It has been, at the last check, well over a month since I last updated my blog.  I have also not updated any of my other websites for this same period of time, and I thought that if I posted a blog and tried to justify why; it might just make me realise that there’s no good reason for this.

Drag Racer is still going from strength to strength in terms of user numbers but the morale of the regular users is suffering due to the lack of updates and involvement that I have been offering them.

This blog is still delivering impressive user numbers too despite the lack of content that I am injecting into it.  It is very low-maintenance and I will have to try to make it my first visit on my daily web-browse so that I am more motivated to post blogs.

So, a little background.  At the moment, Siobhan and I have been very busy not doing a great deal.  Siobhan just started uni at Newcastle University (congrats) and I am recommencing my second year of my Degree at Newcastle College.  We have just recently bought two rabbits, which are in the process of being trained to be given the free roam of the house, but this is proving difficult. I will probably put up some photos of the two little terrors on the Photo section very soon.

Since my Hackintosh had it’s harddrive faliure, I have found it really difficult to be motivated to spend 6, 7 or 8 hours in front of a PC writing hundreds and thousands of lines of code.  I seem to have found a much better pastime in losing at online poker!  This is going to change though, and I will not be playing poker online for atleast a few months now until Siobhan and I are more sorted with the furnishings for the flat, etc.

I have also just recently started a new job, at TK Maxx newcastle (lol), which doesn’t take a great deal of my time (16-25 hours per week), but now means that most of the time that I spent alone, and did most of my coding, (weekends while Siobhan was at work) are now occupied.

I hope this provides a good insight of why there has been a lack of activity around here and I apologise for this!

Thanks
Stephen

I don’t know what caused it, but all of a sudden, after a stint in Windows, located on the same harddrive as MacOS, the MacOS partition refused to play nice and took 15 minutes or so to boot.  I tried everything to get to the bottom of it and there were no errors shown in the verbose boot or system.log

Eventually, after un-overclocking the rig, I ruled out all hardware besides the Harddrive.  Windows was having a little bit of a grumble about that too and partition magic identified a number of “boot sector problems” which it fixed.  As this didn’t fix my OSX issue, it was time to dig deeper.

Off I popped and booted my iAtkos install DVD and launched “Disk Utility”. This identified a number of problems

• Invalid volume file count
• Invalid volume directory count
• Missing thread record

I then set it away for an hour doing a command something along the lines of:

fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y && … …

but that didn’t help me either.

After a little Googling, I found that Disk Warrior was the solution, so I burned it to a DVD and tried to boot.. D’oh!  My Hackintosh can’t boot OSX native DVDs and it took me a few days to work this out.. stupid.. I tried to launch Disk Warrior from within OSX but it wouldn’t do any of the fancy stuff to the disk as it was in use.

Sooooo.. After playing with the Chameleon bootloader for a few days and giving up on that route, I had to take drastic action.

I did a little reshuffling of my harddrives and made room for a partition.  I then installed ANOTHER copy of iAtkos onto this and booted into that partition.  On this partition I installed Disk Warrior.  FINALLY I was able to repair the disk and this is where I am now.  I had a quick read through the files that were damaged/deleted and there were a few worrying ones in /System/Library/Extensions that were deleted and the rest were all chinese user manuals and recovered files.  These didn’t bother me too much so I booted and all is well, so far.

I hope this wee guide helps somebody diagnose there problem faster than me and I hope this will see me returning to the internetz more!

Thanks
Stephen

Over the last month I finally moved in with my girlfriend Siobhan! We have a cool little 2-bed flat in Hebburn and having our own place is absolutely brilliant!

This is a very uninteresting blog but it is just word to let you know that I am still here and will start posting as soon as I have something interesting to post about! I’m sure you guys don’t want to hear about our lovely new bed linen and wardrobe…

I have just started to learn socket programming in flash and I am intending to develop my second Facebook application over the summer. Watch this space

Yesterday was the final deadline for all of my assignments and projects at College.  This means that I am free now until september!

