Zeitgeber / Somnambulate

I thought that, since I missed Friday's post (I know, I'm as gutted as you are) I'd provide two words instead of the usual one (to make up for the one I missed).
Zeitgeber is a rhythmically occurring event that cues organisms' biological rhythms. In most cases, the primary zeitgeber is light. We run on a 24-hour clock (or 25-hour biological clock) based around our light hours (daytime) and our dark hours (night-time).
And, to somnambulate is to walk in one's sleep.

I've not really got much to report on at the moment. Not much has really happened that I can write about.
On Friday night, I finally got sick and tired of my buggy laptop deciding that the screen was not, in fact widescreen, but standard TV resolution, and thus deciding to change the display ratio and stretch it across my widescreen. So, I decided, once again, to use my recovery disc. (It's a lot quicker and easier to just completely blitz the hard drive and just reinstall everything than it is to find the source of the problem and cut it out like a tumour). I backed up all of my documents, downloads and my lovely disc images (I store a lot of software as disc images to save on physical CD-Rs, and then just mount them virtually if and when I need them. It's particularly useful with large and expensive software like MATLAB) to my external hard drive, inserted the disc and rebooted. I cheerily watched as every other file left on my old and weary laptop was slowly wiped out of existence.

Meanwhile, I decided it might be an idea to back up a few files from my desktop computer (Oh, the temptations of a 500GB hard drive the size of a small wallet), and stumbled upon a few old files that made me smile. But I've now got all important files backed up on a hard drive that's smaller that my passport. I love technology.

However, once my laptop had finished restoring and removing every old file, I decided to start installing all of my old programs. Starting with the so-called Windows Live Essentials. This lovely little package comprises of Windows Live Messenger (the instant messaging program that I use) and Windows Live Mail (the email client that I use). Now, surely if this package were essential, as the name suggests, I'd be able to install it without an ounce (Sorry, I keep forgetting we're working in metric now -- gram) of hassle. Silly me. Forgive me for assuming that the wonderful Bill Gates and that *ahem* highly-qualified programmers at Microsoft would ever create something that works and installs without any problems at all.

It turns out that I need to install the Windows 7 Platform Update. No problem, I'll just download it and install it now. This update requires Windows Vista Service Pack 2 to be installed. Huh? Ok, I'll install that first then . . . Before you install Service Pack 2, you need Service Pack 1 to be installed. Ok, so what has Microsoft actually provided me with, if I don't even have Service Pack 1? Before you install Service Pack 1, you need to install all of the optional updates from Microsoft via Windows Update. So . . . these updates are, in fact, not optional? I've installed all of these things now, but the true irony is that I just cannot be bothered to install the Windows Live Essentials right now. Each of the above platforms or Service Pack updates took a minimum of an hour to download and an hour to install.

I've got my important software installed though. Mozilla FireFox, Spotify, and iTunes. By important, I meant software that I use frequently. I should probably install Microsoft Office, Microsoft Visual Studio and MatLab soon though. Sigh.

I love technology, but sometimes it's so frustrating. Also, mobile phone operators have annoyed me recently. A week or so ago, I discovered the reason that texts have a limited number of characters (160 characters in an English text, using standard alphanumeric characters, and around 70 characters in, for example, Chinese). Mobile phones are constantly communicating with the big masts through the sending and receiving of data packets. These packets, worryingly enough, send information such as your location, what network you're on, et cetera. However, there's a little bit of blank space at the end of this packet. The size of this space is (yep, you guessed it) 160 bytes (Each alphanumeric character takes up a byte of storage). Mobile phone companies charge extortionate amounts to piggyback a tiny amount of extra data onto a packet that was going to be sent regardless of whether the extra was there or not.

If you are on a pay-as-you-go tariff where you pay for your texts, you are being ripped off. Get a contract as soon as possible. Use this information to convince your parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents that you need to go on a contract with free texts. I'm not advocating going down to the network headquarters and protesting, but do not ever use a pay-as-you-go tariff without free texts.

Anyway, I hope this has made up for missing Friday's one (If I hadn't mentioned this, would anyone have noticed?) and I leave you with this:

"Bill Gates is a very rich man today, and do you want to know why? The answer is one word: Versions."