I did this

I wish I could say that I have a really good excuse for not updating the web site for six months. Luckily for me, I can!

Our story begins during the week of the RAFTA project. I was in the kitchen of our temporary lodgings engaged in a rather lengthy mobile telephone call when I suffered what can best be described as a ‘spaz-hands’ moment.

Part way through a conversation concerning MIDI sequencers and digital guitar effects, I decided to emphasise my enthusiasm for the subject by striking various air guitar poses, which is all very well and good when in conversation with a person in the flesh, but totally unnecessary (and a waste of a good Eddie Van Halen stance) when conversing on a mobile telephone. In fact, so involved was I in my reproduction of the middle-eight section of Hot For Teacher that during the rather excellent guitar solo I decided to unwillingly drop my mobile telephone into a bowl of hot, soapy water. This moment of spaz-handery came as a complete surprise to both myself and my conversational chum, who at this point was probably wondering why I’d suddenly started swearing and speaking like I was The Man From Atlantis. As quick as you could say, “Sorry Joe, I’ve just dropped my phone into the sink”, I’d apologised to my chum for getting him wet, gathered all the tea-towels and absorbent cloths I could find and started the mobile phone equivalent of CPR. After what seemed an eon of vigorous rubbings and dabbings (and my chum repeatedly shouting “Hello?” at me down the phone) my suddenly sodden mobile telephone survived its dangerous little voyage to the bottom of the sink.

Over the remainder of the week I tended to my sick mobile phone with blasts of hot air from hair dryers and overnight airings on radiators and at first things seemed to improve, only a slightly wonky display and a tendency to repeatedly dial the number two being the only evidence of any kind of mishap. As the week progressed and all evidence of spaz-handery disappeared, the phone gathered itself together and it started to work normally, so it came as a complete surprise when a month after the event my mobile phone suddenly decided to curl up its antenna and shuffle off this mortal coil.

An unscheduled visit to a mobile phone boutique proved fruitful for a replacement and I found myself the proud owner of a Sony Ericcson K800i mobile phone/camera/supercomputer. As all modern mobile phones really are more supercomputer than telephone, the K800i came with the obligatory USB cable and CDROM full of software ready for it to be connected to my PC.

It was at this ‘connecting it to my PC’ bit that things started to get a bit silly.

My PC was (and that word is very important, was) four years old. Since the day I’d built it I’d never performed any corrective maintenance on it – I’d never de-fragged the hard drive, I’d never reinstalled Windows, in fact my PC was so full of junk and virus-ridden tat that it had almost rendered itself fully sentient and was existing in a fine state of equilibrium – it was either going to take over the world or dramatically explode into tiny pieces. Realising that it may actually reach critical mass and explode if I installed yet more mobile phone software onto it, I decided to remove all traces of any previous phone software from my PC and start again from scratch.

This is when things really started to get a bit silly.

Arse!

The old phone software wouldn’t uninstall. In fact the uninstall procedure went so far as to crash my PC in a spectacular fashion, forcing me to unplug the computer and say a very rude word. I then restarted the computer and decided to forget about removing the old mobile phone software and just install the new software anyway. This too crashed my PC in an extraordinarily spectacular fashion, forcing me unplug the computer, douse the flames and say an even ruder word!

I restarted the PC again…

Nothing! Nothing happened except the appearance of a black screen and some text that cryptically read something along the lines of:

System file C:\Windows\System32\System” has become corrupt or is missing. Use the Recovery Console to repair or reinstall Windows

“Knackers!” I thought. “Knackers!” I said.

I spent several hours searching the internet for clues as to what happened, and more importantly clues as to how I could get my PC working again (before you ask, I used my laptop to search the internet, not my broken PC). Having exhausted Google I discovered that a very small yet very important configuration file on my hard drive had become corrupt and needed to be replaced with a clean version. This would give me a working PC again, but as the file contained various configuration options for Windows to operate, installing a clean file would effectively mean I’d be starting afresh with a clean computer – I’d lose all my installed programs!

I decided that this would be good time to scrap my four-year old semi-sentient PC and treat myself to one of those new-fangled Vista machines. As I am a nerd from space, I chose not to pick the easy option and buy a ready-made machine, but instead to build one myself in a manner not to dissimilar to that of Robert Vaughn in Superman III.

Arse! Again!

Several days and £400 from my bank account later, I found myself in my kitchen surrounded by several anti-static boxes full of computer components. Armed with a screwdriver and a limited knowledge of jamming bits together until they fit, I successfully assembled fans onto heatsinks, heatsinks onto CPUs and CPUs onto motherboards and before you could say, “ow, that was sharp!” my new PC was up and running. Or at least it was until it crashed.

Now, I could go on and explain how I reinstalled drivers several times and swapped components with no avail but that would make uninteresting reading (and It’s getting late and I really don’t want to type any more). Suffice to say my new PC crashes 20 minutes after a cold boot for absolutely no reason at all, and although I think I know what is causing the crashes, I am still nowhere near getting a working solution.

It took me a few weeks to get my new computer up to scratch. I had to recover all my files from the old PC and transfer them across to the new one. I also had to update all my existing software to new Vista-compatible versions (which is when you find that some certain ‘home grown’ yet vital pieces of software no longer function). Somewhere in the process I had also managed to lose all of the details for The World of Me – I’d lost the Dreamweaver templates, the scripts for the image catalogues and all my notes and passwords, which meant that although I had plenty of content to add to the web site, I couldn’t actually do it with without applying an awful lot of time and effort.

Meanwhile, I was far too busy with the outside world to get involved with the rebuilding of The World of Me; the theatre was doing an excellent job of taking up most of my free time. Not only was I spending many of my spare hours producing music for the upcoming pantomime, I was also spending a lot of time at the theatre rehearsing so I could be in the pantomime. Not only that, I had somehow managed to cajole myself into helping with the creation of the fantabulous new Lyneham Stage Club web site.

If the theatre wasn’t enough of a distraction, Plastic Ringo decided to suffer a sudden resurgence which resulted in several new songs and talk of finally going out and gigging. Time has been spent honing lyrics, tuning banjos and blowing woodwind instruments in attempt to change the face of popular music.

Then the neighbours central heating broke and I had to fix it for them, then Assassin’s Creed came out on the Xbox360, then….

I could continue on with a whole myriad of reasons as to why I haven’t updated the web site, but instead I’ll finish by summarising this unnecessarily lengthy update with the aforementioned really good excuse – I lost the web site and I was too busy to fix it!

Ladies and gentlemen, normal service has been resumed – The World of Me is back!