Spring Cleaning

I decided to clean out my computer room today. It was long overdue for a dust and as spring is in the air, I also decided to clear out the rubbish around the room as well as put away some older computer parts and give it a good dusting. Hopefully, the new airy feel will please my local players.

I finally boxed up and put away an old analogue 20" monitor that sat in the corner of the room as well. So that means I now have two boxed 20" monitors (analogues) that I no longer use and are up for grabs (£25 each) if anybody can make use of them. I would give them away, but my HD recorder has just broken and I am hoping to make the money I need to get it fixed. They are both Hitachi (CM802 and CM827), fully functional and still in their original boxes.

While I was in the tidy up mood, I also swapped over the speakers I normally use to Netmeet with one of my players. The previous ones were starting to distort and make it difficult to hear him at times. These newer ones appear to have a much better tone and I have not noticed any distortion.

Next, I swapped over a couple of drives: I removed a DVD writer from my old PIII and swapped it for the CDROM that was a second drive in my main computer. The problem was that NWN2 needs a DVD drive to run, and as I normally like to use my DVD to backup data, it meant I was always having to swap discs to accommodate both operations. It meant I started to slack on my backing up, which is not good, and so I made the swap. As I don't use the older PIII for anything much nowadays, it won't need a DVD anyway ... I hope.

Finally, I swapped over a mouse on one of the client computers that I found was having difficulties with the right mouse button not opening the menus properly while in the game. The replacement mouse appears to work fine.

My wife decided to do some tidying of her spare room as well. Needless to say, it meant we were doing a lot of shuffling around, moving stuff from room to room and what we did not throw away, went into that extra-dimensional closet of all storing: the loft!

I am glad that is done for a while again - and with the room clean, it does inspire me to finish off the XML tutorial I have been working on. I can report that all the code is now finished and working. All it needs for me to do now is simply finish the writing and upload it. Then, finally, I may be in a position where I can return to my campaign, knowing I have cleared all the cobwebs from both my room and imaginative thinking.