OMG to busy to do a proper update cause I er normally write them at work when I should be working, sorry.

Potted version of this weekend…

Work, bah, nasty  little man who was obviously a traffic warden or a guard at a concentration camp in a former life causes merry hell with my work on Wednesday and Thursday. Friday Work from home, do a a little but mostly get ready for a night out with the Angels. Think I like my outfit, grey sweater dress, wet look leggings and new grey ankle boots look good, it deserves a photo. Cept camera remote won’t work  And I actually think that dress is a little more brown than grey in good light. Take timer shot instead.

Its Friday the 13th isn’t it. My PC dies too  sob its got half my life on it, it won’t stay on for more than 30 seconds, fuck, theres the last 10 years of my life in that box. And  OMFG trouble comes in threes, the camera remote, the PC and What next?

The plan, after much kitten herding was going to meet the Angels at 8pm for a meal then a club in Kensignton, but Carissa says shes’s bored on Facebook so I go and meet her at 7 (I was ready early anyway, cause I wasn’t able to take a photo). Its a wild and wet night, but the tube gets me there on time, but I wish the man almost leaning (actually nearly sitting) on my legs respected personal space a bit more.

We meet up and head to the nearest place for a drink and a chat, which turns out to be the pub almost opposite Gloucester road tube, its packed, but we sort of steal a place near the table where they store the condiments and cutlery and broken chairs and have a chat over a glass of wine, trying to not get in the way of the bar staff. 

8, back to the tube station, (am almost run over by BMW driver crossing the road) to meet Petra (who isn’t Olga anymore, must get that right), Louise is going to meet us at the restaurant, and Jess is in a Taxi running late (which is normal for Jess) so the 3 of us head towards Med Kitchen. My wet look leggings wont stay up and I have to keep adjusting them all night.

Jess and Lou meet us at the restaurant, we talk, we eat, we drink wine   Its an OK mid range chain restaurant, not bad food (though the starter selection was a bit weak) and reasonably priced. Fries could of done with being hotter though.

After dinner we head across the road to Opal, an upmarket club/bar thingy where Monica, the girl who runs Corset and Diamonds promotes a night. She’s’ not there but we are on the guest list and are waved in. Down the stairs and its sort of like the Bat cave meets a Lounge bar, quite groovy really. We chat for a bit, dance a little and there’s another glass of wine  Monica turns up, but the club, er I dunno, its not happening, maybe it kicks off later (and it was 11 already)  its rather quiet and a bit dead  But the company was nice, lovely to see you all again.

Loose my lens cap for the camera  that must be bad luck item 3. Leave around midnight to make sure I get the last tube. Its hard work not to fall asleep on the train, OMG how much wine have I drunk. It was hard staying awake sitting down, the 15 minute walk up hill afterwards was just painful, just trying and put one foot in front of the other took all I had. Home, just wipe most of the makeup off and crash.

It wasn’t that late, my ankle boots weren’t agony (unusual for new ones with a 4″ heel) and I didn’t drink that much but it seemed to take it all out of me.

Saturday and its wet and wild. Good news, found the lens cap. Bad news, PC is still dead  To be honest its 5 years old and has been on its last legs for a while, it has issues and struggled with a lot of modern software, esp photo tools and games, it was even below minimum spec for some, though it is 5 years old, thats like 90 in PC years. But its sort of has sentimental value, I won it in a computer graphics competition ( I came 2nd) . So what to do, new one? or replace component, it could just be the PSU that’s gone, but it could be the mother board, and that would mean new board, new CPU, new ram, new cooler etc. Think about it.

Now am I going to get this stuff. Weather is awful rain and wind, I have serious nerd shopping to do and I still feel quite delicate. Sod it, Tottenhamcourt road and boy mode 

I’ve been told the difference between TS and TV is choice, TS don’t have a choice, whereas TV can choose not to present as female. This is true, but on the flip side, if I present as Helena, I have to do the whole thing, wig, shave from hell, heavy makeup, wig, padding, breastforms and feminine clothing, I can’t just slob it as I wouldn’t appear female. But TS on the other hand after surgery, hair removal, hormones, own hair or fancy hair system  etc do have a choice of sorts, they can’t not present, but they can present as a slobby female, no makeup, no wig, baggy clothes etc. I don’t have that option, its full on or nothing. So when I can;t mange full on, I pretty much have to do male

<<Note the rest of the blog is sad geeky PC stuff, if you are looking for Tranny time, best come back next week>>>

First stop camera shop where I got the remote, and Oh its just a flat battery, £2.59 and I have a new little battery and a fully working remote. Good. Now its just the PC.

Desktop PC’s seems a rare thing these days, its all laptops and I don’t want one of those, I like I big tower case with room for expansion and change. Plus I’ve always found laptops to be unreliable, slow (esp the hard disks), have no expansion/replacement capability and the quicker ones run very very hot. Of the desktop or tower PC’s I can find are ultra basic models, there was just one high end model, a HP with I7 and bluray , but that was thirteen hundred quid and I wasn’t sure about the graphics card it had was good enough.

