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Computery Things
Jan. 8th, 2006 06:16 pmI have not written in this in absolutely ages. Well, a week. Somehow I haven't had much to talk about, because my life either consisted of getting up at 12 or being ill and not bothering.
At least I got my PSAC reports done. I never thought that I would have so much difficulty producing 2000 words, but I chose to write about cryptography and challenges facing IT professionals. The point that I realised that I was in trouble was when the textbook I was blatantly copying bits from mentioned "an amusing anecdote concerning cryptanalysis of polyalphabetic ciphers in the eighteenth century".
Thanks to Whitney, I now have another 80GB of storage space - we shared an evening crowbarring the drive into the computer. It seems my case is built in a particularly stupid way, as there wasn't enough room to mount it in the normal space and it's been put in one of the CD drive bays instead. This was difficult enough in itself because the fan was blocking most of them - there are catches at the back to swing the motherboard out, but it's rather attached to the other side of the case by about a hundred little screws, making this feature largely useless. But it's in now and works fine, and probably will until we try and move the computer.
So as a result of all that I've finally been playing Civ 4, given to me by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
allly_cs a while ago. After playing it for a few hours, I've concluded that it does mess with the rules a bit, but it's so nice about it that you don't really care. Everything on the map is updated constantly rather than using icons like the previous games - you can zoom right out and get a globe of the world explored so far, or go in to hear your civ's theme music playing in the towns, in which you can see the houses and improvements you've built so far. It's rather like Google Earth, in a way.
I've looked at the Multimedia past papers and am absolutely terrified, even though they seem to be virtually identical from year to year.
At least I got my PSAC reports done. I never thought that I would have so much difficulty producing 2000 words, but I chose to write about cryptography and challenges facing IT professionals. The point that I realised that I was in trouble was when the textbook I was blatantly copying bits from mentioned "an amusing anecdote concerning cryptanalysis of polyalphabetic ciphers in the eighteenth century".
Thanks to Whitney, I now have another 80GB of storage space - we shared an evening crowbarring the drive into the computer. It seems my case is built in a particularly stupid way, as there wasn't enough room to mount it in the normal space and it's been put in one of the CD drive bays instead. This was difficult enough in itself because the fan was blocking most of them - there are catches at the back to swing the motherboard out, but it's rather attached to the other side of the case by about a hundred little screws, making this feature largely useless. But it's in now and works fine, and probably will until we try and move the computer.
So as a result of all that I've finally been playing Civ 4, given to me by
allly_cs a while ago. After playing it for a few hours, I've concluded that it does mess with the rules a bit, but it's so nice about it that you don't really care. Everything on the map is updated constantly rather than using icons like the previous games - you can zoom right out and get a globe of the world explored so far, or go in to hear your civ's theme music playing in the towns, in which you can see the houses and improvements you've built so far. It's rather like Google Earth, in a way.I've looked at the Multimedia past papers and am absolutely terrified, even though they seem to be virtually identical from year to year.
