Persisting Technical Issues

Technology has not been on my side so far this year. Perhaps I've done something to anger the machine gods. Should I sacrifice something to appease them? Maybe set fire to my old computer parts, my old phone, and my old laptop while screaming binary at the sky?

This would be far less painful than what I've been doing so far.

Seriously, some of these things may as well be on fire.

Let's start with my desktop computer. A stick of RAM was defective and caused my entire computer to crash literally every few minutes. Fortunately, I had a friend come over, we found the defective stick, removed it, and now things are ok now.

Unfortunately, we believe that that stick of RAM also corrupted my OS. I spent around a thousand dollars on upgrading the parts. It shouldn't lag when I try to view files or stutter when I'm watching a video on Youtube.

So fine, we need to do a reformat of my hard drive. A bit of a hassle, all we have to do is back it up and we're good to g-

Oh wait. My external hard drive is corrupted too.

Kill me now.

When my computer was crashing I tried to back up my files. Unfortunately it crashed during a back-up and this has done something to my external hard drive. I could reformat it, but I have files on it that would be forever lost. I have back-ups from multiple computers on it.

So I'm kind of scrambling to try and access it. I really don't want to go running about through old computers hunting down specific folders.

Speaking of old computers. Have I mentioned how bad my laptop has been getting? I constantly require a laptop cooler otherwise the whirring and the overheating gets unbearable. One day in class I was afraid it was going to catch on fire.

Maybe if I fall asleep everything will be ok.

And then we have my phone. It began to die in less than 24 hours leading me to believe it was a battery issue. But the new battery does nothing. Nothing! So it's just my phone being defective. Lovely.

My sister recently upgraded to a Nexus 4. And I'm really tempted to do the same. Sure, I'll be giving up my beloved keyboard, but I'd getting something that isn't a complete disaster. Something that can take decent pictures and have voice commands.

Upgrade now, or upgrade at the end of the year? Decisions decisions.

My main concern is still my computer. Hopefully things will be resolved by the end of this week.

Rough Start to the New Year

Happy new years to everyone out there. Unfortunately I have to keep this post short again. As the title may suggest, things aren't exactly spectacular for me. Bit of an unfortunate start to 2014 really. Some of you may have noticed that I haven't been making my usual rounds around the Blogosphere lately. Well, it's a bit hard to when your primary computer was crashing every few hours but is now crashing every 5 minutes. It forces you to use your inferior, overheating, and crashing (slightly less often) laptop.

We think it might be stick of corrupted RAM or a driver issue. I'm still waiting on a friend to take a look at it for me.

Also, I mentioned back here that I wanted to use my mass number of airmiles to go to an event called Magfest. Unfortunately I can't go this year. Just because you have the airmiles to get a free ticket doesn't mean you'll be able to get a returning flight in time for classes.

Oh and also, I mentioned here that I had an excess number of personal training sessions at my old gym that I wanted to get rid of. Still haven't been able to get rid of them much to my dismay. You'd think that with the new year around the corner more people would be interested but this has not been the case.

I have to end this post with no pictures. This laptop was never designed to do more than take notes and be used for temporary entertainment before I could use my superior desktop. Instead of hitting the ground running for 2014, I've hit the ground face first. Welp, things can only go up from here right?

Preperation for China

Less than a week remains until I head to China. It's a combination of dread and excitement for me. I'm excited because I love traveling and seeing new things. And so many things in China are so cheap, especially the food. I am stuffing my face there until I die.

Unless you know, the heat and humidity kill me first.

Yeah, not the greatest time to go, in the middle of summer but it's the only time we are able to go there. Also, I love my internet and China has terrible internet. I lost all job opportunities due to this vacation and I'll miss out on a roadtrip that my friends are going on as well. But what can you do?

Well, I'm getting ready for trip.

1. Internet Access

I'm addicted to my Internet. China, hates the internet. Surprise surprise. I'm certain most of you are aware of the Great Firewall which prevents people from accessing certain sites such as Facebook, Youtube and (sometimes) Gmail. There is a way around it however, by using a Virtual Private Network or VPN you'll be able to bypass the Firewall with no problem.

Unfortunately, I lack the technical abilities to set one up for myself so I'll probably just rent one for a month for $5 again. Not bad. Let's just hope my Macbook doesn't catch on fire...

Uh oh.

2. Money

Theresa completely failed to buy herself anything with the money I gave her when she went to China. If you want something done right, do it yourself.

But not just that, we're going to be going to Hong Kong, a Shanghai tour and then to Taiwan. 3 places, 3 different types of currency. I'm really hoping I've brought enough because I'd rather not try and exchange money in Asia. I've heard enough horror stories of people losing their credit cards and what not.

I am fond of the way the coins look though.

3. Locations

In China we'll be mostly on tours. We'll be running around on our own in both Taiwan (Taipei area) as well as Hong Kong. If anyone has any ideas of what are interesting things to see mentioned it in the comments below. I haven't found anything that really appeals to me yet.

4. Clothing

My worst enemy is heat. I burn extremely fast and it doesn't take long for me to get heat rashes. Seriously, I get rashes on my body from being too hot. This is complicated by my style of clothing which is long jeans, t-shirts + dress shirts.

I'm forced now to wear shorts in an attempt to stay cooler. There's a reason why I refuse to wear shorts unless completely necessary. I'm fairly certain I have chicken legs. It's a curse, being so thin. And my dress shirts usually do a good job at making me look like a normal weight.

So graceful.

So again, anyone with memorable locations in either Taipei or Hong Kong let me know. Preferably indoors or with air conditioning.

Time for a new Laptop

I briefly mentioned it here but my laptop has been acting up. If you were wondering why I haven't been visiting your blogs that much this weekend, that's why.

Ok, time for another confession: It's not a real laptop. It's a Macbook. And I keep referring to it as a laptop because I'm kind of ashamed of using an Apple product.

I really dislike Apple.

Every single Apple product I own has been given to me by my parents. Like my iPod for when I graduated. My Macbook was a gift when my old laptop wasn't working so well. And I accepted because I didn't want to look like a spoiled brat for declining their generosity.

And I learned the hard way that you should always get the extended warranty with Apple products. A few months after the warranty expired, problems started happening.

Not quite, but close.

It started out when things got really laggy. I used to be able to run TF2 and Minecraft with minimal problems. Then suddenly I would have extreme lag when watching a Youtube video. It would hear the fan start up when I went onto Facebook. It didn't make sense. It usually never got this hot.

The next flag that suggested something was wrong was when the case started melting onto the Mac. I had a case for it and one day I took it off in hopes of helping the Mac cool down. And that's when I noticed the fried on splotches of plastic.

Needless to say I was concerned.

Don't want something like this to happen.

So I take it into the Mac store and get it checked out. The say it's going to be one of two problems, and they weren't going to be cheap because my warranty had expired. Maybe it was a fan problem which would cost $100 to fix. If not, it was a logic board problem, which would cost $500.

Either way, they needed to run some more in-depth tests to see what was wrong. They said they'd call when everything was figured out.

And I got that phonecall today. Turns out, I have a fan AND logic board problem.

It could be worse I guess.

So I've decided NOT to get the repairs done. Even though my fan is running at double the speed it's supposed to. Even though my logic board is derping harder than a Corgi. I think I'll just start looking into getting a new laptop. A real laptop this time.

Assuming I can find a job. I've sent more applications out but still no response. :(

Technical Problems

Yeah, having a few computer issues over here that are preventing me from making a complete post and has stopped me from commenting on other blogs all weekend.

Hopefully this issue will be resolved by Wednesday, I'll see you then.