Sleepypete's Pillow

Ok, so 2 days in Guild Wars 2 and a whole day today of ignoring it …

I’ve been very impressed with this one in its very early days. I’ve forgiven the early access issues cos, to be honest, once it started working it’s been the smoothest online multiplayer experience I’ve seen yet. Warcraft was good but even after it was settled, I saw servers knocked offline by masses of players invading the capital cities. (That’s commonplace now in WoW and works)

But in its early days, GW2 has been working very well. Let’s see if that continues when more people come in who didn’t get to be part of the early access.

Character names are much more in demand in Guild Wars 2, so I’ll be using my online gaming name of Iceangel as a surname. The little guy I’ve been playing so far is Finlay Iceangel :

Yeah. He’s a funny little guy. Engineer seemed to have the best potential for doing damage at range, which is my favoured role in these types of games. He’s an Asura, who are half crazy little gremlin/goblin people. I’m enjoying the storyline so far.

Early days so far. That’s the character selection screen, how does the actual game look ?

That’s from the starting area. The environments look better than what The Old Republic (SWTOR) managed, even when it got past beta stage. SWTOR really dropped the ball incredibly badly. It just copied WoW but didn’t implement it as well. I dunno if it got fixed after the beta weekend but it didn’t even include swimming. MMOs have to be 3 dimensional.

But swimming/no swimming is a minor complaint. However … if it’s implemented fully into the game :

(oops for leaving a hint screen up!)

Then it adds a whole new level of potential. That’s an underwater sequence where I’ve joined in with one of the random events that happen all the time. Reckless Inquest Engineers have dabbled a little too much and upset part of the wildlife. Players then join in to take down the Enraged Shark (no laser beams on this one, just Big Teeth). In WoW, the first player to hit the mob would “tag” it and be the only one to get the credit. In GW2, all players who help with the event get credit according to how much they helped out. And these random events happen all the time.

The drawback with the WoW model is that you have to beg for groups in order to get the group content done. It’s very tough as a single player to get into trustworthy groups. Or …. you just wait a few levels until your character is far too strong for the fight and do it easily. Guild Wars 2 has a dynamic level system, where the game will step you back or step you up to match the content. Because I level quick and I’ve been gaining levels through pvp, it’s been dropping me back to keep the content challenging.

That dynamic level system has huge advantages. In WoW, you can’t really pvp until you get maximum level and decent gear, either because you’re not allowed in or because your survivability is low. In GW2, level doesn’t matter, it just puts you up to maximum level. Talking of pvp …

I was having way too much fun storming the castle over the weekend.

That one is from us assaulting a gateway. We’ve demolished the boiling oil that the defenders placed over the gate, now we’re taking down a cannon emplacement on the neighbouring tower before going for the gate. The oil and cannons are all put up by players. In that screenie, I’m taking part in World vs World vs World, where my server is up against a couple of others so there’s a 3 way fight going for dominance of the map.

It’s quite dynamic too. The WvWvW combat is pretty tough. It takes a while to break down those gates, even with lots of people helping out :

Yes. That is a scary amount of people on screen at once. Performance of the game is pretty good. I was getting very occasional slowdowns with the graphics still at the quality above. No need to step it back as I occasionally had to in WoW. No lag either.

What I will say though is that while my engineer is pretty good in the single player content and can happily take on single elite NPC mobs in WvWvW, I’m not so convinced about how he does in multiplayer. I may be looking at making a “Melody Iceangel” (Melody ? It’s got a nice ring to it) for pvp. She’d be an elementalist character aimed at doing lots of area damage. We shall see. One of the advantages of that levelling system is that I’d be able to join in the WvWvW early instead of taking massive time to level two characters to maximum.

I’m pleased with it so far. I suspect Guild Wars 2 will keep me interested for quite a while. It’ll definitely change some WoW veterans minds on whether they should get the new expansion. Like – they’ll stay in GW2 and cancel their Panda preorders.

I’ve had to break from it today though because that overindulgence over the weekend had a side effect – my shoulders hate me !

One of the oldest signs I’ve known that a game has that “just a little more” factor is when I see the sun starting to come up while I’m still playing it.

I know ! And it’s 2 months past longest day (and therefore earliest morning) of the year too !

One of the most hotly anticipated games for the last few years opened its doors properly yesterday. It’s Guild Wars 2 and it’s been promising to revolutionise Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) gameplay. MMOs in the past have fallen into a well established cycle where the world is effectively static. But … it’s not just static, it’s bound to what the player triggers and at the same time, completely ignores what the player triggers.

