Higher and higher, ascending to the skies

Hello again, let's see what I can write in this. I've got back in to the routine of working, and it seems I'm getting a lot more than I used to - I've already worked fifteen hours this week since Tuesday.

Between making sandwiches and salads, I've also been attempting to clean up this computer. Two weeks in the hands of siblings can do all sorts of nasty things to a machine, but this one survived intact. There were a lot of seemingly superfluous programs that came with the computer, though (I try and never let my Start menu exceed one screen-height - it's like tidying a desk). So I started a clean-up plan. What happened was the following:

1. Remove "RealTek Sound" from the Start menu.
2. Decide that as it's a player I can safely uninstall it.
3. Realise that none of the computer's sound works at all.
4. Frantically search for the drivers CD.
5. Reinstall it and never touch anything ever again.

In happier news, my loan application has come back. My loan for next year is going to be approximately one fortune (that's 1298.97 all-day breakfast Tesco sandwiches). Apparently it's much to do with the fact that I will have a brother attending the same university. You see, siblings have their uses after all.

In a forgotten land, where evil is enthroned...

I think my MOD-writing is getting better again. Actually, those capital letters annoy me, I'll just say "songwriting". It always happens in summer when I don't have the Internet to distract me as much. I think I've now got what is one of my best sections ever, but I have to sort of glue it together in to a finished work...

As if what I did to my computer wasn't bad enough, another computer on my desk (one along, one down) has decided to give up entirely. Switching it on yesterday gave the wonderful message CMOS Checksum Failure. This isn't too surprising as it's about a hundred years old now, but we were trying to see what was on its hard drive. So Jamie went in to the setup menu, calmly pressed Cancel to all the boxes warning "Never touch anything on this screen", "Keep out, this'll cause your computer to explode" and so on, and restored it to its defaults.

The computer wasn't happy with this, and restarted itself. Then there was a disturbing "whoom" noise as it gave up. And it restarted again... and again... Feeling this wasn't getting us anywhere, the menu was opened up and a different hard drive type selected. But no matter what we tried we couldn't get it to say anything apart from "Missing operating system", so it's been left to sleep again.

My feet hurt. I haven't worked for seven hours a day before. But it was worth it, because I have a fairly large wage packet on the desk beside me now. I'll go along to the bank tomorrow, provided that it doesn't close before I get up.