Thursday 30 May 2013

bank holiday error

I mentioned yesterday that I made a bit of a mess of timings, etc over the Bank Holiday weekend.

The main error came from SimCity.  Having been blogging about how I was thinking of leaving it for a while I thought I'd have a quick go at trying to adjust some settings to see fi that made any difference to the freezing.

My guess was that the freezing was either due to some game save problem (it saves to the cloud so there's no real way for me to tell what's going on) or if it was graphics related.  The only pattern I've noticed for the freezing is that it happens when I do something that involves the graphics - scrolling or editing a building or putting a data layer on, for example.  Now that's a bit tenuous as the whole game involves graphics, obviously, and it doesn't consistently freeze when I do any particular one thing, but I figured I could easily lower the graphical settings and see if it helped the stability of the game.

And, after fiddling for a while (I now have no filter on, some of the settings are at low or medium where my card should be powerful enough for it to handle the top settings and I run the game in a windowed mode at a lower resolution) I seemed to end up with the game basically playable.

The other thing was that they released update 4.0 and this included a new region so I started playing that... and I kept playing until I'd basically absorbed all of Saturday and half of Sunday.

This was where I forced myself to stop - I had the Monaco Grand Prix to watch and there was all this stuff I'd put on e-bay but that I hadn't watched.  I therefore switched track, but the reality was that I should have watched all that stuff first.  I had woefully underestimated how many extras there were, for example, so I then basically watched anime and films constantly from Sunday afternoon to Monday night and I still had hours of stuff left, hence why I've been getting up early and going to bed late to try to get it all done.

It's hardly an ideal situation and I need to get a bit of a grip - I need to keep watching stuff so that I'm then e-baying things that I've finished, rather than thinking I can watch them last minute and failing.  And I still need to keep selling stuff, so there's no respite on the horizon - I'm going to have a tough couple of months with money until my current ban on spending lets my finances catch up.

Wednesday 29 May 2013

bad day

It's not even lunchtime and already I'm having a bad day.

I had to get up very early, having gone to bed pretty late.  This is because I made a bit of a mess of my time over the Bank Holiday weekend, which I'll talk about tomorrow, but I've basically left myself in a situation where I have some stuff I need to post for e-bay auctions that I've not watched.  But of course the only time I can watch it is before or after work, so I had to get up stupidly early to watch some stuff.

Having done that I discovered that the plug where I plug my kettle in appears to have stopped working.  Certainly the kettle is fine, but I get no power out of that plug.

I actually checked how much power I have in case I'd run out of juice or the circuit breakers had blown and therefore discovered that I have about £2.50 worth of electricity.  In theory this is enough to last me about 2 days, so long as I don't use the oven... except that I have basically run out of food and the only things I've got left need cooking in the oven.  That means I will have to buy some elecy tonight, but I have £20 to my name and I need to post some of those e-bay parcels I just mentioned.

I checked my account and obviously discovered I still haven't been paid.  I'm betting I won't get the money until Friday, which puts me in a real bind.

Having watched some stuff and parcelled it off I was a bit later than usual leaving for work, but it is half-term here, so I was hoping the roads would be quiet.  They were, but unfortunately when I got out to the car I discovered some workman was dropping off one of these mini-digger things, so I had to wait for him to finish before I could go.  Add on to that the fact they've now started some roadworks at the end of the road and I hit every red light possible on the journey and I was not as early as I normally am for work.

This then meant that my morning walk was rather hurried and when I got back to the car I discovered I had forgotten my shoes (I wear trainers for that first walk and to drive to work).  I'm therefore wearing my trainers at work, which are, thankfully, black so it's not too noticeable.

I then logged on and opened a couple of e-mails that were also bad news.  I then went to listen to my MP3 player and discovered one of the ear bud things (I use in-ear headphones) has fallen off again.  This happens fairly often - it will most likely be in my bag in the car, but if not I do have spares.  However, it does mean I have had to switch to my other set of earphones I use for my MP3 player I use when walking and those aren't really very work friendly.

And it's only mid-morning.