Getting Underway

After an exhausting week at work, it's finally the weekend. I think it's been all the more exhaustive because I had the week before off. All manner of things have been going wrong at work and I have had less and less support in finishing projects. My boss did have a quick chat with me just before I left on friday to say she had noticed a high rate of calls completed in the last week - Hurrah! someone finally said something positive. Not that it will stop me from writing up my cv and looking for work elsewhere...

Next big piece of news is that World of Warcraft will go on sale on February 11th. I have already pre-ordered my Collector's Edition so hopefully I will get this before that date but you never know with distributors.

Ladonna is now level 21 and exploring all parts of the WoW world. She's even managed to take parts in some Horde raids (players join together to go raiding into enemy territory - it's called Player vs Player and manages to poke fun at other players). Unfortunately, the servers will be wiped on the 10th and Ladonna will cease to exist. When the servers come back up, the chances are I will be playing Horde as Scythe and Kitten (and Kayne and a few others) will be playing that Kingdom. I loved the Hunter class so I think I'm going to go with that again.

Before that happens though I'm going to wipe my hard drives and install Windows 2000. Lots of things have been going wrong with my computer and I can only imagine it's because I've updated from Windows 98 First Edition to Windows 98 Second Edition. Apparently (although no one explained it to me before which makes me think that no one knew and only now claiming they knew all the time), upgrading always leads to instability in the OS.

So for the last week, I have slowly been uninstalling applications off my computer. All I have left are the basic internet tools and World fo Warcraft. And 1.5Gb of files. I'll copy those over to Susan's pc, fdisk my C: and D: drives (they're on the same hard disk), blow away the partitions, create a brand new 20Gb one and reinstall Win2k. Then I'll slowly add programs and convert drive E: (which will become drive D:) to NTFS. At some point I'll purchase a bigger hard drive but I don't need anything fancy for now.

Now, a word of explanation. People keep asking me "Oh. So not XP then?" The answer is NO! XP may have all the bells and whistles and look nice but it's also memory intensive. Plus any DOS programs will cease to work.
I've also noticed that XP tends to fall over a lot - far more than 98 ever did.

Other news - last week, I was watching a particularly interesting programme on TV, called "Undercover Angels", about the shocking practices in hospitals by nurses (you know, not administering medicine properly, not sticking to protocol, essentially not giving a shit) and they featured Ealing Hospital.

Now, I've been to Ealing Hospital recently and I can confirm a lot of what the programme said. Last October I took Susan to Accident & Emergency because she had a really bad migraine and was throwing up (we were actually advised to go by NHS Direct). After she was checked and admitted, they left her for an hour and a half whilst they sat around a table and chatted. The only people I could see being looked after were the people being the noisest or making the most racket.

I've also been several times when my father has been ill and each and every time I wonder just what is going on behind the scenes in the wards. You can just stroll in and have a good look around before walking out (you're meant to be questioned by the nurses). God forbid I actually wanted to start screwing around with drips, etc. It's really that bad.

Finally, we're off this weekend to investigate getting a 0% Balance Transfer credit card so we can do something about our credit card debt. We've looked at the ins and outs and we've decided to take the initial step with a real bank (so if anything goes wrong we have a face to face explanation) - in this case Halifax. We've calibrated our budget and worked out we can make lots of savings. This will force us to spend those savings on the credit card repayments rather than just spending them on booze and takeaways.