Belfry Images

I managed to switch my motherboard _and_ my video card the other day, and keep the same installation of Windows going. I had to do a repair install, which was very tricky, using an original XP disk with an SP2 installation. So I went from SP2 back to vanilla XP with the repair install, installed drivers for absolutely everything, upgraded back up to SP2, installed DirectX 9, and then crashed every 30 seconds until I disabled most of AGP. So that was enough to keep programming (and kick myself for swapping motherboards). But now it crashes every time I try to do something fancy, like opening Azureus, WinAMP, or any other program that uses sound or tries to initialise DirectX.

And the entire reason for the upgrade was to get DX9 so I can check out XNA.

Well I’ve finished my current project for now, made my backups, and am about to reformat. I may even make a partition and install Linux. See you on the other side. If I don’t come back, bury me with my guitars.

Microsoft has released a service pack for VS2005 under Windows Vista, so maybe I can consider Vista when I eventually upgrade my poor Athlon XP 1600+. Now I just have to get over having to go through twice as many screens to use advanced settings, mess around with an over-simplified explorer interface, buy an enormous screen to make room for the Aero Glass widgets, wait for minutes to delete a file, and the fifteen billion other annoyances that I picked up with Vista after playing for 5 minutes. Easy.

I was looking for GUI designers for Eclipse (because Sian-lee’s got me thinking about Java) and found this animated blog entry about the GridBag layout manager.

So tomorrow we have four weeks until Carrie and I get married. That’s 28 more sleeps. Yep. 28. Married. Hmm. Yep. Getting close.

I’m not worried. Not at all. Just another day, really. Just another simple normal day, that somehow has been transformed into a monstrous Italian wedding. Two marquees, four tier wedding cake, flower girls with fairy slippers, a brass band, mobile fridge, helicopters, and ninjas attacking.

OK so none of us are actually Italian, there won’t be a brass band or helicopters, and I asked the ninjas to leave the swords at home (on the hand-made invitations). But seriously. The cake decoration? On top of the 4-tier cake? It had to be _ordered_. From _England_. That’s like, overseas and shit. I spent 20 minutes talking to Mum #2 about ties and handkerchiefs for the groomsmen. We needed to decide on colours. I’m thinking about going with pink. Like the bridesmaids dresses (and the fairy flower girls). Or maybe silver. Silver hankies, that makes sense, nothing like blowing your nose on a silver hankie. Swot gets me going in the mornings.

*gag* too sweet. going… to… be… *swallows*

Tell you what, she’d better be worth it. My formerly evil dark emperor friend has just turned into a saccharine romantic disaster movie.

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Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have anything against people who _drive_ 4wds. I’ve got to admit, I like Jeep Wranglers, they’re cool. But what I don’t like is pulling up at a roundabout and having a big truck with a huge bullbar running into the back of my tiny, ineffectual, pedestrian-friendly plastic Corolla. No matter how nice the driver is. I am now firmly in the ranks of the 4WD hate club, at least in town. And my neck hurts.

Wired have a feature called Very Short Stories, which are stories six words long, written by some of the legends of SF. I love this one by William Shatner:

Failed SAT. Lost scholarship. Invented rocket.

Ah Bill you legend.

Probably both. Wordpress seems to suck at letting me post code. And I’m either to busy or lazy to mess around with finding something to help me post any code. Hence a month with no posts.

Well the 9th incarnation of Belfry Images since I started counting is live & ready for action. It’s going to be great. It’s going to be a blog full of programming tips, tutorials, rants about the state of the world, human rights, sushi, and some other stuff.

But it’s going to have to wait until tomorrow. Because now it’s midnight.