neo-zelandaise.net

Just so you know, I am in the process of moving the majority of my fanlistings to a subdomain. It is taking me longer than I thought but I will get there in the end. I know I will, even if it means losing a fair amount of my hair in the process This will explain why things might be a little funky on my fanlistings in the meantime. Rest assured that I know about it and am doing my best to rectify the situation, in between work and my other online commitments.

January-Star will be the new home of my fanlistings.

Since my last post about the job interview I had, things have been pretty good for me. I got the job (coming home with an employment agreement with my hours on it was pretty much a giveaway) and started training the following day. I got paid for the training which was good because the money went towards our massive June power bill ($366 with prompt payment discount, than you very much). How the bill was that big I have no idea.

I now have a new laptop because of the old one basically dying. I now have World of Warcraft (level 15 Tauren Druid at the moment) and The Sims 3 which I’m liking.

Yes, things have been going well for me. And in four weeks, I will be on my way to Auckland for the WWE show!

Finally! After nearly three months in Christchurch (it will be three months on Friday), I finally have a job interview!

Tomorrow at 2.30pm. I have my fingers crossed and my toes too. I just hope it goes well.

Guess who has a kind of dead laptop?

That’s right.

Me.

At the moment, I’m on my flatmate’s Mac checking everything I check every day. I can’t afford to either get my laptop seen to or get a new one so this will have to do. But one thins is for sure. I want to rescue stuff off the hard drive this time!

Stupid piece of shit Dell.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been turning into a night owl. Before, 1am would be about my limit when it came to going to sleep but now…

Honestly, I could be up all night now. I’m making myself go to sleep at around 4am even though I only feel slightly tired and taking my usual 8 or so hours sleep into account, this now means I’m waking up around lunchtime. I play the Sims on my laptop, watch DVDs on my laptop and surf the net just to try to get tired enough to want to go to sleep. I could read in bed but I don’t want to leave my light on to all hours of the night/morning.

When I was in high school, if I had a late night, I’d be awake around 7am regardless. There was one time in my final year of high school where I went to bed at 5.30am on a Monday morning (because I’d been up watching a live sporting event) and got up at 7am to go to school. I had that one and a half hours sleep because I thought if I didn’t, I’d fall asleep during school. I did pay for it in that I looked extremely tired but I went to bed at my normal time that night.

I don’t know why I’ve turned into a night owl. There could be an underlying issue behind it which would mean a trip to the doctors but I can’t afford that because of a double blow on my unemployment benefit. Hell, I can’t afford to do anything unless I find a job and soon. Once my share of the rent is paid, what money I do have left goes either towards my share of the flat bills, my own bills, food and treats for myself. Then I feel bad for having to decide whether I’m warm or I should eat. I probably should go to WINZ again and tell them what the story is. At the moment, I’m worse off than what I was in Invercargill (and working too) and I’m finding myself questioning why I’m here. Not necessarily why I’m living where I am now but I’m wondering what my true purpose is.

I’m weird. I’m an Aquarian after all.

There will be new codes and skins coming up at my Karate Kid Part II fanlisting (three skins and several codes) and also new codes at my Mr Miyagi fanlisting (codes from the first three Karate Kid movies).

Don’t want to say just when these will be up but keep checking because you might just see them, heh.

I’ve been playing The Sims 2 (yes, I know I’m behind the times when it comes to the Sims but my laptop definitely won’t be able to handle The Sims 3 at all so I plan on getting a new one) for quite some time now. I’m even entertaining the idea of creating a WWE neighbourhood!

The only thing that is really annoying me in the game itself is in the picture to the left. The fucking horrible – manky I like to call it – maternity wear. What pregnant Sim, let alone a pregnant woman, would be seen wearing maternity wear like that? I know damn well I wouldn’t be seen in anything like that! Surprisingly, this ‘maternity’ top is somewhat detailed in that you can see the flowers on it – I’m putting that down to the fact that I doubled the RAM for my laptop to 512MB. I’m thinking that the Sim in the picture has the perfect facial expression – as if she can’t believe what she’s wearing and just how horrible it really is. Then again, this particular Sim is grouchy by nature but that should be something to expect when her mother is Lilith Pleasant.

If you are still playing The Sims 2 for whatever reason, what are some of your pet peeves?

Oh, what Windows XP service pack dramas I’ve experienced on my laptop since I moved to Christchurch!

Ever since my laptop got a new hard drive in August 2007 (the previous one having died rather unexpectantly 18 months earlier), it hadn’t been connected to the internet – consequently, it didn’t have an anti-virus program, an anti-spyware program, an anti-malware program, it had a 2.x.x.x version of Firefox (that I transferred from my portable hard drive) and was really only used to play The Sims 2.

When I got to Christchurch, my flatmate set up the wireless internet connection so I could use it and download and install anti-virus program, an anti-spyware program, an anti-malware program as well as upgrade Firefox to the most recent version. This went reasonably well. The downloads were quick and the installation went relatively smoothly. Except when it came to iTunes and I realised then that I had to upgrade to Windows XP Service Pack 2. Automatic updates, you see.

So I did that, not really thinking anything of it, and saw that the previously green bars at the start were blue so I knew that it had worked. This was when the drama started.

Surfing the internet
SP1: Could surf as soon as the desktop showed up.
SP2: Had to wait at least three minutes for the wireless connection thing to show up in the taskbar, at least three minutes for it to find our network, then at least another three minutes for Firefox to actually load then about another three minutes before I could really do anything.

CPU usage
SP1: didn’t really know what it was because I didn’t have Task Manager open frequently but I would say that it was very low.
SP2: As soon as I opened Task Manager, it would hit 100% and would stay there most of the time the laptop was running.

Overall system performance
SP1: Everything ran smoothly. Nothing took forever and a day to load.
SP2: Nothing ran smoothly. Everything took forever and a day to load.

So, I went surfing on my flatmate’s Mac to see what I could do in order to try and rectify the problems I was having. I found this page which said the following:

After you install Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) or upgrade to Windows XP with SP2, you experience slow computer performance. For example, you experience the following symptoms:

* If you browse the Internet, the performance is slow.
* If you try to download newsgroup e-mail messages, some or all of the messages are not downloaded.
* There is excessive hard disk activity.
* Overall system performance is very slow.

Then it went on to list some possible causes (what I did is italicised):

This issue occurs if one of the following conditions is true:

* You have spyware or malware running on the computer. Ran both anti-spyware and anti-malware programs – nothing was found
* You have viruses that are running on the computer. Did a full system check which took nearly five hours and nothing was found
* You do not have sufficient free space on the hard disk. The hard drive is 80GB – I had at least 42GB free
* You do not have sufficient random access memory (RAM) installed on the computer. The laptop initially came installed with 256MB RAM – upgraded to 512MB which didn’t really help that much
* You have corrupted or outdated drivers. Nothing was showing up in Device Manager as being corrupted so that was ruled out
* You have too many files in the Recycle Bin or temporary folders. Temporary folders and the recycle bin were both emptied

None of those helped at all so a couple of days ago, I found a page that explained how to uninstall XP SP2. It took forever but my laptop is back to its old self. I know that downgrading wasn’t the best thing to do security wise but seeing that I’m currently looking for a new job, I obviously can’t afford to get a new laptop but I do have my eye on one in particular.

Why my laptop couldn’t handle XP SP2, I don’t think I’ll ever know.

I’ll be making a rather lengthy post about the dramas of Windows XP Service Pack 2 very soon. It will be somewhat lengthy but at least I can type fast so it won’t take me too long, heh!