Generally Specific

I read somewhere that if you want to make your blog popular you must have a specific topic in mind and not be too general. So I've done some introspection and decided that my topic will be anything and everything. I'm not going to let any internet hot shot tell me how to run my blog. If I want to talk about clowns I will. If I want to talk about STD's I sure as hell will. Speaking of STD's, let's talk about herpes.

I actually have herpes, but NOT of the STD nature. There are two kinds of herpes, Herpes 1 and Herpes 2. Ocular Herpes is a special type of facial Herpes that is caused by Herpes 1, the non-STD. And it sucks. My one friend started talking about how she had a fly fly into her eye. Well after pitying her for a bit I told her that a fly is nothing really. Because when you have ocular herpes, you can't even open your eye for three days.
I had to lie in bed with my curtains closed for two days, on the third day my curtains were opened and felt like someone was holding a blowtorch to my iris. I tried to go on my computer after the 5th day or so and I was blinded by Google.
So I told her to get Herpes on her eye first then we'll talk, then again, I don't wish Herpes on anyone, ocular or not.
After we saw the ophthalmologist (Greek for Destroyer of Eyes), who stuck something in my eye to prove it had no feeling then vigorously stuck something in my other eye to prove it had feeling, I was prescribed some eye-drops and a white icky substance that I had to rub onto my eye, which is madness. I can't even look at a pale ray of light and here I must open my eye and stick something into it? Medicine seems to be slightly backwards. Well, it was that or blindness, so I weighed up the pros and cons and with hesitation I put this stuff in. It didn't hurt or anything, it just was a very strange mushy feeling.
The best part of this was that this all happened during my mid year exams. After a few phone calls I didn't have to write geography and some other subjects and would just get assessed marks, which was fantastic. Then I only had to go to school to write the last few, but I went to school only for the 2 hours of the exam, instead of a full school day.
Still, knowing that I have this dormant virus in my eye doesn't seem to outweigh the fact I didn't have to write geography, as much as I hate it.

So there, that was what I wanted to write about. Take that, advice man!
Since I'm going away these holidays I won't be blogging for a while, probably for a good two weeks at least, where I can think of more random stuff... that's mine... and whatever I want.

Procrastination is next to Cleanliness

Some people clean their rooms, houses, garden, whatever to just not get around to doing the task at hand. I just don't do it. I know I have to study for accounting, but not now. There's still 9 good hours in the day where I can do that, so I'll just wait a while, relax, update my blog, the usual.

Recently I just received my computer back from the technical guys who, after 3 weeks, finally fixed what was wrong.
I first noticed something was wrong long ago when, while playing Neverwinter Nights 2, polygons decided to start drawing themselves everywhere.
So in a clever fashion I opened up the PC and decided to bash around. Everything looked fine so I went to my next most credible resource, the internet.
I googled "gfx prob NWN2 weird shape thingies geforce 7900gt need 1337 help". After narrowing my keywords slightly I found a sight telling me about the wonders of keeping your card cool.
I downloaded a nVidia utility that would tell me how hot my card was.
IT WAS HOT! Anyway, I told you all this earlier. Eventually I did get a cooler and it dropped nicely down to around 50 degrees celsius.

But this didn't solve my problem as about 2 months ago Warcraft III, a game made ages before NWN or Crysis or any others that used near the intense graphics that I believed overheated my card, started flickering between the picture on screen and black.
This was very worrying and eventually I was left with a completely frozen screen and all I could hear was Matthew Bellamy singing from windows media player in the background.
So I restarted my PC and ran my nVidia utility, with it taking logs of the temperature. I opened up Warcraft and it didn't get past the main menu before it was frozen.
Rebooting and opening the log I saw that there was no abnormal temperature. Heading off to the kitchen, I found the screwdriver.
When I had opened the case, inspected the card, sighed, and saw nothing wrong I put the card back in, closed the case and switched on my PC's power.
Nothing.
The screen was black and only the PC was whirring. The disk drives opened, but it didn't get further than that.

I decided the graphics card had exploded or something and decided I needed a new one. After a few phone calls I had a GeForce 8600GTS waiting to be delivered.
A good 12 days later it came. Plugging it in and pressing the power button, nothing happened.
This was really annoying me so I gave up and sent it in the professionals, the same ones that took 12 days to get a card. Another good few days and I had my PC back, with a new motherboard, and formatted. Why they had to format the hard disk I don't know, but at least I had my PC back.