I didn’t explain that too well did I ? World of Warcraft is the one that made MMOs popular. It wasn’t the first MMO but it was the first that made MMOs popular and easy to play. That’s not to say it was easy in the early days, the farming required made it pretty damn hard. It’s easy now, sure but in vanilla days, group quest meant you needed help. In current WoW (and SWTOR), group quest means either waiting a few levels or using special tactics, a special build, a hunter or death knight.

But – there’s a lot of flaws in the way it does things. I got bored of the WoW model mostly because of the lack of challenge in the current game but it seemed like the massive amount of content in there was just about getting you to the endgame faster. And the endgame sucks bigtime. What makes the WoW model worse is that all that content is great. But it’s wasted in the rush to get to endgame, which is just going through the same select few locations in repetition ad nauseum.

Aside – the only MMO that doesn’t suffer this model is Eve, which is completely player driven outside of Empire. And the game is well balanced enough that the player-political map constantly changes with the shifting alliances. I just find it mind numblingly tedious.

Guild Wars 2 feels a little different there. For a start, the mechanics are much simplified. You have much less skills to play with as standard … But those are supplemented by utility skills that you can select. I have a healing turret and a gun turret for my Asura Engineer.

Where’s this sun up test come in ?

Well – after giving up on Guild Wars 2 early yesterday because of massive problems with the login servers (which might be back today), I went off and gave full attention to Twenty20 Finals day. (Yorkshire came a close second – all 3 were good games). After that, I go back in at about 10pm. I level up through a fairly amusing (not the best but pretty good) early storyline and reach level 11. Upon which I’m getting tired and thinking I should go to bed (at about 1.30am).

But not before checking out the much vaunted World vs World vs World player vs player mode. This sees players from multiple servers coming together to fight it out over a single map. The maps are huge … and full of control points, strongholds and castles for players to fight over. It’s suitably epic.

WoW players may know of Alterac Valley (dunno how much that’s done now since it went effectively PvE only). Alterac Valley is a North-South contest with effectively just one lane to fight in. WvWvW is massive. It’s easily the scale of a WoW zone and might actually be bigger.

Yep – it caught me for a little while and that’s with me fighting effectively on my own instead of being on voice comms with a guild. I was still on there at 5am …

Oops.

Yep. Guild Wars 2 definitely passes the Sun Up addictiveness test in a way that WoW kinda did before it went easy.

But what it doesn’t pass is the availability test. A common happening with all MMO releases is that their Day 0 log in demand far exceeds the capacity available. Some MMOs deal with this by staggering their release (WoW did). GW2 was attempting to evaluate this through stress testing. That didn’t succeed in anticipating demand.

It’s a great game – but wait for the demand issues to sort themselves out. By the way – I’m on Aurora Glade as an Asura Engineer called Finlay Iceangel. I’m planning to use the Iceangel tag as a surname for the characters there, so at some point there will hopefully be a melee Bashara/Bashran Iceangel join the engineer.

Can’t close without a mention of a pioneer who passed away yesterday. It happened before I was born but I’m feeling a need to watch again the HBO series From The Earth To The Moon to relive again some of those early space faring days. May they come back some time soon. Farewell Neil Armstrong !

I was kinda hoping to be falling asleep in front of the telly today and tomorrow.

Friday – England v South Africa in one day cricket
Caturday – Twenty20 domestic finals day

Friday’s England game was effectively a washout, with the day being “will they ?” “won’t they ?” with heavy showers interspersed with occasional dry spells. Hoping for better tomorrow although I’m expecting the rain to intervene again.

Definitely needing the downtime as I’m definitely not feeling right at the moment. I suspect I’m having issues shifting to this different diet. I’ve had trouble adapting to taking mineral supplements before so putting the greens back into the diet too ?

How am I doing at the moment ?

Structurally, my legs are fine. I have maximum power available, even if I can’t use it when I’m not on a cricket field (max power = slippage = sore bum). Ok, maybe not 100% ok because for some reason, my left achilles has decided to clamp up and go tight. No big deal.

My legs are still a mess though. It’s going to take a while for all the surface damage to repair itself. That’ll be another advantage of the downtime this weekend, no work trousers to sandpaper the healing away.

