Archive for the 'Purchases' Category

Ah crap, I don’t need this now

It appears my Xbox360 console has just died. When I’m playing games I get a few minutes in and the screen either goes black and fills up with random colours so I sent an email off to Xbox support and got a fairly prompt reply back from Omar (Automated or not, prompt) telling me to call Customer support to resolve my problem.

I decided to double check my battery on my Dell laptop to see if was a suspect sony battery and liable to explode. And it is! So I now have a new battery on its way to me.

And only wanting to order books for this christmas, they won’t arrive in time unless I pay for the priority shipping which would make the shipping as expensive as the books. So I’ll wait then.

Trouble 4457 miles away

As some of you may or may not know, I’m involved in EcwHost a very small web hosting company and disaster struck!

We have a server in the US in The Planet which until now were a very decent DC and when the chips were down, in became the biggest pain in the ass to fix. Needless to say myself and Nick were talking about a new server as our old one was getting a bit sluggish to find one morning our current one wouldn’t boot. Oh dear, submitting a ticket to them it was several days and phone call later before we got this resolved. Even then our server was still down, I had managed to convince them to boot Knoppix and turn on SSH so we could move our files.

Now compare this to SoftLayer who after talking to Amanda in sales had my server deployed and ready for my use in 3 or 4 hours and even threw in a free CPU upgrade! (Everyone should do automated image building for servers, its so much faster) and then cPanel fun started.

Doing account transfers manually using cPanel is no easy task at all. For the last few days, I’ve been going to bed at 3 or 4am working on stuff and getting up at 8am to go to school and then come back and do some more work. But this morning I was able to get up at 11am and it was wonderful considering I got most of the issues sorted the night before. Of course there is a few small things to resolve first but otherwise life is good.

I’m dangerous…

when I have money. Since Friday I have ordered the following:

T-Shirts from Threadless

Pre-ordered Dead Rising (Xbox 360) and got Metroid Prime 1 (Gamecube) Play

Book on Networking and Metroid Prime 2 (Gamecube) from Amazon UK

And looking at my online banking tells me I’ve spent about 200 quid in total on that. (Threadless cost me the most) And work are still paying me oddly enough but its not my normal wage and its such an irregular number with 54 cent on top of that. I better call HR this week and find out what the deal is.

And whats with Play’s prices? They offer a euro and sterling option on their site, but if you convert the sterling price using xe.net its cheaper then the euro price listed on the site.

Well at least its only Saturday and there is still a bit of the weekend left. Its going so slow which is lovely considering I have school on Monday.

I’m on a roll

I feel I have a bit to get off my chest so I might as well keep going with this. My fancy oakleys arrived on Tuesday as well, its finally nice to have sunglasses which actually have proper lenses in them and thus allow you to see. I find the most appealing feature of them is the fact you can’t see my eyes through the lenses. Shame the weather in Dublin has been so fucking shit, I’ve gotten very little use out of them so far.

Something else which I never even thought of is the fact they wrap around my eyes and I don’t have blind spots anymore, I actually felt a little motion sick when I first putting them on since I can take on that bit more from my eyes. I’ve uploaded a photo albeit a poor one to flickr. My webcam is no match for someone else I know who takes photos all the time. Check out Phil’s site

Expensive Tastes

After getting a letter saying I was due an eye exam, I decided to actually follow their advice and get an eye exam. So off to Vision Express I went intent on getting my eyes checked and nothing more. Now I’m about 900 quid down after this afternoon and this is my story.

Getting the letter I thought my eyes were the most important sense I had so I better keep them in good shape, being happy with my glasses as they are I went and had my eye checked to find there is a very very tiny change in my left eye which isn’t bad for two years of computer use.

I was eyeing (excuse the pun) up some new glasses as the frames were slightly out of shape on mine. Going through the price range I found something I liked at 350 quid. Ouch. Since it is summer and having glasses, stylish sunglasses aren’t the easiest thing to come across. Seeing oakley sunglasses now available to vision impared people like me I knew I had to get a pair. So I did, a very expensive pair at 550 euros. Since they are wrap around glasses and can’t be made up in the shop they’ve had to send off to oakley to have the lenses custom made, so in about 3 weeks I’ll have them. Am I mad? Quite possibly. Check out my flickr account to see a poor quality photo.