I like to ride my..

I got given a mountain bike a couple of weeks ago and since I’ve moved to part time work, I’ve been going out every day on it riding around Lancaster. I regularly ride over 10 miles in a session and as Lancaster is a cycle friendly town, there’s loads of different routes to try.

Bring back the 80′s

Today, I had a crash/scrape. I remember being super awesome on my BMX back in the day (early 80′s) where bunny hopping up a kerb was almost genetically inherited knowledge. So much so that it didn’t require a seconds thought.

Now though, much older (and not even that much wiser) I thought it was the same old ‘push down, pull up, back flick’ to get up a kerb. The thing is, back then in the good old 80′s, I never used to travel so frickin fast down a hill, there weren’t 18 gears, only future rocket bikes had front suspension and kerbs were, well, kerb size.

Now.. 18th gear, at least 30 mph, a kerb (uk term for the bit that raises and separates the sidewalk from the asphalt) that would be more appropriately called a frickin plinth and an unqualified belief that I was still a BMX bandit who could bunny hop anything and you’ve got a recipe for a soreness.

Ouch?

I remember, whilst in mid air, thinking that there’s nothing I can do. I remember not feeling regret at trying to bunny hop at speed, I accepted that it was now too late to do anything and I was going to crash and it might hurt a little bit. All this went through my head before I’d even surrendered to gravity and the friction coefficient of concrete.

A scraping sound, an ‘oomph’ as I met the floor and even a roll or two and I was on my back staring at the blue blue sky.

“hmm’, thought I , “it doesn’t hurt”

A crash at that speed, a meeting of pavement at that velocity and it didn’t hurt? I must be either dead already or I’m an undiscovered super hero. I considered what costume I would have and if I had a home planet that I’d been sent away from when I was a small child. That explains why I had that “I must be adopted” feeling growing up.

As it turns out, I’m just a little dramatic (and maybe even slightly concussed) and have good leather riding gloves and a wicked good bike helmet that protected me from the almighty whack my head got.

I got up (slowly) and sat on the convenient boulders on the side of the pavement and gathered my thoughts. I felt a little sick but I figured that must be the landing flat on my stomach and then I started white-ing out, everything went to high contrast and gain and I felt a bit dizzy.

So, I took a picture of my arm and sent it to twitter of course!!

Then I laid back and watched the sky until the dizziness faded and I no longer felt sick.

40 minutes and 5 miles later, I was back home to much ‘oooh!’ and ‘awwww!’ ‘s when everyone in my shop saw my arm.

Get a helmet (and maybe riding gloves)

You hear those adverts on the radio about safety, you see the reports on the news about cyclists whose lives were saved because they wore a helmet and you think, “hmm, whatever”.

It turns out that they were right!! if I hadn’t been wearing my cycle helmet, I would have probably suffered a serious concussion. I whacked my head on the floor when I met it with a serious amount of force. Not only did my helmet save me from possible brain spillage, it prevented me from getting all scratched up and sore for weeks.

My riding gloves (which I only bought to keep my hands clean and prevent blisters from the grips) were destroyed as my hands went out (superman styley) to protect me from the fall and they certainly helped protect my delicate typing hands.

So, all I have is the graze or two on my arm which wouldn’t be there if I’d had elbow pads on but, seriously, there’s a limit to my safety (un)consciousness!

What an interesting week. Not content with crashing hard drives and losing data, I went through a round of Ubuntu weirdness that meant I had to change the monitor to one with a larger default resolution.

Fixed that and just got used to the mammoth monitor that now looms over the counter and Ubuntu decided it wouldn’t play nice with vmware any more. I need that vwmare to run the ancient Win98 system that handles the delivery orders.

All I can say is welcome back XP. Spent bloody ages installing an old OEM version that was lying about and even longer taking it through SP1, SP2 and SP3 updates. At last though, it all plays nice with my virtual image and USB serial adapter (for caller ID). I had to take off the webserver though which I use to serve the new order pages. I need that to work, we have new drivers who need maps!!

Home Pc plays it too

Windows 7. RC1. Finished.

New Windows 7 Ulitmate installed and functioning with a VMware image of Ubuntu which is now serving the pages to all the PC’s on the shop and home network…. just in time for my Sky router to start playing up. Now a direct cable connection spazzes it out and the wireless keeps dropping off . bwahhhh!