My muscles have been rebelling too. I run a fine line before my muscles go into a cramping up tendency. I suspect some of the healthy options stuff I’ve been eating/drinking have had too much salt in there. That’s what tends to get my muscles into trouble.

Oh – yesterday was good. I was supposed to be at a meeting at a contractor’s office in the middle of Bristol for a 10am start. I’m thinking – leave around 9am, that’ll let me miss the worst of the rush hour traffic as they’d be at their offices by then. I actually left at 8.50 and was on the motorway at 8.55. I was still on the motorway at 10am … And this is for a trip that’s supposed to take about 15-20 minutes total.

Meh. There’d been a lorry break down on the motorway, which caused the initial traffic problems. But what compounded it was a little Citroen dropping the contents of its radiator into the inside lane. And what made that into a major problem was that it wasn’t pushed into a refuge that was less than 50m ahead.

Deeply meh. I’m still on my learning curve so I didn’t contribute as much as I’d like but I think I learned enough and contributed enough to make it worth me coming. That learning curve is pretty huge at the moment but one of the things I’ve always been good at is taking in and assimilating new information.

News has been active lately. There’s 2 stories that especially catch my eye – a playboy Prince (which I’m not going to say anything about except for “silly boy” for getting caught) and exam results.

I got used to being top or near top of every class at school. This was in the days when GCSEs were just coming in and they were a decent test. I got 6 A’s and 4 B’s (iirc!) at GCSE. The B’s were English Lit, French, History. Coulda been 3 Bs and the rest A’s.

However ! My GCSE results and those of the other kids in my year have been made irrelevant by more contemporary results. The A* result didn’t exist when I did my GCSEs. It was added because too many kids were being allowed to get A grades. Over the years, the pass rate has gradually gone up and up. There’s a couple of reasons for that :

Past papers allowing more practice
Easier marking

Both reasons are valid. What’s caused the controversy this time around is that someone’s decided that English GCSE results could be permitted to have a lower pass rate than previous years …

Good on ’em ! But what it has done is provoked huge “how could this be allowed ?” controversy.

I have a huge problem with exams anyway. They teach the wrong behaviour. Rote learning for facts isn’t particularly useful in modern life. Knowing how to attack questions and hunt for information is what’s useful. Knowing when to say “I don’t honestly know but I will find out asap” is the most useful thing anyone can say. It’s far better than just guessing. Guesses can be very dangerous.

But then again, for some techniques rote learning is key. If someone was doing medical stuff on me, I don’t want them to be looking it up in a book 😉

I’ll leave it there cos my fingers are getting itchy for a bit of gaming. I have a contingency plan in case the cricket is hit by the weather – Guild Wars 2 early activation starts tomorrow morning. And I suspect that as soon as I log into Steam and get spotted, a certain SteamGirl will be looking to drag me into GW2 🙂 I have a feeling that SteamGirl has her eye on the Eurogamer expo at the end of September. I think she’d have liked to drag me off to Gamescom which just finished over in Cologne, Germany.

That’s something really good for a struggling ego – someone who I’ve only met in person once (and she thought I was 10 years younger, pre-diet!) and who is highly amusing to natter to over Steam chat and wants to drag me off to places 🙂 What’s stopping me ? I really don’t know. Although I’d pin it on that one track mind that had me looking elsewhere somewhere closer to home for quite a while.

I think I’m feeling a kind of anticipation.

Season’s changing at the moment and there’s a bunch of stuff that’ll be either finishing, starting, transitioning or shifting around a bit soon.

The thing I’m feeling the anticipation for is Guild Wars 2, which will possibly see me dive into Massive Multiplayer Online games again for the first time since World of Warcraft was at its peak. I guested a bit for Violence Reborn raiding in Lich King but missed the early Lich King raids and late Burning Crusade raids. I got fed up with WoW during the Cataclysm times so didn’t really do much of those raids.

No – my main WoW memories are the original raids and the early Burning Crusade raids with the Mercenaries. We had a good thing going there, although it fell apart as the Guildlink initiative turned into a black hole sucking all of the players addicted to raiding into the one guild. I was more about keeping my people ok than the raiding though.

So yeah – next big game on the horizon is Guild Wars 2, which I should be able to access early from this weekend. I’ve been thinking I should have cleared off one or two partially completed games (like Beyond Good & Evil and Machinarium) before heading into GW2. That’s not happened though cos I’m usually not feeling the motivation to dive into games after looking at a monitor screen all day at work.

