Shady Goings On

I recently bought a new extension lead for the computer, this one is quite cool though as it has a “master” socket that the PC plugs into (but you could use it for your amp or TV just as well). The extension lead can then detect when the PC is in use and switches on all the other sockets (think printer, adsl modem, scanner etc).
The clever bit is that once you shut the PC down the lead then switches off all the other appliances for you. This not only saves energy and money, but also save me effort switching the things off individually or at the wall.

Get your own from Maplins:
IntelliPanel™- Intelligent Surge Extension Lead

Just what I need for surfing from my sofa and sending messages to my friends, I just plugged it in and it worked straight away, it even came with the batteries!

Keysonic Wireless Keyboard for PS3

Well we got a Playstation 3 for xmas, very good too, hence no blogging lately!
I’ve now got this great keyboard thiugh so that I can blog from the sofa, great for when there’s nowt on tv or the ps3 controller is recharging (not very often actually). More about that later!
We’ve also been saving up for a tv, ours is long past it’s best, it’s actually a cast off from Paul, Alisons brother. So we now have a 32″ philips hd tv coming in the post, lets hope the courier doesn’t just leave it by the door like he did the keyboard!

Anyway, I’m off for a blast on Need for Speed Pro STreet now, my fave game at the mo!

Well the results are back and I scored 82%, it seems quite high but the results page tells me that about 40% of students scored over 85%, so I could have done better.

I got 4 questions wrong, one was a stupid mistake: I ticked the wrong box in the multiple choice answer form, even though I checked it twice - next time I’ll check it 3 times! The other three were tricky and were more down to interpretation than simply knowing the answer

The next assignment is out now and looks even trickier so I have to really pay attention to the wording of the questions.

I’m now five weeks into my course now and thankfully most of the reading seems to be over. Initially all the activities were reading but now we’re actually getting down to a bit of coding.
This week the course has introduced the basics of PHP variables, operators, constructs and a few functions.

I’m wating to hear back about my first assessment: I subbmitted it on Friday.

After more investigation last night it seems the root of the problem my be a hardware issue rather than anything to do with Windows, I also had some issues with Linux.

I left the box powered off at the mains over night and this morning I was able to boot both Linux and Windows. It seems to be a heat issue, perhaps caused by the processor-intensive DVD conversion I mentioned earlier. It may also be some BIOS quirk or ACPI (power management) problem.

Hopefully no permanent damage has occurred, time will tell.