Computer-themed Rambling
Aug. 7th, 2005 10:13 pmNeil Gaiman's RSS feed started a major quest this afternoon. Apparantly BBC is playing the Guards! Guards! radioplay, and it's available to listen to online. So i thought, what the hell, and went there - it was horribly messy and told me to go download Realplayer.
Now, we all know what a bitch Realplayer is, but when Discworldness is RIGHT THERE ON TEH INTERNETS!!! I cannot resist. So off I trooped to www.realplayer.com, which kept me busy for a good half hour or so. I ended up back where I started with half an exec file and some random shit, nothing useful whatsoever. At this point I turned to Shareaza for solace. There was any number of zip files and unzipped files of Realplayer, but they all smugly told me they were "pending". Finally I found one that relented and turned Active - livejournalled for a while till it finished downloading - and guess what happens?
I unzipped the file, and what I get is a freaking folder full of exec files with titles like "Thief Shadow Runner Brigade Voltage Tits Zombie Bazooka Massacre Four crack". NOT on the menu, pal! I obviously get to deleting things - well, World of Warcraft goes easy, as does norton and some weird-ass programs, but good ol' Thief stays with me and so does the ACTUAL, yaknow, Realplayer file, and Nero Burning Rom - you know why? BECAUSE THEY REFUSE TO DELETE. That's right folks - my computer has arbitrarily decided not to let me get rid of three programs. Neither will it let me open them. There are no problems with the OTHER contents of the folder, oh no, it's just this lot. So for all my trouble I STILL have no realplayer. Still with me?
Okay. So I go running to stan on msn going OMGWTFBBQ?! He says: "Yeah, that's weird." He talks me through some cmd or DOS or whatever, and deletage still isn't happening. So I give up on that and try again for realplayer. Gneil updates again linking to a webpage that apparantly does it in windows media player. I go YAY and head over there. Well - it doesn't. It doesn't do that at all. Another helpful LJrandom suggests realalternative. I am unlucky enough to be in the last part of my subscription month and am therefore over my meagre download limit. Therefore this is ALSO being a bitch. While it downloaded verrry slooowly, I was informed by Stan that it only read .rm files and not .ram files, which were apparantly just URLs leading to .rm files... >_< so anyway, I opened one of said .ram files and pasted the URL into my browser - File Not Found. Lovely. I then turned to Google, but alas I am not a Google wizard - I got, among a bunch of fairly identical Discworld-related pages, five sites advertising employment as guards, fifteen forums, three pay-to-download-free-audiobooks sites, a play about Rumpelstiltskin, some kind of pirate site that required some kind of program download too, and a monkey.
It is now ten o'clock and I officially give up. It really doesn't matter, I can always read the book. My cat is spastic. My fever is gone. I have a bag full of stuffed toys and a small red plastic hammer to take to school tomorrow for our year Sevens' leetle play. I have no lunch. I miss Avi. I am making Sims for all the Good Omens horsemen, and Famine does NOT have an afro. War is black. And not just the wussy black that the template has - I body-shopped this skin, and it is EXTREMELY black. As in, so dark brown it's almost REAL black. I had to put facepaint on her in order to fix up her cheekbones, because I couldn't actually see what I was doing among the blackness. But of course she has red hair. And red eyes (I made those too). She's pretty funky. I'm not making pollution till I've done my Albino skin, and I don't know WHAT I'll do about Death... I mean, he ALREADY exists in Sims 2. Actually, that'd be pretty funny - watching a Horseman do the bargaining-with-Death thing. Heh.
Anyway. Book reccommendation for this evening is Thigmoo by Eugene Byrne. It's really funny and involves prostitutes and supercomputers. Very little bondage. Much communism. Go. Read. Goodnight.
Now, we all know what a bitch Realplayer is, but when Discworldness is RIGHT THERE ON TEH INTERNETS!!! I cannot resist. So off I trooped to www.realplayer.com, which kept me busy for a good half hour or so. I ended up back where I started with half an exec file and some random shit, nothing useful whatsoever. At this point I turned to Shareaza for solace. There was any number of zip files and unzipped files of Realplayer, but they all smugly told me they were "pending". Finally I found one that relented and turned Active - livejournalled for a while till it finished downloading - and guess what happens?
I unzipped the file, and what I get is a freaking folder full of exec files with titles like "Thief Shadow Runner Brigade Voltage Tits Zombie Bazooka Massacre Four crack". NOT on the menu, pal! I obviously get to deleting things - well, World of Warcraft goes easy, as does norton and some weird-ass programs, but good ol' Thief stays with me and so does the ACTUAL, yaknow, Realplayer file, and Nero Burning Rom - you know why? BECAUSE THEY REFUSE TO DELETE. That's right folks - my computer has arbitrarily decided not to let me get rid of three programs. Neither will it let me open them. There are no problems with the OTHER contents of the folder, oh no, it's just this lot. So for all my trouble I STILL have no realplayer. Still with me?
Okay. So I go running to stan on msn going OMGWTFBBQ?! He says: "Yeah, that's weird." He talks me through some cmd or DOS or whatever, and deletage still isn't happening. So I give up on that and try again for realplayer. Gneil updates again linking to a webpage that apparantly does it in windows media player. I go YAY and head over there. Well - it doesn't. It doesn't do that at all. Another helpful LJrandom suggests realalternative. I am unlucky enough to be in the last part of my subscription month and am therefore over my meagre download limit. Therefore this is ALSO being a bitch. While it downloaded verrry slooowly, I was informed by Stan that it only read .rm files and not .ram files, which were apparantly just URLs leading to .rm files... >_< so anyway, I opened one of said .ram files and pasted the URL into my browser - File Not Found. Lovely. I then turned to Google, but alas I am not a Google wizard - I got, among a bunch of fairly identical Discworld-related pages, five sites advertising employment as guards, fifteen forums, three pay-to-download-free-audiobooks sites, a play about Rumpelstiltskin, some kind of pirate site that required some kind of program download too, and a monkey.
It is now ten o'clock and I officially give up. It really doesn't matter, I can always read the book. My cat is spastic. My fever is gone. I have a bag full of stuffed toys and a small red plastic hammer to take to school tomorrow for our year Sevens' leetle play. I have no lunch. I miss Avi. I am making Sims for all the Good Omens horsemen, and Famine does NOT have an afro. War is black. And not just the wussy black that the template has - I body-shopped this skin, and it is EXTREMELY black. As in, so dark brown it's almost REAL black. I had to put facepaint on her in order to fix up her cheekbones, because I couldn't actually see what I was doing among the blackness. But of course she has red hair. And red eyes (I made those too). She's pretty funky. I'm not making pollution till I've done my Albino skin, and I don't know WHAT I'll do about Death... I mean, he ALREADY exists in Sims 2. Actually, that'd be pretty funny - watching a Horseman do the bargaining-with-Death thing. Heh.
Anyway. Book reccommendation for this evening is Thigmoo by Eugene Byrne. It's really funny and involves prostitutes and supercomputers. Very little bondage. Much communism. Go. Read. Goodnight.
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