Two weeks ago, my power supply packed up - it was working fine, I left the room for an hour, and the PC was off and refused to turn back on

Luckily the PSU was still under warranty, so hopefully I should receive a repaired/replaced PSU some time soon after RMAing it last week.

On Friday of last week though, my Graphics Card died! This was also still under warranty, so I RMA’d it today to Scan, who will hopefully send me a replacement by the end of the week.

They say bad things come in threes, so I’m waiting for something else to stop working now - unless the third thing was Royal Mail’s overly-excessive (and seemingly random) pricing. £14 to send a PSU with very little insurance, but only £6 to send a graphics card with up to £500 insurance! WTF!

I’ve been using my Laptop with a full-size keyboard, my normal and my monitor mouse plugged in, so I can at least keep more-or-less up-to-date with things (email, RSS feeds etc), but all of the stuff I was working on is on my PC - so all my VB, PHP and C# development has come to a complete stop until the PC is revived.

Every now and then, when Windows crashes, and I have to reset my PC, the motherboard only detects 1 or 2 of my 4 SATA2 hard disks. It’s always the ones connected to the 3rd and 4th sockets (so it says on the board), but these are actually the 1st and 2nd devices as seen by both Windows and Linux.

So today, after removing 2 currently un-used and un-powered drives from the case, I swapped the cables around (and tidied them using some spare spiral wrap), so that it would stop moving the main boot drive to be third in the boot order preference list.

But of course, Windows didn’t like this, and I got an ever-so-helpful message on boot:

NTLDR is missing.
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart.

The fix was easy, I just swapped the cables back.

while ($system->has_changed()) { show_unhelpful_error_message(); }

Grub (The standard Linux boot loader) can handle you moving drives around… It barely blinked on mine; it just said “invalid path” (or something along those lines), and was very easy to correct.

But Windows? Oh no! That’s far to difficult… *sigh*.

Why do two out of three users on most IRC networks these days have to use a lame script? Each one is more n00by than the last…

WTF does a noob need with a clone scanner?! Noob’s aren’t opers, so they can’t do anything about clones. And a sensible oper uses a plain(-er) mIRC, Xchat, or another client.

Also, do noobs need an annoying away system which spams every single channel their in with an action (using “/me”) when they go /away, come back, or are highlighted? I don’t think so… That’s what /whois is for!!

Another annoying habit is for noobs to load a system stats script (or a lame script to bundle one inside), and then not change any of the settings, so if you send a VERSION request to that user, you’ll end up with between two and four replies! One from mIRC, one from any lame scripts their running, and one from the System Stats thing, with all their OS/CPU/RAM/HDD info in.

There will come a point where I start banning every user of these damn scripts from any channel where I have +o or higher… and it’s coming quickly.

(more…)

Apparently, I run message boards on this website… somewhere. Have you seen them? I like posting in forums, so please tell me where these so-called message boards are if you’ve seen them :P

I’m posting this because the internal security team at BT, who control the blocking of “bad” websites on their corporate networks have apparently found a message board here… So they blocked my entire domain!

I’ll see if I can get a screenshot of the funky error message - you have to see it to beleive it… dark blue background, big bold yellow text everywhere. And then they stick BT logos all over it too

This post marks the opening of a new category, designed specifically for posts like this

Edit: I’ve updated the post with a screenshot of the message :P