Vintyfresh’s blog

Well I think so anyway.  I ripped a load of CD's recently and decided to completely redo my itunes, and the machine kept crashing when I was trying to update the library.  It also seems to crash a lot when I play flash games, open too many internet browser windows or pretty much anything that requires a bit of memory.

I have no idea what the problem is, but my hard drive was almost completely full at one point so I deleted a load of stuff and had a go at defragmenting it.  It certainly needed some defragging, but I think the machine crashed either at the end or close to.  Anyway, it didn't help.

I decided to back up my files on a portable USB hard drive I have, and reinstall Windows.  Great idea in theory, but it wouldn't even let me do that without giving me blue screens of death.  I've disabled a few options in the bios and tried again, and at least it seems to be letting me format the hard drive now, but I don't have very high hopes.  I suspect it will be off to the shop to buy a new machine in a few days.  Woo.

I really hate exams.  I have 4 in 4 days, and I'm half-way through.  So far I've done Economics and Law, and tomorrow (well, later today now) I have Building Technology, followed by People & Information Management (?!) on Thursday.

My brain has turned to cheese.

My first nephew was born today.  Ollie arrived at 16:45, and weighs 7lb 4oz.  It's pretty cool to be a real uncle (I've been uncle Simon to my sister's dog for a couple of years now, but it's just not the same).

Went walking in Brecon again today.  We'd arranged to go as a group this time, so I thought it would be a little less lonely climbing up.  Unfortunately I was about 20 minutes late and the others decided not to wait for me.  I guess it was my own fault for being late (again), but it annoyed me a bit.  I pushed on hard to catch them up, and apparently I wasn't too far behind them when I got to the top.  One of the guys said "just in time for a team photo" and I almost made a sarcastic comment about "what team?!", but held my tongue.  At least I had some company for the walk back down.  The others decided not to go any further this week (which I was secretly pleased about, since I was quite tired from playing catch-up) so the long one is on hold until next week.  I'll try to be on time for that one.

It was a quite different day to last week.  A lot of the climb was through clouds, which I found quite refreshing.  Once I climbed to a level above them, the sun was burning bright and it was rather hot.

Here's a couple of pictures of the cloud-carpet.

This weekend has been quite busy.  Just as well we've had a couple of extra days for Easter.  Friday I was dog-sitting for Abbie and Nigel as they went to London for the night.  Saturday I was helping my parents clean out their garage and take things to the tip, and today I went over to the folks' place again, this time for Easter dinner.  We were all expecting a roast, but we actually had turkey bolognese.  When mum told me what she was planning to cook, I laughed and said it made me think of Bridget Jones' mother and her turkey curry buffets.  She looked quite indignant and replied that was exactly what my sister had said.  It was quite nice anyway.

This morning I climed up Pen Y Fan, which is a small mountain in Brecon, about 45 minutes away from where I live.  It's part of my preparations for entering the Six Peaks Challenge (which I was supposed to enter last year, but dropped out from as I didn't train enough and was blatently not up to it).  I was supposed to be going up there with two other people, but one had to cancel last night, and I'm not sure what happened to the other - I was a bit late and he'd either already headed off or not turned up.  I didn't see him at all so I don't know (and I don't have his phone number).

Anyway, going up on my own wasn't too bad.  At least I got to make good use of my iPod.  I took some photos with my phone because I don't think anyone will believe I went up there by myself.  Especially at 7:30am (was supposed to be 7:00, but everyone knows I'm always late).

I bought an iPod about 2 weeks ago.  I don't really like Apple stuff - it all seems a little bit too much style over substance to me.  Thing is though, I really like music, and you can't get anything even remotely comparable from anywhere else.

So I ordered a 120 Gig iPod Classic (silver) and it was delivered on Friday 2 weeks ago.  It took me the entire day to sync iTunes and then the iPod to all my music, but it was worth the wait.  Having all your music available to you wherever you are is a huge benefit.  Especially in the car - it was getting super-expensive to keep burning compilation CD's.  I got one of those fancy iTrip radio transmitters.  It's quite annoying though - it doesn't remember what frequency you last tuned it to when you switch it on, and seems to go for a random channel - completely different every time.  There must be a lab of engineers somewhere who are paid to come up with the most annoying solutions to every day problems.  I'd like to work there - sounds fun!

An 18-year-old has secretly painted a 60ft drawing of a phallus on the roof of his parents' £1million mansion in Berkshire. It was there for a year before his parents found out. They say he'll have to scrub it off when he gets back from travelling.

I've been finding it hard to motivate myself to update my blog in recent times, and I suspect there's several reasons for this:  Once you've not posted anything for a while it's hard to know where to start.  Also, I never had a huge number of blogging friends, and the ones I do have don't seem to update much any more either.  I also found it a bit tiresome to post anything of substance on Livejournal.  In an attempt to rejuvenate my enthusiasm, I've decided to try a new system.

I've been hearing a lot about Twitter lately, so I thought I'd give that a go.  I set up an account (here), and I've made a couple of updates.  I even set it up to update my Facebook status.  The trouble is, I just don't "get it".  You can only update in 140 character posts, and you're encouraged to do this regularly.  The frequency that I do things that I'd consider interesting to others is so low that I can't see the point.  Unless people really want to read about me doing things like putting the kettle on, but that brings me to the other reason I don't get it.

When you have your twitter account, you can "follow" other people and they can follow you.  This is pretty much the same as a friend feed on other blogs, but because of the regularity and nature of the updates, it seems a little more like stalking than following to me.  Not only that, but there are very few (if any) people that I'm interested enough in to actually want to follow.

I'm very much looking forward to the new album by St Vincent.  Her last one, Marry Me is one of the best albums I think I've ever heard, and the new one is released in May so I've been checking out her website for news.  I noticed that she has a link to her twitter, and naturally I had a look.  Clearly she expects people to read it, otherwise she wouldn't post the link (I assume), but I felt quite uncomfortable reading what was essentially messages to friends and people who actually know her in real life.

So no, Twitter is not for me.

Vox on the other hand is much more my kind of thing.  It's a lot like Livejournal, but it's linked with things like Photobucket and Amazon, which is a lot more functional and user-friendly.  It's made by the people who owned Livejournal before it was sold to some Russian corporation, so it feels fairly familiar - even down to a lot of the themes being the same, and it enables cross-posting to LJ.  I guess it's a blog with social networking features, rather than something like Myspace, which is a social network with some blogging features.

Anyway; let's see how it goes, eh?