31/12/2003 @19:03:32 ^20:50:37

"I'D RATHER HAVE MY BALLS CURRIED"

-one disgruntled reaction to an invitation to the idiot brigade's New Year's party at Chronic Haemorroids Dave's house

Holiday Season Hijinks

I can't be bothered listing my christmas presents fully. Most of it was chocolate, sweets, and cans of Super Strongbow. However

I bought my mum a microwave. It's the first one we've ever had. It has so far been used to heat a cup of water as proof-of-concept. To be honest it's not set up yet, we have to rearrange the kitchen slightly to fit it in.

We've borrowed the fifth Harry Potter book, following the first four back in summer. I'm about halfway through it. Hermione is still alive. So far.

Lastly we went shopping for the sales today and now I've joined the set of complete morons who own their own copy of K&R. I finally used the £10 book token which I won as a school maths prize six years ago, and happily told them there wasn't a gnat's bollocks' chance in hell I was going to go to the ceremony - thus forming the tradition which I gleefully continued two years ago in refusing to go to my graduation.

The token was so old that the young and attractive shop assistant who bore a certain resemblance to the lesbian daughter in At Home With The Braithwaites was thoroughly confused and had to ask her manager if they still accepted such antiquities. I would have found this to be hilarious had I not been occupied by shouting at my mum for never letting me get a word in edgeways for the umpteen millionth time.

Community Chest Megawad, part two

You may remember from a year ago I was talking about making maps for Doom. I've been long aware that I lack the motivation to fight with Yadex to make a decent map, and so the only way I'd ever finish my stuff was if I felt I'd be letting other people down if I failed.

With that in mind I have joined the effort to build a sequel to the Community Chest megawad. That is to say, I posted "can I have map 5" in the announcement thread, with the intention of finishing elixir and donating it.

I realised that having never released a map before I should at least post some screenshots to prove to anyone wondering that I know which end of a map editor is the sharp one. Fortunately a new site called WADs In Progress has just been set up, so I posted some screens on it.

It's fucking Windows 98! Get Bill Gates in here!

I'd promised my uncle ages ago I'd go round and take a look at his laptop, and was very pleased when he said I could take it home with me. Having an extra computer to screw around with, even only for a few days, was a fantastic extra christmas present.

He'd been trying to connect it to the internet, which the guy from whom he'd bought it had said it was already set up to do. There was this cable, one end of which obviously was for the phone but the other didn't plug into anywhere on the laptop. I took it home, looked at it for several hours and eventually concluded there should be one of those little card modems in the side of the laptop into which this strange cable would plug. A brief search the following day for "well, it'll be like a credit card, only a bit thicker..." turned it up. I found one of those 0845 ISPs who had a free trial account and managed to coax Windows 98 into dialling up.

I managed to stop the CD sound cutting out every few seconds. Turned out to be some obscure power saving thing that shut down the audio system if it wasn't used for a while. However, it didn't take into account if an audio CD was playing, which I thought was a horrible bug in the driver software. In fact the only thing I didn't succeed in doing was setting up a PPP link between my machines and the laptop; at least I know the null modem cable I bought in May works because I was able to use the laptop as a serial console on ttyS0.