Robin Harbron

Long time since I did an update! I’ve been really busy between family and church and music events, and my online store, and a number of odd computer jobs for people. Of course, I have had some time to just vegitate in front of the computer, but you need that every so often, right? Plus I’m feeling kind of guilty about not getting further with a couple c64 projects I’m supposed to be working on with some friends. However, I have a week off coming up a week from now, and I really hope that inspiration and motivation will arrive when my vacation does.

There’s few things more disturbing than happening to look in the garbage can, and finding something there that shouldn’t be. What’s worse is the thought of what has been thrown out (by accident?) all the time you didn’t look!

As I’ve become more competent at fixing modern Windows type computers, I’ve been getting more jobs on the side fixing them. Usually it’s just word of mouth – somebody calls me up who was referred by someone else. This most recent job has been extremely frustrating – I’ve spent the better part of 3 days dealing with a very erratic Celeron 800 running Windows XP Home.

Got rid of viruses, small improvement. Got rid of spyware/adware, small improvement. Did the Windows Update – blue screen of death after the reboot. Tried dozens of permutations, same deal every time I got to the two last updates.

In addition to solving the crashes, I was supposed to upgrade the RAM from 128MB to 256MB. So I put the extra stick in, and the crashes get even worse. I pull the original stick, and just put the new one in – it starts running way better – even the Windows Updates finally work. It never occurred to me that the RAM could be the problem. Argh!

Gotta put a plug in for MemTest86 – a brilliant program that scans memory in the way that the BIOS and Windows should, but don’t. It’s counting up the errors on that bad stick right now – amazing that Windows managed to run at all. But isn’t that always the case?

Woo-hoo, comments seem to be 100% now, it all comes down to some ‘ needing to be in the right place. Please, comment away!

Comments? Well, I think I mostly got them working – it just seems the number of comments (0) doesn’t change when people actually comment. Well, I’ll try fixing that.

Now that I allow for feedback, I wonder if I’ll just get a bunch of comments from all the people that I’m supposed to be doing stuff with/for – Mermaid and our game, Tim and the Dreamcast hockey league, etc. “What are you doing posting in your blog when you should be working on xyz?” In fact, this idea has already prevented me from posting over the last couple weeks.

Thanks to Aaron Chan and his cgicomments version 2.0 to make comments possible!

“Now, how does the cruncher work? Basically, it reads the specified filename, which you have chosen and then crunches the program.”

Well, thanks for clearing that up. Reminds me about what was once said about the Brontosaurus.

Been listening to a lot of Slay Radio a lot lately – click on a stream under “Tune In” on the left – you’ll need Winamp or something else that can handle this type of stream. This “radio station” plays nothing but modern remixes of classic Commodore 64 tunes – very cool.

I did a bit of code last night for the game that Mermaid and I are working on. Felt good to get something happening there finally.

I’m going to try and get some sort of feedback system working here… I found a cgi based one that might be fairly easy to set up – I’ve never done this sort of thing before, so it’ll be a learning experience.

My wife and I went out tonight for a belated Valentine’s Day date. We went for dinner, and ended up ordering way too much food, so we brought some of it home – some nachos, and a fair number of french fries combined from our meals. I opened up the containers just now, and the nachos are there, but instead of the fries in the second container, I found a big steak and some rice! Now, if I was a gambling man, I’d consider this a good deal, but the gross-out factor leads me to toss the steak, even though it doesn’t appear to have been eaten 🙂 Kind of weird, but I guess things get mixed up often in a busy restaraunt kitchen.

In computer/gaming developments here, I received my Gameboy Advance “Multi Boot Version II” and “Dreamcast Coder’s Cable” in the mail two days ago. I’m really into tools like this that open up otherwise closed platforms. I don’t even own a GBA yet, but will soon, I’m sure. Both tools appear similar – they hook up to the parallel or serial ports respectively of a PC, and allow you to transfer programs into the ram of the systems, so they’re appropriate for smaller projects.

Lik-Sang messed up a bit – they wrongly included what I paid for shipping in the value on the customs slip, so I had to pay a bit more for taxes there – then Customs Canada messed up on the exchange rate, apparently hitting me as if the value printed was in Euros when it was clearly marked “USD”, which is another 30% or so. I should be able to get some of that back.

I got my first issue of Commodore MaiLink since returning to membership today – it’s the same sort of stuff as when I left a couple years ago. Lots of random ramblings by one guy in particular – pretty strange, not very informative, but I guess you gotta appreciate that he’s trying, and I guess few others are.

Been trying to get cc65 up and running on the various PCs I use throughout the day. MagerValp is wanting to get a neat little TCP/IP game up and running using the RR-Net, and I’d like to help out.

And one of the next few days I gotta finish up the little movement routine for the game that Mermaid and I are working on. The graphics she’s drawn are great so far!

Reach me at macbeth@tbaytel.net – later!

Check out my computer and video game pages at: http://my.tbaytel.net/macbeth/computer.html!