Letters to my future self

14th Jul - Not sure if...

I should trust doctors anymore. Just a week ago, when my grandma was readmitted into the hospital, the doctors claimed that she's only got 2 weeks left in her. Apparently she's fit to be discharged now.

On a more personal note, things around me seem to be breaking down recently. Granted, I've had some of these artifacts for a number of years, but having them break down within the same time period annoys me to no end. First to go was my watch strap, then my PC, then my glasses. That and I sort of sprained my right ankle on my way home the other day.

That PC breakdown was a terrible experience. Problems were huge, the motherboard appears to be malfunctioning and a faint burning smell is coming out from my power supply. Not good at all. There were a few things I could do. I've been trying to save up for a netbook/laptop for awhile now, so one option was to speed up this process and get one immediately. The downside to that is that, while I do get my internet access restored, the data which I have on my current hard disks cannot be retrieved. That, or I could attempt to fix the machine (I've made some minor upgrades to the hardware some 3 months ago, replacing the whole system doesn't seem too wise.)

Marched off to Sim Lim the following day to acquire the parts I need. Thankfully, I'm still somewhat adept in this computer tinkering thingy. Got a new board, chip, power supply and a spare hard disk. Got home after work to try and assemble it all together, which was then I realised that DDR RAM and DDR2 RAM aren't quite the same thing and that my new board doesnt take the RAM that I currently have. *SIGHhhhh*

That, fortunately, was the last screw up in the entirely fiasco. Another trip back to Sim Lim the following day puts me back on my tracks, the system was able to boot up properly. I would however like to say at this point that WINDOWS BLOODY SUCKS. Upon booting up, windows claims that due to major hardware changes, I'd have to revalidate my copy of windows. That's fine by me, except there are only 2 ways to do it, call them for some code, or do it online. I didn't want to call and the internet is out of the question until I get all my motherboard drivers configured. The best part was, both my mouse and keyboard were USB. motherboard drivers not configured = no USB = no mouse, no keyboard. So I'm essentially stuck there. I eventually found a primitive way of getting around the problem and successfully boot into windows. Now, because my copy of windows has yet to be validated, windows is 'kind' enough to remind me AGAIN AND AGAIN that I need to get that done. As if trying to troubleshoot my driver problems weren't enough, I had to repeatedly deal with an annoying popup that assumes that I'm running a pirated version of windows... Nice.

I was actually looking forward to July, because of the GST credits. $200 towards the netbook/laptop fund helps on a long run. But now gaining that $200 seems trivial compared to the $400 and $170 I spent fixing the comp and getting a new pair of glasses. *SIGH*

My class 3 Practical is coming up next monday, hopefully I can clear that in one attempt and turn my fortunes around for the month ><"

-out- for now.