course trying to get it to work in 64-bit mode. With this new found direction i found myself packing away my trusty old Delphi (which im sure i'll miss lots) and am getting stuck right into the C# language. its pretty similar to Object Pascal and im not having to many problems with it. Im also continueing on redesigning this website but i decided to just keep this blog system as i rather like it anyway. Back to C#, With the new OS and all, i was looking through the many small programs i've written for myself over the years, know the ones you write and find out that they're actually really handy and you end up using them constantly. So i've decided to redo these in C# and take advantage of the experiance i've gained with programming since i initally wrote them.

I've also decided to start keeping research documents for my many idea's, which i think i'll start posting in a seperate section of this website. And i've decided my first real electronics project will be some USB to PIC interfacing stuff. Im looking forward to actually starting that as the research i've done on it so far kinda points that its a P.I.T.A. which is always a fun/frustrating/rewarding thing for a project when your getting back into the swing of something.

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