I’m also looking at Planetside 2, which could well be awesome. Sci fi ground combat with the potential to be fighter pilot again. Missed that. I’d get caught up in WoW’s player v player gameplay (and quite likely GW2’s pvp too) but first person shooter games online left me cold because there was no persistence past each staged battle. Planetside 2 should see players fighting for domination of a couple of continents. Could be interesting.

TV is on the transition as well.

I’m currently watching the last Deadliest Catch of the season, plus there’s the cricket season coming to a close. I’ll be watching as much of Twenty20 finals day (Saturday) as possible but that’s pretty much the last big cricket event of the summer. I’ve also been enjoying Leverage and Falling Skies

TV will be transitioning into the Fall schedules and I’m looking forward to Warehouse 13 coming back (it’s fun). DOCTOR WHO ! Yep. 10 days for the next Doctor Who episodes.

I have a few rules with what I watch where I let the OCD out to play. My V+ box shows 7 shows per page. I start on the last page, if it’s just movies I’ll watch one of those. (Real Steel was surprisingly good.) If it’s something daily, I’ll watch a bunch of them. That leaves weekly stuff. I like to watch a few episodes one after the other, to get continuity. However …

Falling Skies and Doctor Who ? They’re like – watch immediate. Or in the case of Falling Skies, watch the next day cos it’s on late and I’m listening to music by the time it’s on.

Oh and if there’s more space available on the box than is listed to record in the planner ? I’ll dip into the movie collection. I have a small pile of blu-rays from the Bristol trip a couple of weeks ago that I haven’t watched yet.

Work is transitioning as well, in both what I do and who I work with. We’re getting a fair bit of turnover in the team – 2nd RO and a couple of people the rank above me, including the one I’m trying to learn as much as I can from before he goes.

Project wise, I’m switching from the old project to a brand new one. It’s a good opportunity – I’ve soaked up a lot of knowledge over the past too many years, including seeing now the consequences of decisions made (or not made!) years ago. The thing I’m most responsible for is called a Master Data and Assumptions List, which is where we record decisions, facts and just plain “this is what’s gonna happen” assumptions. It’s very important that everyone involved in a project is working off the same assumptions, or you either get work done twice (which you pay for twice) or work not done at all.

It’s a good opportunity and I’m already getting a chance to apply my brain to it. Just hope we don’t end up being a poor relation to some higher visibility projects.

It’ll be sad losing a few of the people though as they either move on in the organisation or leave for the outside. I’ll definitely miss Miss Meerkat’s cheerful cheeky grin as it pops up to see who’s coming through the door 🙂 May it stay unblurry for a long time in that photographic memory !

Oh ! Music too. I have finally managed to get everything in the library listened to since I acquired the Beyond Good & Evil soundtrack a few months ago.

Must do another music post sometime soon. Not sure if there’s been much stand out stuff in what I’ve acquired lately but the Deus Ex soundtrack and the latest from the Ting Tings were pretty good. Not forgetting the Machinarium soundtrack by Tomas Dvorak (one to look out for) and looking further back, I was very impressed with Velveteen by Transvision Vamp.

Ooo – 1 hour 20 left of Deadliest Catch and it’ll be on to the music again. Cya later !

Been seeing improvements with this latest diet shift I’ve made.

My legs and the wounds on there that have refused to heal have been an issue for over a year now. The antibiotic pills and cream stuff given to me by the doctors helped up to a point (and mostly cleared it up) but after a while, that patch type stuff runs out and the original problem returns. In my case, it looks like it was diet.

That first doctor’s trip did help in a very significant way though – the “diet” (actually antibiotic) pills had a fairly strict pattern attached to when I could have them : don’t take one until 2 hours after food and 1 hour before food. With 4 times a day, that’s 3 hours times 4, literally half the day when snacking was banned. Upshot – the habitual grazing was no longer an option. Going on that regimen for a week put the idea in my head “yes, this can be done”.

Combine that with knowing that in the cricket I’d gradually been losing my speed … and you have someone thinking that he can make a go of losing the weight. Oh – I’d also been seeing my most recent photos taken on a holiday. Best word to describe ? Chunky. I don’t like being chunky and I definitely don’t like being slow.

Result ? After almost a year of it, I’m down 1.5 stone (9.5kg) and I have all of my speed back. And that’s not just straight line power, it’s being able to dodge out the way when I have to. I still wilt in the heat (was hoping less insulation would help there) but hey – can’t have everything.

