On Friday, 9th of May, I turned 18 years old. Now this is a big thing because it means I can legally do a lot of things. Purchase Alcohol and Cigarettes, Gamble money, and do other things that I will think of later. Anyway, its supposed to be a milestone for a young person. To be honest, I couldn’t care less. It doesn’t feel any different and I probably won’t do any of the things stated above for a fair while because I don’t care and am not interested in wasting money on those luxuries.

Now onto my birthday… Every year for a few years now, Birthdays haven’t really meant much. They seem like normal days, only slightly different because I get a few gifts and people give you a different number to associate how long you have been alive. This year, I didn’t really get much in the terms of the gifts department. I did get gifts, but they weren’t anything special or anything worth talking about. Maybe that is one of the reasons I don’t care much about birthdays anymore, I don’t get cool toys like when I was little.

And in case you are wondering, no, there was no party. Parties do not appeal to me really. I did not have friends over and do stuff. There is really nothing to do, nor a reason to celebrate, in my opinion. Some would say I have a negative or bland view on birthdays, or celebration in general, and yes, you are probably right. Why don’t I care? Maybe because no one else does either.

On Tuesday, it was tertiary open day in Dunedin. This was an opportunity for year 13 students to go onto campus and find out information on courses and such that the Otago University and Otago Polytechnic has to offer. This was compulsory for the year 13’s at my school to go to and the roll was taken to make sure we at least showed up (although that didn’t stop everyone from wagging it *cough* GTA IV *cough*.)

I turned up there and had a fair idea at the presentations I was going to see and the pamphlets I was going to take. I also went to a couple that I wasn’t going to but ended up going to because they were kinda relevant and a mate was going anyway and I needed something to do to pass the time. I went to the General Science presentation which covers the different courses for a Science degree. After that I went to the Applied Science presentation which has Software Engineering, although they didn’t say much about it. Then later on, I went to a Information Science presentation which talked a lot about IT. It was the most interesting presentation up to this point because the others were boring.

At the end of the presentation, I had 5 minutes to get over to the Polytechnic buildings to see a presentation for Information Technology. On my way there, I didn’t make a turn when I should have and I got completely lost. I had had to find my way back to on the right path. When I did finally figure out where the hell I was, I managed to find my way to the building. I was already 5 minutes late and I had difficulty finding the room in the reasonably large building. When I got to the room, there was a notice on the door saying there was a change. Different building, different room. After making my way to the correct room, I was 10 minutes late and I had missed quite a bit of the presentation. I was a little annoyed.

Anyway, after that fiasco, I made my way back to the University area and went to the Computer Science building for my last presentation before I go home. If you hadn’t guessed, the presentation was on Computer Science. It wasn’t that bad of a presentation. After seeing all of the presentations, I am still not 100% sure what I want to do next year but I am swaying towards doing Computer Science at Otago University. Now I just need to get that one pesky English credit and I should be well on my way of getting there.

Over the past month or so, I have been playing a fair bit of minesweeper. You know what minesweeper is, that silly little game that comes with Windows. You probably wonder why I have been playing it, because it is a boring game to play and there are real games available, for purchasing or for obtaining illegally. The main reason of doing it is to compete with a friend. We have been trying to get the lowest score out of the both of us.

After the many hours playing Minesweeper, I have become pretty decent at it, to the point where in a lot of instances, I don’t have to think about where to click, I just click right. My high scores on each of the modes are as follows, beginner at an amazing 6 seconds, intermediate at a quick 85 seconds and advanced as a decent 342 seconds. I’m sure anyone could beat those scores so go ahead, if I can do it that quick/slow, you must be able to do it much faster.

With all the hours of Minesweeper down my sleeve, the game has turned into an obsession. I think about minesweeper and dream about minesweeper. I think that is one sign of insanity and I must now put my minesweeper glove and mouse down and move on to bigger and better things. I enjoyed playing and trying to get the fastest time I could.

Yesterday, I made a post about backing up. A few hours later, Peppery, the server admin decided to upgrade my Wordpress blog to 2.5.1. Well what happened was instead of upgrading, he ended up deleting my blog off the server. He fucked up. To make it worse, he didn’t have a backup to restore my blog. Ironic how a couple of hours after I write a post about backing up, something goes wrong with my blog and there is NO backup!

At least all my posts and settings were in tack in the mysql database. He managed to restore my blog and theme and some of the plugins. I don’t have a clue what plugins are still missing but they can’t be important or else I would remember them. After he mucked around for a while, everything seems to be as good as rain. The only thing I am missing are PSP themes that were on the server. Lucky that I moved the pictures saved on the server to another host so they will be fine if anything was to happen, like this. Now I just need to restore the themes.