Work..WORK

I had lots of fun things planned for ComLuv and other pet projects these past two weeks but it’s all been put aside so I can fix these real life, gotta work or we dont get paid, things. I think I am on top of most of it (except the sky router) but I’m so knackered from doing all the fire fighting that all I wanna do now is watch some movies and pretend I don’t have a PC (for a little while).

I am getting seriously behind schedule, well, if I had a schedule, I’d be seriously behind it.

why?

this is why

and a little closer

It seems Vista or my M3A790GXH motherboard or it’s Radeon HD3300 integrated graphics card or in fact, all three are conspiring to wait until I modify some code in some awesome way and just before I can save it, send the screen in to spaz mode.

I can’t even listen to music or watch movies on my pc now for fear of it crashing completely and destroying any code or blog posts that I have open. It’s really really starting to piss me off!

It looks like it’s a graphics card problem because of the corruption on the screen and also because it seems to happen more often when playing a movie. That’s not exclusive though, it can happen when the pc has been on for a few hours and my blog post/ forum post/ code addition/ research is reaching a critical point. It even happened when there was nothing running except vista sat on the desktop.

I hate it.

new bios, no joy
new gfx card drivers. no joy
new all in one drivers. no joy at all.

Has anyone out there in internet land seen this happen to them? any hardware guru’s know what to do?

I am thinking of buying a new graphics card and disabling the onboard one. Do you think that could help?

Oh, the event log says nothing (except kernel processor power errors at around the time of the crash). I can’t find anything remotely similar from my searches and no amount of driver/bios updates has made a difference. hate it hate it hate it!

please help if you can..

It’s been almost a week where I haven’t been coding anything for longer than an hour without the computer crashing with weird little squares all over the screen.

I think it has to do with my integrated graphics card (Radeon HD 3300) . I have gone through all the usual steps of updating drivers, bios, firmware and wotnot and I am waiting for the next crash.

It’s been hard because I need to code some major things for the ComLuv site and every time I get deep into it, the bloody pc crashes! It’s doubly hard because I have so many great things to watch and listen to on these awesome monitors and 5.1 speakers and I can’t because a little bit of media is liable to make the screen freeze with little squares corrupting it.

Big mofo list

I’ve got a fair bit of stuff to do for the ComLuv network, it’s kind of like the washing up. The longer you leave it, the less likely you are to do it… imagine a big pile of washing up and then imagine that the kitchen crashes every time you run the water. That’s me that is. boo hoo

If my latest open heart procedures on my hardware can keep the system up without pissing it’s pants when an mp3 gets played, I can move on to what I was doing before all this crashing malarky. Which is..

1st priority: Get the url registration page working with a new look and form validation. (seriously, I don’t know how people keep putting http://http:// in their url field!)

2nd priority: Update the WP commentluv plugin with these new things:

• update the settings page to look real nice
  I’m doing this with a plugin framework that takes care of all the settings page bumph so I can easily make it a lot more intuitive to use.
• Allow CSS to be edited for all objects
  This seems to be an important thing to do. Rather than edit a style sheet or hunt through the code for inline styles, I will add a text input box for the different objects so (advanced) users can completely control the look of the links, badge and info box.
• Add the Russian and Chinese language files
  Awesome work from users to add even more languages to the plugin

3rd Priority: Allow more URL’s per account on ComLuv.
This was supposed to be done already but I have spent an awful lot of time on making sure the basics work properly, plus, my personal/business life has it’s own mofo lists to deal with!

4th Priority: Add a “what I’m doing” theme to ComLuv so extra features that are only available to ComLuv blog owners can be opened to all. This will be a friend feed type of affair where you can add widgets to show your stumbleupons, diggs, comments, luvlinks, link clicks etc etc.

I want this in right now but time to do it is a rarity for me these days! Having this theme will allow people who don’t necessarily want a new blog to have the extra features. It might help with links and traffic to have a site where your latest links and other social activities are chronicled and it’ll reduce the amount of empty blogs created on the network.

5th Priority: Tutorials and videos!
Lots of them.

6th Priority: Email courses.
Everything from starting blogging to running your own network to making money with a ComLuv blog (I’m itching to start this one!)

There’s loads more but it’s depressing the hell out of me listing them!

As soon as the crashing like a mofo finishes, I’ll try to get on the coding like a mofo. Stay tuned!