I’m back on the gym bandwagon. Technically I’m overweight, and I’d like to correct that, though getting fitter in general is a good goal anyway. It will improve my ability at floorball too.

I did a firefighting course, and then a senior first aid course recently. Yay for work sponsored stuff.

Nindeals. What a scam. DO NOT WASTE YOUR TIME. Around the end of July I went in for a bulk buy to get some ram cheaper than retail. 2 weeks later they emailed out basically saying we can’t supply for that price so we’re canning it. Normally this would be illegal as they have accepted payment and must supply, but they have a little line in their terms of sale that they can cancel anyones order if they want to. DODGY. Not only that but they take an ice age to return your money back to you. I was still waiting for it 4 weeks later. So much for their immediate priority refund. I think Nindeals is more of a scam to earn some quick interest in Matt’s bank account. After repeted emails to them I fineally got a response ON MSN one evening (which is NOT the email address my account uses (my work one)) and the guy actually did the refund. The money arrived a few days later and the total amount was there, pity it didn’t include interest because I would have been able to get over 5% on that if it was in my account for that long. I still feel it’s a scam and won’t be falling for it ever again.

So to further complicate things, while waiting for that money to come back, I went out and bought ram from AusPC, for more money than it would have been at the time I ordered from nintek (thank you oh so much for making me wait 3 weeks and pay $57 more (than AusPC’s price at the time I ordered from nintek)). And of the 6 sticks of Mushkin ram, one was dodge. Like WTF. Of course it took me a while to find this out (I was waiting on cases and the ram worked, just not at pc3200 cas2). When I investigated further I spotted the manufacturer of the ram showed Mushkin on 5 of the 6 sticks, and a sequence of numbers for the last one. The last one being pc3200cas3 ram NOT cas2. Between spotting the speed being slower and this manufacturer change I’d already run memtest86+ on all the ram which found no problems, but confirmed the speed was different (eliminating a bios bug). I had also flashed the bios to the latest anyway, oh and tried in another mainboard. After quickly throwing a web page together detailing what I had tested and screenshots obtained (from CPUz) I opened an RA request with AusPC. This was uncharted territory for me. Fortunately it was completely painless and I got an RA number early the following morning and I express posted the ram back to them. I packed the pair of ram in the Mushkin original packaging, and sent that to them in an HP dvd mailer (padded box for shipping single dvd’s, except it’s huge and well padded box. It costs me $9 to post it, but I got ram that works so I really don’t care. 4GB of this is in my Vmware box. Phear the Vmware box! So I have to congratulate AusPC on a completely painless and very fast RA, a big Thumbs up from me, they are still on my highly recommended list for online retailers.

On the entertainment front, Guitar Hero rocks ! Though I’m still sorta stuck on Cowboys from Hell on medium, but more practice and I’ll have it. I’m trying to get back into my xbox360 games, since I need to really play it more to justify the expense to myself.

The holiday cost way more than it should of. I get the feeling someone hasn’t paid me for something, but without accurate figures of what some things cost I’ll never know. If you choose to holiday with friends, make sure you aren’t taken along for the ride.

I’m off to Italy in October to referee at WCG2006, yay.

Just lately I’ve been having more boring and pointless thoughts about where I’m heading in life. Unlike Eve life is harder to plan for, I’m not able to simply queue up a list of skills and have them by precise dates. Life is harder than that. I need to go back to the therapist again, but first I’m going to put down (brainstorm style) a list of all of my problems and why I think they are problems or where they come from. The problem with this is each session is precisely 60 minutes long. If you can’t talk about your problems for the full hour, your wasting (someone elses) money, and if you have more than that to moan and complain about then you need more sessions (not a problem). But this time I need to be more honest and open about everything to try to get the best result out. I don’t think I’m well, I can’t be, normal people don’t act or think the way I do, but to get someone (with appropriate skills) to admit that is harder than I ever felt possible. Hopefully not insurmountable, but a challenge none the less. Part of the problem here is work. I’m not able to move in the direction I want, so I guess I have to leave, and work is not being helpful about this.

Now for some funny links of sorts, not quite sure what or why I was googling random stuff with geek as a keyword, but I found a Geek guide to working out, Geek guide to dating and a Girl guide to geek guys. And from slashdot I found this guys blog where he reviews some new kit kat flavours, what a neat idea for blog entries, FOOD REVIEWS!

The borg wouldn’t know fun if they assimilated an ammuzement park !