Yesterday, I decided that it was probably about time I backed up some files in case something goes wrong with my computer. The day before that, I got given a DVD writer for my laptop to borrow. I was going to give it straight back but they said I can borrow t for a bit longer. Since I had it, I thought that I might as well put it to use. I had some music to burn to CDs, music to rip from CDs, and some backing up to do.

I used Windows to format the disc to enable me to drag and drop the folders and files I wanted to back up. I was hoping that I could backup all my important files to one DVD disc so I didn’t have to mess around with multiple backup discs. I managed to just fit everything that I needed. I didn’t backup my desktop because the videos there will be transferred to an external drive later. I also didn’t bother backing up my music folder because I didn’t need the podcasts and iTunes libraries that were there because I wouldn’t use or listen to anything there ever again. If something did happen to my data, it would be easy enough for me to start fresh. After backing up, I closed the disc and labeled it with a marker and filed it in my Disc Case for archive purposes.

I then burnt music to disc and them ripped music into my iTunes Library. That was a simple task. I then decided that I would backup my iTunes Music Library because at times, I have heard clicking coming from my external music drive and also Windows Vista doesn’t spin down the disc when I eject it from the computer so I have to unplug it in a special way. If I just yank the USB cord from the computer, the drive makes an awful sound, and it could one day possibly destroy the drive somehow. For me to safely remove it from the computer, I have to pull the cord half out to spin down the drive, then I can take it all the way out without it making the horrible sound. It took a bit over 30 minutes and 3 DVDs to backup my iTunes Library, which was a little over 10GB.

Backing up my files on my computer will help me sleep easy and in the event on my computer fully dying, I won’t have to worry as much about the data I have lost. Also if my music drive dies, I have a backup which will contain most, if not all of my music and recovering my library in the event of a failure won’t be that painful. Using iTunes to backup my music was simple, I love how it just does it. I wish backing up what I want with Windows was as simple as that, without requiring third-party software.

About two weeks ago, when I was checking out my Flickr Stats, which I do everyday because I’m obsessed with the line graph, I happened to see that one of my pictures had 50 views that day. 50 might not sound like a lot for most other Flickr users, but for me 50 is a HUGE amount of views of one picture in a day. I went to see what site the views were coming from and it told me they were coming from the bbc.co.uk website.

Now I thought this we very weird, because the BBC is a big company and why on earth would I be getting clicks from there. I went a little deeper and found it on the BBC Internet Blog on a post about the BBC’s iPlayer for the Nintendo Wii. The odd thing was, my picture, which is of an S-Video port on my laptop, had nothing to do with the Wii. I read through the post and saw that the author was talking about watching shows from your computer on your TV. I thought it was a little weird that my picture got chosen but looking at other first page results from an S-Video search on Flickr, I can see why mine was picked over the others, I just don’t know why a more suitable picture wasn’t chosen.

Well today, the picture made it into my top 10 most viewed pictures on my Flickr photostream. I’m pretty happy my picture got used on the blog site and generated hundreds of views of that picture, but I don’t really care that much. Its nice to have you picture on some biggish website for everyone to see, as long as the picture isn’t crap or humiliating. This is a win for me

Yesterday, my friend Morgan hosted an Xbox LAN party for his birthday. There we had 3 Xboxes, 3 televisions, 3 copies of Halo 2, 3 Ethernet cords, 1 router, 12 controllers and 12 people playing. There were a lot of people there, many experienced Halo 2 players, me on the other hand, was not. It was a lot of fun and I had a great time. But afterwards it got me thinking about myself and gaming, shooters in general.

I got my arse kicked! There are many reasons for it. I have never played Halo, I have never played a FPS, I have never played an Xbox, so it is understandable that I would get owned by everyone there, well maybe not everyone, but most people. It has got me thinking that maybe I should start getting into shooters. Every second game coming out these days involves guns or shooting of some description. I am missing out on an important part of gaming and should get on the bandwagon as soon as possible.

When I get my next generation, or should I be saying current generation now, I shall get some shooters. I am going to need a game to get me into the genre, enough to get me hooked into it and getting me to purchase other titles. This should improve my skills in this area, something that is considered as an important part of gaming. Being able to competently go around killing other players is a skill that anyone who considers themselves a gamer should have, which is something that I currently don’t have. Someone needs to help me become a gamer, and they better do that stat!