I’ve had to shift that diet again though. With the stuff on my legs erupting again a week and a half ago, I figured I’d look up diet as a potential cause for the damage coming back. As in, was I giving my body the material it needed to repair itself ?

So – diet shift. I’ve added lettuce to the lunchtime sandwiches. I’m drinking orange juice regularly again (old habit that I dropped a couple of years ago), I’m taking vitamin supplements (as a booster). I’m eating green crunchy stuff in the evenings as grazing snack instead of cookies.

Trouble is, that comes at a cost in the early days of the shift. My head was definitely not right last week (think it’s been more in balance today) with motivation definitely lacking. That’s not to say I wasn’t getting on with doing Stuff, I may not Want to do Stuff but I’ll get done what needs to be done. Like the laptop, the contracts stuff at work, the desktop and all the other bits and pieces at work.

That balance thing also shows itself in cramping up – I ride a fine balance there and having the leg muscles I have doesn’t help. That sounds kinda whingy doesn’t it ? I can handle the cramp and it’s a good sign that I need to drink something.

Other signs – you know when you get starving and there’s a kind of conversation with yourself that goes like :

“I’m hungry ! Feed me something !”
“But I just ate, what do you want now ?”
“I dunno ! Feed me Something”
And you have no clue what the “something” you need is. You have an instinctive level understanding that you are missing something crucial but can’t put your finger on it. By adding the Vitamin C rich stuff back into my diet, I think I’ve identified that “something”. That’ll help the diet too because instead of treating craving with cookies, I’m treating it with green stuff.

How are the legs doing with all this ?

I have this impression that there’s thousands of mini workmen inside me all shouting “Yey ! He’s finally giving us the stuff we need to fix him ! Let’s get to work”. And they’ve been patching up each broken bit in turn. Literally. The bad bits on my legs are in patches on both calves and above my left knee. Behind my left knee is also bad. Each patch started repairing after the other.

At the moment, I have a couple of fairly spectacular patches and my right leg looks like it got burned a while ago. But that’s ok, cos it shows it’s mending now instead of getting worse.

Hopefully the legs will continue to improve. As they are at the moment, I cannot wear my knee pads because of where the patches are. And that means no cricket. And no “warm up the legs” treatment when the cold of winter gets into my knees, as it will. I got bored of these leg issues last year and want smooth skin again.

I think it’s time to close now before this post gets huge. Summary ?

Diet’s helping – and I’m adjusting to it
Legs are repairing (I hope!)
Having leaner legs means I can see the muscles at play under the skin
And that’s pretty awesome
I have speed !!!!!
Still not gonna be seen in public in shorts

What I’d really like to close on is – if you find yourself confronted by a need to make a wholesale life change, throw yourself into it. Don’t look back, don’t have second thoughts. Make that change. Whether it be giving up something damaging like drink, drugs or smoking. Or if it’s needing to eat healthier or otherwise lose weight. Or change in circumstances at home or work (not something I’m usually good at due to inertia but when the change clicks ? I’m ok)

It’ll seem hard early on but stick with it. It’ll be worth it in the long run. However, I’ll admit to being no saint there. I have had the occasional cookie and piece of chocolate when I’ve felt the need. I have one chemical addiction that I’m not willing to give up – caffeine.

Sometimes a little comfort is needed. I’m not so tough that I don’t need that comfort munchie every once in a while. But as long as that long term plan is in sight – consider the chocolate or the cookie a treat rather than the norm. Try to be dependent on absolutely nothing. I’m not there yet, I have that chemical addiction to caffeine which means I get headaches if I’m too long without coffee.

And I am definitely rambling now – if you make big decisions like me with the diet, stick with it ! It’ll be worth it. And I’ll be remembering that tomorrow when I’m dodging out the way of people on the stairs 🙂

Nope – not thinking about spending money on stuff (although I do need another vacuum cleaner soon) but I feel I need to say a few things about buying stuff.

(Techie stuff mainly)

You see so many people buying things and then getting disappointed that it’s not all they would have wanted. There’s a sense of entitlement there, although some of that comes from feeling entitled to receiving a completed and reliable product from the people we’re giving money too. And yep, I can’t believe that Legends of Pegasus is still in the Top 20 Sellers chart in Steam, despite the horrific reviews that game is getting.