And after all this I have even less of a desire to study. Life's good....

Nearing the bright light...

It's the end of the tunnel!
Or rather, an oncoming train.
Exams are nearly over, I just need to get through Maths and Accounting and Afrikaans Setwork and I'll be A for 'Away'... or if I was unlucky B for 'Better next time' or really unlucky with C for 'Hahahaha'.

Anyway, regardless of mark I'll be going away these holidays to the Kruger National Park. The largest game reserve in South Africa. Where I'll be getting in touch with my photographic side and seeing if I can snap any nice photos.
In the mean time, I have completed The Rusty Machete of Anti Grammar!!!.



And while sitting through the last hour of an easy Afrikaans language exam I came up with Time Traveling Monks, which you can see here.
I'll be updating it sporadically at best, with school and holidays and all that. But maybe I'll get some time in on the 8 hour trip up to Kruger.
And that's all. Nothing really major happening in life. Exams slows everything down. Ah, how wonderful.

The Rusty Machete of Anti-Grammar

*casts resurrect on Rawr-Zebra*
"I live once more!" -- Mal'Ganis (Warcraft 3)

And so does this blog, he said to the roaring applause from all his fans.
*tumble weed goes by*
Right, well let's cultivate some readers.

So there I was, minding my own business, after I had just written an article for the school's newspaper thing. When I get a response from a friend I just sent it to for proof reading. She said Haha, awesome. I love it, and then said, That's it. I'm writing a blog.
And with that she drew me into to reviving this one.

So, onto The Rusty Machete of Anti Grammar!!!

While procrastinating instead of writing this (already 2 weeks late) article, I was hurting my thumb and sending my airtime balance into the red. Most of you who can relate to this, know about “text speak”. It is thought to have originally started with the fact that there is a 160 character limit, well with my network anyway, in the text messages and with the desire to say as much as possible, people started to hack away at the English language with The Rusty Machete of Anti Grammar. This invented the use of Shorten My Sentences, more commonly known as SMS. People would replace ate with 8 , for example I am l8 (late) , or I h8 (hate) machetes .

This carried through most of the alphabet as “for” became “4”, “the” became “da” and my personal favourite butchering being “cya” (see you).

Of course I am not blameless at all. Who wants to pay the price for two messages when you could just cut off a few unsuspecting words and half your costs?

N E wai, this dialect has spread amongst the teenage populace and can be seen written where there isn’t even a word limit.

However, another, arguably more skilful use of characters to replace letters, is 1337 speak. What is one-three-three-seven speak? Well it’s not numbers at all. Each number represents a letter. So you actually read it leet speak. It was developed by internet gamers who didn’t have a character limit, but rather had to send messages quickly or risk losing their base to the enemy, a terrible thought.

Leet is short for elite, as it was first used as an adjective for gamers self-proclaiming their awesomeness at shooting each other. The most basic use is substituting letters with symbols, such as @14n71c (Atlantic) or 4/\/\4z1n9 (amazing). One person’s interpretation of a symbol can differ from another’s however.

Nevertheless, there are some standard acronyms that are in the language; arguably the most well known being lol. LOL stands for laughing out loud and basically represents laughter in text form. Intentional misspelling of words seems to make someone more leet . Common ones are teh (the) and joo (you) and rawr (roar). One that could be considered as a misspelling is pwn (er, pawn?). Presumably when some hot shot was typing so fast to protect his base his finger slipped while we was typing own (which is leet for dominate, superior etc., i.e. “I owned him”) and hit the P key by mistake. This caught on quickly with his buddies and so word spread that own got pwned .

Another saying is roxxorz my soxxorz / boxxorz (rocks my socks/boxers). This probably has nothing at all to do with the state of your underwear but is generally used to show great satisfaction with something. noob / n00b / newb is the term applied to a newbie or just someone who has little to no skill at the game at all. The greatest form of owning takes place when a noob , for instance, kills a really high level player. This roxxorz many people’s soxxorz and sends lol's all round. Normally the veteran can shrug it off and say, "n00b got a lucky shot" and then the other old wisened sages (with RPG's) nod in agreement.

However, in most cases in life we don’t have a 160 limit on all that we write. So just write it out in full and don’t cut it down. Kkthxbai!