I can’t wait for the free time and am very glad that I will be able to have more time to put into web projects such as Drag Racer and SJGmusic.  The fun won’t last for long as it won’t be long until I run out of money.  This weekend is a bank holiday but on Tuesday I intend to do alot of phoning around to get myself a temporary job .

In the meantime though I have alot of free time which I have thus far wasted playing Facebook games and looking at youtube.  It wasn’t fruitless though as I did find this HILARIOUS clip from Galaxy Radio below:

Enjoy

Love
Stephen

I got inside and straight in front of us was the Rabbit pen. "Rabbit" I screamed as I remembered all of the fun times me and Bugsy (My previous rabbit) had shared.. I was quietly told that a rabbit wasn’t an option as it was too expensive and too much work. I agreed, and we browsed some more. There were [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_hamster]syrian hamsters[/url], [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_hamster]chinese dwarf hamsters[/url], [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phodopus_campbelli]campbells dwarf hamsters[/url], rats, mice, chinchillas, gerbils and guinea pigs ‘aplenty but I was strictly told "No Tails" so that ruled out most things besides Hamsters and Guinea Pigs.

On browsing again I came a cross one of these:
[img]http://www.british-giantrabbits.co.uk/opal1.jpg[/img]

Again I was told "NO RABBITS", especially since the "Giant Houserabbit" could grow to 4 feet long or something crazy. This, however, is an idea for the future!

Next came the Guinea pigs.. I saw two to be housed together and fell for them immediately. To cut a long story short, I wasn’t allowed these either and I’m not sure why . I think it’s mostly because the cage required to keep them in would have been A: the size of my room; and B: too small anyways.

After much deliberation we brought these little guys home:
[img]http://www.groomi.net/files/hamsters.jpg[/img]

They’re Campbells Dwarf Hamsters and one if them is an Albino . Siobhan chose that one and I got a darker coloured one :thumbs:. We haven’t yet chose names so comments will be nice \/ \/ \/. I need to chose a black name for mine so god knows what I’ll end up choosing.

For anyone wanting to buy a hamster for kid’s first pet, don’t buy these!!! I’ve had mine out to play today and the first thing they both did was bite me on the end of the finger (twice, same finger, EXACT same spot :@). Apparently they can become friendly if you handle them alot though so I intend on petting them for an hour or two each day till they stop trying to eat me . Today’s achievement was to get them both climbing up my arms but I had to put a stop to that as I bet they’re hard to catch when they jump off .

Anyway yeah, summary: I bought two hamsters, and they bite!!

I promise the next blog will be alot less feminine / gay but I had to think of something to post about as you guys will stop checking for updates if there aren’t any. Plus, since when did a random post ever go unread

I’m off to get bit some more!

Love
Stephen

After helping my dad move house, I now have about 50 things to put on eBay. With it being the run up to Christmas, this may be a good time to sell stuff. I am adding it as I find it and will probably be adding stuff for the rest of the week.

So far for sale I have 19 kids books, and to come is about 20 board games and whatever else I can find.

It’s unlikely that anything I have for sale will be of interest to readers on here, but just in case here’s a link to [url=http://search.ebay.co.uk/_W0QQfgtpZ1QQfrppZ25QQsassZsjgroomi]my items[/url].

On an unrelated note, I am working on a layout for URLshort.com so expect to see a post relating to that in the near future.

Thanks
Stephen

Today is a year since we both got together and I don’t think I can imagine the year having went any other way. We are going to celebrate by getting a massive chinese takeaway tonight and both getting very fat

Enjoy

x

I am regretful that the pics are all taken with my phone camera, because Siobhan (Stupid) forgot to take her camera’s memory card.

Enjoy :wave:

I will be posting my holiday photos this evening and may even add a photo gallery or something to the website as part of the redesign.

Speaking of redesign, work will continue tonight and it should be ready for deployment withing a day or two

Thanks
Stephen