We have very different rules to buying things at work. They’re quite strict and we have to go through a lot of hoops to firstly get approval to spend money and then to get the work on to contract. While I dislike that from an engineer “let me do my job” point of view, I can accept it from the point of view of being professional and an acknowledgement that the money I’m spending is not mine.

To give more of an idea of the hoops we’d have to go through to get support contracting in, we have to give a lot of justification.
Why have we selected that company and not others ?
How much does it cost (often based on early estimates of scope of work) ?
Do we really need it ?
Can we shave anything off the final cost ?
When is it required ?
And have we got a good contracting means

You’ll notice that “can we do it better ?” or “do we get more value out of spending a little more ?” are questions that do not apply. “Can we wait for something better ?” is also not a question that’s used much because, we need kit now and it often takes too long to jump through the hoops to get it through quickly. Plus, in the techie world if you keep going with the “wait for better ?” then you end up not buying anything and continue using wheezing, archaic equipment that serves no purpose.

Buying at home is much easier. But that doesn’t mean it has to be frivolous. I put in a lot of research before buying techie items at home and even there, I don’t make the right decisions all of the time. My amplifier is a case in point, I assumed I’d avoid the occasional bad HDMI board issue with Onkyo amps. That assumption was incorrect as I suspect that’s the cause of the silent blips (I’ve eliminated all other causes).

There’s a parallel there though. The justifications we have to include at work force us to convince others that we aren’t throwing cash away. They make us look beyond “cos this is how we’ve always done it” and also make us look at options we may not have considered.

Home buying is rather different. If I’d gone by work rules I’d have :

Been hunting for a “what’s wrong with my laptop” person (time + money)
Investigated suitable replacements
Investigated who would be the cheapest supplier
And then hunted for another person to do the switch

I have to admit, I actually followed most of those steps up top but I don’t have to justify my computer/techie skills to anyone around me. People come to me for advice with techie stuff 🙂 I’m happy to admit that I don’t know everything to do with PCs (anyone who does is a liar) but I can answer most questions by figuring out how to ask Google the right question, filtering out the incorrect, inconclusive and irrelevant.

Investigating suitable replacements was based around me knowing what I’d need to replace the suspect item (a 2.5″ SATA completely standard drive) and knowing I’d have the freedom to spend a little more on an item that would boost the performance of the machine. (The hybrid SSD definitely makes for a smoother machine).

I also did an investigation on the software, trying a couple of trials before setting on Acronis True Image as the software for the job. It’s easy to use (for a techie), whereas the other free/free trial options didn’t apparently want to do what I wanted – clone the drive.

Suppliers is a curious one. Google shopping results help here but whereas at work, we’d be required to go for the cheapest supplier, I was free to spend a little more (especially considering fuel) on going to Novatech. I’ll go through Novatech a lot for my PC bits : They’re cheap, they sell good stuff, they have an excellent selection and most important – They’re local. Being local means I can take advantage of flexi credit by leaving work a little early to head down the motorway to pick stuff up. Definitely better than waiting a few days for Bristol’s Finest Postmen to lose your item in the mail.

It’s definitely easier to buy stuff at home – but does it get you a better result ?

Not always. I’ve got a few pieces of cricket gear where I’ve effectively bought something because it caught my eye, finding that it was less than ideal when I took it on the field. Not sure if I can actually use my latest helmet.

I’m rambling again I believe.

Yes – the hoops we have to jump through at work are a pain. They’re often based around convincing people who tend to be very reluctant about spending money. But … they’re worth it in the end. I put in a lot of checking out around buying my current car and minimal research into buying my last one. What I learned about Lexus in that time assured me that it would be a great car with good dealership backup (both correct). I assumed the Focus would be an almost like-for-like replacement for the Puma and was proved wrong (handling not up to it).

I’ll close out with : Procrastination can be a good thing.

Applying a little patience and walking away to do a little more window shopping to check out the options lets you commit your cash with a clear head. You know more about the detail of what you’re buying. If I’d believed the rumours about bad Onkyo HDMI boards, I’d have bought a Yamaha AV amp. By checking out the inside of a Prius, I saw for myself the different quality of the interior and bought the Lexus.

I’m actually quite happy with the AV amp but the dvd playback is an issue. The Lexus – is still awesome. Also happy with the laptop performance now, hybrid SSDs deliver the performance boost that WD Raptor drives don’t.

