Diary: April 2008

Mildly embarrassing moment #56732 in the life of me

Singing word-like gibberish sounds loudly to the tune of "Ain't no sunshine" by the Lighthouse Family, while programming and excitedly waggling my head around in time to the beat, and then looking up at the completely-not-soundproofed window and catching the postman staring in with a perplexed look on his face.

Yet another reason to keep the curtains drawn.

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Seriously though Dell, it's April 2nd now

So after much deliberation, I made my decision and went for a Dell XPS M1300. Thank you to everyone who helped me in the comments, but in the end it came down to a combination of size, features and price. The model I've ordered has everything I wanted, but for half the price I was originally expecting to pay; the other windows machines couldn't really compete.

The only other one that left was an Apple, but with the money I'll have left over from this I can buy myself a mac mini and still have enough to ...

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Nightmares

Is it normal to have a nightmare about your computer getting infected with a drive-by browser exploit, and you being unable to stop it or find your OS CD to do a reinstall? Would you be as relieved as I was when you wake up and realise it was all just a dream?

While on the subject of nightmares, I should probably complete the story of the new laptop. We'll pick it up a week last Friday - yes, we're now talking over a week and a half ago; I've been stupidly busy with work, more work and ...

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On laptops, and resisting the 360

Today was a significant day for two reasons. Firstly the Dell engineer came out to fix my laptop, and secondly the game went on sale.

Lets talk about Dell first. The chap who came over was very nice, took my laptop to pieces - literally, unscrewed everything - replaced the speakers, and the motherboard while he was at it. Turned it back on, and everything's working perfectly - I can hear sound! Hurrah!

I'm actually very happy with the laptop now; sure, it runs Vista, but that's nothing a quick reinstall won't fix. Thanks to everyone who has taken ...

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