Suman!!

Suman!!

I'm probably just posting this to catch Clair's attention, but I know this to be a treat that helps me to get my creative flow back. Decent suman like this paired with freshly brewed coffee warms the belly and stirs the senses... and is easily purchased at the market not far from home. *sticks tongue out at nee-chan* For those of you who don't know what it is, click the photo and read the caption. But I suspect that won't be an issue with the majority of my readers. Like everything sweet, it's not something you eat everyday; only on those times you need a salve to the spirit...

Why I don't write for a living

I suppose those readers who've known me a long time wonder why I didn't take up the pen as a means of supporting myself. The simple answer lies in a simple issue; my case in point is the past week; didn't see any updates, now did you? Creativity isn't something that can be tapped on demand. Unlike jobs that require a more or less fixed skill set, "getting creative" just isn't as simple as the idiom makes it out to be. I fear that my pen will run dry, starved not of ink but of the thoughts and passions that fuel it. And this, my good audience, will in turn starve the erstwhile author, yours truly. And beyond remuneration, I've always considered personal pastimes to be out of the realm of business; deriving profit from a hobby is a disservice to it (except perhaps where computers are concerned). I'm sure this point is debatable, as are many things I have written, but that's why the comment form is there. Right now is too tiring.

My friend is out of trouble! ^^

Welcome back to the world, Joule! Finding out about his Dengue fever was a shocker. I'm glad he's out and recovering. When he dropped out of online sight for a week, I knew something was up. It's funny how IM can mean so much to connecting people...

Help from an unexpected quarter

Dom's helping me get published! This is so unexpected, yet wonderful nonetheless. It looks like my knack for finding good friends has not failed me yet. Go increase his site traffic (but do it in a new tab/window)! ^_^

Three days till the worst day of my life...

My birthdays are invariably the same: all the bad luck I should have suffered for the year compressed into 24 hours of perdition. I have no idea why my birthdays are like this, but I'm tensing my shoulders for the beating. This time around, there's no Cat to stay the whip for me...

Prayers for Freya

Funny how All Saints' Day can remind us of our mortality... not just ours, but that of the ones we hold dear as well. Yes, I am very attached to my computer, as you can probably tell by now. (^^) Cold-starting Freya gives me slow booting due to ATAPI timeout errors, and I occasionally have the odd BSOD. Fortunately, Microsoft has been kind enough to make kernel debugging a snap; you can get the kernel debugging tools (Windows Debugging Tools and OS Symbol files) here (opens a new window again). It's so easy that anyone can do it in a few seconds; trust me. Freya's results were not encouraging:

Probably caused by : memory_corruption ( nt!MiAttemptPageFileReduction+46

Crap. Only two things cause this kind of error: a parallel-port Zip drive or bad memory. Since I don't own a Zip drive (or any form of removable mass storage), guess where that leaves me? I'm not getting the flags associated with bad paging sectors either, so it looks like the RAM module's gone bad... and ECC RAM is expensive too... I hope it isn't that, but I may have to live with the cold start crashes if my worst fears are realised. T_T