PS Laptop = stable. No random 10 second frozen mouse pointer pauses since the upgrade. Desktop = stable with new firmware in the drive.

Have been – but ages ago …

Came out ok then for the diabetes potential. Might be worth getting checked again though if eating more Green Stuff doesn't sort me out 🙂

Not healing? Have you been tested for diabetes?

I seem to be improving 🙂

A health issue I’ve had for over a year now is that some wounds I’ve picked up have been refusing to heal. That’s not good. The diagnosis last year was ulceration and infection but … I’m hoping now that’s a conclusion based on incomplete data.

What I did was look up and research “diet skin repair” (or something similar) because I suspected that with my horribly bad diet, I was missing out on crucial minerals needed for my body to repair itself. Basically, by neglecting eating my greens and by going away from habitually drinking orange juice, I’d got to a point where my body had run out of the stuff it needs to keep it intact.

After a week of shifting the diet a bit again, things are looking promising again today 🙂 Although I’ll keep an eye on it over a weekend where I can wear shorts all the time. The skin is still weak and shorts mean that trouser material won’t damage it.

Now that’s out the way – techie stuff !!!

Been researching that again today because the desktop PC is still sick. It would boot up fine initially but after “a while”, it would crash hard and wouldn’t work after a reboot. Turn the PC off and on and it’s fine.

Researching “Crucial M4 problems” quite quickly gets you seeing stories about them failing after 5100 running hours. How long is that ? It’s 212.5 days or roughly 7 months. That’s spookily about right for how long my desktop has been active. Looking with that DiskCheckup utility I linked a few days ago, the run time is about 5240 hours (if I’m reading the numbers right).

What’s the known issue ? They’ll go unresponsive after an hour of use, leading to the machine crashing. Powercycling the drive will fix it. (That’s consistent with what I’m seeing)

What’s the fix ? Update the firmware. I’m on that – I’m currently doing disaster prevention by copying all files on the SSD to another drive in the machine. The firmware in my drive is version 0002 and needs to be 000F.

I usually avoid updating firmware like plague – it’s a very risky thing to do and should be unnecessary. One false move (like having the drive die halfway through cos of it’s 1 hour limit) and you’ll end up with something less use than a brick.

It’s been a saga … But it’s good to have it confirmed that Crucial are a responsible and quality bits manufacturer. Other SSDs have been bricked completely by firmware difficulties and one reason I went Crucial is because they didn’t just go sheeplike and clone everyone else’s drive.

One reason Gigabyte and Acer hit my blacklist a good few years ago was that they didn’t have that responsible attitude to making quality bits (now forgiven). The GA5AX motherboard for my K6iii was based on an Acer Labs chipset which had software which was … incomplete. I’m not sure if that firmware was ever fully developed. On motherboards, which form the foundation stone of all PCs, that’s almost unforgiveable.

Crossing my fingers that I’ve got it right on this one. Returning hardware is always a pain, especially if it’s a problem that couldn’t be recreated in store without waiting an hour for the time to tick over. Novatech would be find with returning hardware … it’s just time and hassle to get the drive to them and back on top of annoyance of having to get a new drive up to speed.

It would cut into cricket watching time !

So – crossing my fingers that :

My legs continue to heal themselves
That I can resist the compulsion to scratch them (own worst enemy)
My drive has the known issue with those Crucial SSDs.

And … it’s just crashed again after roughly 1 hour of use. It’s not nice to have a problem. But it is nice to see confirmation of symptoms that lead you to a possible fix for that problem.

Closing out – if you’re putting together or buying a PC and have free choice over what to get, here’s what I think with the knowledge over the past week :

Laptop – use a hybrid drive. Conventional discs are too slow, SSDs are lightning but not big enough. Laptops rarely give you room to fit more than one drive, so Hybrid drives aim to give you the best of both worlds. My laptop isn’t as quick as my desktop now – but it’s smoother than it was before the swap.

Desktop – plenty of room here, use a SSD boot drive and a conventional drive for data. There’s all sorts of advantages to separating out Windows from the data. It’s easier to back up if Windows is separate but that’s insignificant next to the performance gains from separating them out. If Windows is on the same physical drive as data, it has to go back and forwards across the disc to read what it needs. Caching should cut down that time but caching has been broken in Windows for many years now.

Even doing something like switching to my 74GB WD Raptor (conventional but less slow) drive for Windows, combined with the 1.5TB drive for data, would lead to big performance and smoothness gains by eliminating all that seek time.