Well that was the case in most of the shops anyway. But then there was YoYo tech, just off Tottencourt Road They mostly sell PC components, but do sell a some ready built systems as well, or well according to the website build them to order. But these where high end “enthusiast” PC’s with top components and flashy lights. One of these? well they get good reviews and where in budget, but er dunno. Anyway I had to move some money from savings anyway to buy one.  I really wanted a PC now, and if they had to build one it would take 10 days  So what was the other option, get a new PSU and hope it fixed the old thing or just get new comments, build a new PC and plug the old ones hard drive into (but I’m rubbish with hardware and would totally fail at a DIY job). Decisions, Decisions.

It took a while to find an open bank where I could rearrange the funds, and via a detour to Forbidden Planet for a new book, ever longer to find a nice pub to have lunch in. Every pub seemed to packed with people watching Rugby, bah. Eventually find one where there still a spot to sit and read and had nice food though. But even that one had Rugby on as well, some people ask me to swap tables so they could get a better view of the TV (television) , I oblige, no worries, I’m not interested in men fighting over an oddly shaped ball, but then they buy me a pint as compensation for moving, which was er nice, guess rugby fans aren’t quite as mean as football fans.

Right, er slightly loosed up by a few pints I made a decision, I head back to Yoyo tech, if they have any machine in stock I’ll buy it. Do they? er yes, any of those machines over there they have running demo’s. Ok I’ll have that one. Its big and its black with blue lights, its called a Water Dragon cause its water cooled. Yep Water cooled, with an over clocked quad core Athlon processor, 4gb Ram, 750gb disc (yey plenty of room for photo’s) good graphics card, a bluray drive and it glows blue.  This beats many of the servers I use at work, hell it beats the spec of some of the Big Iron Unix boxes and mainframes I’ve used in my time, I have the POWER! They have to burn some driver disks for me (Dell this ain’t) and box the thing up, takes a while, then I struggle the thing into a taxi (it weighs a ton) to get home.

Home, boxes runs all right, ADSL modem won’t talk to it, wrong drivers for Windows 7, But work gave me a router, use that? try to, it won’t connect, talk to man from Mumbai whose name almost certainly isn’t John Wilson on the phone for ages trying to fix it. He can’t, but after a read of help files and some experiments I get it working on my own. Yey we have Wifi in the flat  This is good for the new PC, but does also mean I can use the work PC on with it as well without disconnecting my PC and use my it with my Ipod Touch. In fact I can now use the the Ipod on the Loo or in the Kitchen or even in Bed to surf and check my mail. Dam that’s good, surfing the web under the duvet, why didn’t a get a wireless router years ago

New PC is on the net , but its virgin, none of my files are on it, hundreds of photo’s and files are sill on the old PC, years worth of content creation I want to keep and would be heart broken to loose. Remove the hard drive and a DVD rewriter from the old one (well new PC only has one optical driver and I like at least two) and try to fit them to the new one. And can’t. Old PC is IDE and new PC is all SATA. Bugger. Little research, and it looks like I can get an enclosure for the old hard drive and connect it to the new one via USB for not to much. More shopping to do, install and play Dragon Age for the rest of the evening instead, max detail and no slow down, the old PC struggled on medium detail in the fight scenes. Then I realise I’ve lost my new book

Sunday, have work to do, I’m on call, but manage a quick trip to town for a IDE to USB enclosure and a Veggie Sunday lunch at a nice pub near Euston I’d found the day before.  Popped back into YoYo tech as well to retrieve my book, I’d dropped in it the excitement of buying a new PC.

Back home, old drive in the enclosure, and plug it in, fingers crossed. Works perfectly, to my surprise, all old photo’s etc copied over to the new machine no trouble. Right we are back, oh I do need the photo software though, NIkon and Phase one stuff goes on no trouble and F*&^@%*K me NX2 is fast on the Water Dragon, its gone from pain to pleasure. But Photo paint won’t work. My trusty old copy of Corel Photo paint 8, which I’ve used for graphics and photo editing for the last 10 years (its Windows 95 vintage software) and can use in my sleep doesn’t like Windows 7, it crashes bugger I need new image editing software (I can’t let you all see me real face can I) I’m trying trial version of Paint shop pro and Photoshop elements, but I dunno, they still don’t seem to match Photo paint in some ways, but I can’t really afford a full copy of photoshop now either. A consequence of all this is those pics I just posted where virgin, no photo editing at all, yikes thats what I actually look like.

So that’s it, back to cooking on gas on the new PC (well 90% there), works a bit of a pain though and I have to do some on call stuff. And I miss Helena time, the weekends not the same without her day and gosh there’s some lovely stuff in the shops at the moment.

This week, busy, busy busy, but actually have a few proper techy problems to solve, not politics and procedure for a change, working on those is actually enjoyable.

Coming weekend has to be all girl though, I’m getting the little twinges, boy/girl balance is out of wack.