Yeah, sorry I haven't been around. Life's been hell.
Got suspended from school. I was poking 'round the network to try to find something unique about the school, so I could incorporate a check for that in my lil' UT installer, and thus prevent students from installing four gig of old UT on a school machine, in addition to the UT436, UT348D, UT2003, and UT2004 they already put there. Apparently they'd rather chew someone out for running DOS than chew someone out for running three-dee shooters. 'S only natural, I guess; they put those nVidia cards with more power than the machines themselves in for some reason.
Had a little spyware invasion on my main machine. Managed to kill most of it cold, but when I was poking around in the Registry Editor, in HKLM\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon, I deleted Userinit. Translation: I told Windows not to run the program responsible for keeping people logged in. So now whenever I log in, I am immediately logged out. Anyway, went over to a friends house toting my hard drive, unshielded and shaking like crazy. Not good, especially when the person next to you on the bus has a neodynium magnet and the person across the aisle has 20-mile-ranged walkie talkies up at max power. EM-ville. Somehow the drive survives all that and I am back in business.
Until... About a week later, that is, yesterday, I hear this sharp squealing noise coming form the front of my machine. Where the hard drive is. The tortured thing has a bad bearing at the very least, and is proably scraped clean from cylinder 0 to cylinder len(drive)-1, but I don't know how bad because opening it up and looking voids the warantee and is a sure way to screw things up even more. Estimates to have a professional do it are in the thousands of dollars: about twenty times my net worth. I'm a student, not a bank! However, it is the only viable option, given that the drive has three years of my life, software no longer available anywhere, relese versions of software marked beta and with a faulty timebomb (e.g. MS Office 2003 TR; the timebomb was for Jan. but it never went off), programs of my own creation, and the drivers required to run anything on my primary machine. So basically I'm screwed.
And that is why I have not been around, despite my promise to whoop Tarquin in a Lockdown. I'm sorry, fellas, but my friend Dr. Murphy has been hitting me with his rulebook, so I haven't been able to stare at the jailcam and hit the H key as much as I said I would. I'll be back sometime, for sure around June 18 if not earlier.
Andrew Cook
the late TwelveBaud Studios
and the late Little Tiny Garden Gnomes with Pointy Red Hats
P.S. The DNSERR's in my sig (this if you have XP {YES! I can still locate PE resources!}) are because I was serving them off that dead hard drive. So sue me!
Got suspended from school. I was poking 'round the network to try to find something unique about the school, so I could incorporate a check for that in my lil' UT installer, and thus prevent students from installing four gig of old UT on a school machine, in addition to the UT436, UT348D, UT2003, and UT2004 they already put there. Apparently they'd rather chew someone out for running DOS than chew someone out for running three-dee shooters. 'S only natural, I guess; they put those nVidia cards with more power than the machines themselves in for some reason.
Had a little spyware invasion on my main machine. Managed to kill most of it cold, but when I was poking around in the Registry Editor, in HKLM\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon, I deleted Userinit. Translation: I told Windows not to run the program responsible for keeping people logged in. So now whenever I log in, I am immediately logged out. Anyway, went over to a friends house toting my hard drive, unshielded and shaking like crazy. Not good, especially when the person next to you on the bus has a neodynium magnet and the person across the aisle has 20-mile-ranged walkie talkies up at max power. EM-ville. Somehow the drive survives all that and I am back in business.
Until... About a week later, that is, yesterday, I hear this sharp squealing noise coming form the front of my machine. Where the hard drive is. The tortured thing has a bad bearing at the very least, and is proably scraped clean from cylinder 0 to cylinder len(drive)-1, but I don't know how bad because opening it up and looking voids the warantee and is a sure way to screw things up even more. Estimates to have a professional do it are in the thousands of dollars: about twenty times my net worth. I'm a student, not a bank! However, it is the only viable option, given that the drive has three years of my life, software no longer available anywhere, relese versions of software marked beta and with a faulty timebomb (e.g. MS Office 2003 TR; the timebomb was for Jan. but it never went off), programs of my own creation, and the drivers required to run anything on my primary machine. So basically I'm screwed.
And that is why I have not been around, despite my promise to whoop Tarquin in a Lockdown. I'm sorry, fellas, but my friend Dr. Murphy has been hitting me with his rulebook, so I haven't been able to stare at the jailcam and hit the H key as much as I said I would. I'll be back sometime, for sure around June 18 if not earlier.
Andrew Cook
the late TwelveBaud Studios
and the late Little Tiny Garden Gnomes with Pointy Red Hats
P.S. The DNSERR's in my sig (this if you have XP {YES! I can still locate PE resources!}) are because I was serving them off that dead hard drive. So sue me!