Had something highly expected happen last night when I was testing the laptop with its new hard disc.

When you make a hardware switch on a PC, you always expect a problem. If there’s no problems, that’s the time to worry. Anyway. This time, laptop boots up just fine with its new hard disc and it feels a little smoother too thanks to that special hybrid hard disc.

Ok. So no problems with the laptop. What I definitely didn’t expect was that in the middle of watching a Yogscast video on the desktop, that the desktop would decide to pop its clogs … Like : full machine crash type oopsie. And when you try a reboot of that Windows 7 machine, a “Starting Windows XP” screen would come up, quickly followed by a Blue Screen Of Death “Windows has stopped to protect the machine” …

What … The … Hell …

Cue a little bit of panic.

Thinking it through a bit more, I go check the BIOS (the bit that first appears when you hit the On switch and figures out what hardware is in the machine). The BIOS aka Basic Input Output System can’t see the boot disc. That’s either extremely bad news or a suggestion of something very easy to fix.

Aside – my desktop has 3 hard discs inside it :
60GB SSD – Windows 7 boots off this but it’s too small to have any data or applications on it
250GB Seagate – my last machine’s game drive, put in there to give the new machine a bit of storage space while I waited until big hard discs came down in price
1.5TB Western Digital drive – where my games, applications and data goes.

What seems to have happened is that a cable went dodgy, so the desktop couldn’t see its SSD boot drive. What happens then is that the Bios tries each drive in turn, looking for something it can hand over to. When it found the Seagate, it would see the Windows XP installation on the games drive. However … that’s an installation that was set up for a very different machine … AMD vs Intel, ATI vs nVidia, wholly different motherboard etc etc ad nauseum. Suffice to say, nothing is shared between last machine and new machine.

Desktop seems fine now after a little poking around inside its innards. I’ve also had the chance to tone down a fan that was getting rather intrusive with the noise, so I’ll be curious to see what temperatures the machine will be running (before, it maxed out at 56 degrees C under load with hot ambient).

Where’s the problem come from ? Miniaturisation.

Cabling for disc drives used to be pretty bombproof. It was solid enough that you had to tug quite hard on the cables to get them out. They had a really good grip.

That’s an old Quantum Fireball EL drive. It’s 3.5 inches wide and I’ve popped a 10p on there as comparison. I think it’s a 7.6GB drive and dates back to when I was running an AMD K6iii powered machine. That ran at 450MHz, which is precisely half the clock rate of my desktop’s graphics card.

Anyway – the white connector is a 4 pin Molex, these had a deathgrip. The 2xlots connector to the right is actually a floppy drive cable but hard disc wires were fairly similar (more pins). Data used to be sent around with lots of wires in parallel, using ribbon cables like in the picture. The problem there is that when you get to really high data rates, the neighbouring wires like to say hello, say “wotcha doing”, “this is what I got”, “can we share ?”. That sharing thing is called “crosstalk”. It’s a big problem and is why instead of doing things in Parallel, electronics has moved to passing around 1 bit at a time. I.e. Serial instead of Parallel.

Ok. That’s Dark Age tech, what’s the new stuff ?

That’s the drive that just came out of my laptop. It’s a Western Digital Scorpio Blue drive that holds 320GB. It’s 2.5 inches wide and much thinner than the 3.5″ drives. What’s beside it is the insides of my 2.5″ USB caddy.

The ribbon data cable and the Molex power connector have been replaced by the two sockets with an L shaped connector. You can pull these out quite easily and it’s my huge suspicion that one of them worked its way loose on its own.

When a hard disc goes Bang, the electronics that control it usually still work. That Bios thing can usually still identify that there’s a drive plugged in. Self protection measures keep the control electronics intact if the motors fail in such a way to cause power spikes. So if a Bios can’t see the drive, it’s usually either :

Very Toasty Drive
Loose connector

If the Bios can see the drive but no data can be got from it, that’s when it’s time to chuck the drive in the bin. Thankfully, after unhooking the cables and plugging them back in (plus a swap of a couple), my desktop’s up and running again – but I have just done a backup of its SSD drive again. Just to be safe …

Addon – meh. It’s not a loose connector. It’s a toasty drive. Another failure after about an hour’s running this time …

PS Yes. That is the bottom half of a penguin and definitely the whole of a Biscuit puppy. You are not seeing things.
PS2 I deny all knowledge of dust.