orangeacid.net

Welcome to Ibiza

Our holiday was canceled and we were transferred to a Thomsons Gold hotel.

Some background information for those of you who don’t know me personally: every year my family goes to Es Cana, Ibiza, for the last two weeks of season. Variation is nice, but we know all of the bar staff around here so we get free drinks. I know my way around the resort – and increasingly those neighboring it – like a second home. We’ve always been to family-style hotels. For the last five or six years we have been to the hotel Cala Nova and stayed in the premiere, double-sized, sunrise-facing and sea-surrounded rooms, from the balconies of which it is possible to steal wifi from nearby apartments

The flights have changed this year though, and the Cala Nova is apparently closed for the two extra days that we’re here. Thomson tried to send us to the Hotel Cala Llonga in, well, Cala Llonga, but we declined as Cala Llonga is a barren land consisting of a beach, a tack-shop and up to two bars (subject to season).

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WordPress 2.3

I updated my blog’s platform last night.  It was a seamless transition, and there is now tagging support for me to implement.  Apart from that, there doesn’t really seem to be anything different.

Also, these bugs are starting to really irritate me.  In Internet Explorer 6 the post headers are in weird places, and run away from the cursor when hovered over.  The submit button for the comments form is the same.  If anyone would like to debug this for me then I’ll provide some linkage.

When things don’t run smoothly…

I’m not entirely sure how, but in attempting to add a search box to the top of orangeacid.net I’ve managed to disable the header links and retard my headings. I’d take the time to fix them now, but to be honest I feel like shit, so it will have to wait.

I caught this cold off this girl I was fooling around with. She’s excellent, but she did sort of give me a cold and then got herself a boyfriend before I could return the favor. I swapped my summer duvet for my much denser winter duvet around the same time – imagine waking up with the realization that some large mammal – say, a cow – had keeled over and died on your chest as you slept. Such was the sensation this morning of waking up buried under an avalanche of duck-feathers.

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Selling the Warranties

As part if my job as salesman at Comet I have to sell warranties. The total value of the warranties I sell during the week is inputted into my sales matrix. In theory, if I meet my average-sales-per-hour target, and of my total at least 8% is essentials such as cables and tables, and another 5% is made up of warranty sales, I get a per-hour bonus. In reality bonuses are scarce but you do still get a rollicking for missing your targets.

Essentials are easy… “unfortunately the manufacturers don’t include memory cards, Sir, and the supplied cartridges only contain enough ink for fifteen or twenty sheets”… but warranties are a little trickier.

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Quietening my processor

OK, so the compressed air thing didn’t really work.  The volume of this thing really has to be heard to be believed.  It is possibly even louder than my old base unit which had some sort of beasty extractor fan on the side.

I’m pretty sure that it’s not the PSU fan, because that makes a reasonable humming sound.  But there is the most irritating, high-pitched whirring sound coming from just inside the case.  The fan over the processor is something akin to the head of a small child, so I’m guessing that could be the culprit.

Short of buying a new fan, any suggestions?

Cleaning my processor

Comet salesmen recently all had to undertake training for new ‘Comet on Call’ call-out technician packages. One of the briefs sounds something like the following: “over time, dust can build up inside your computer and slow things down. The dust particles cause your computer’s internal hardware to overheat and become sluggish, or even become permanently damaged”.

I read in a computer magazine some years ago that compressed air is excellent for removing dust from hard-to-reach places. I noticed whilst installing my second hard-drive a month or two ago that my processor fan had become clogged with dust. I managed to find some ‘compressed air canisters’ floating around on ebay and decided that perhaps they would help shift the dust and thereby reduce the maddening volume of my processor fan, which does seem to be getting louder and more strained each week.

The fan system above the processor in my computer was pretty dusty, but also pretty hot, so I decided to wait for it to cool before spraying the compressed air. Lucky I did really: it gave me a chance to read the label properly, and as it turns out, the ‘compressed air’ is actually a chemical mix that is highly flammable. I decided to do a quick spark-check on the residue that I presume shouldn’t really be evident from compressed air, but was being produced in copious amounts from my canister.

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