I used to think Dell was just stupid, but now I think even less of them:

AN INQUIRER READER attending a conference in Japan was sat just feet away from a laptop computer that suddenly exploded into flames, in what could have been a deadly accident. Gaston, our astonished reader reports: "The damn thing was on fire and produced several explosions for more than five minutes". Should you witness such an event, his advice is, "Don't try anything courageous/stupid, stay away, away, away!"

"For the record, this is a Dell machine," notes Gaston. "It is only a matter of time until such an incident breaks out on a plane," he suggests. Our witness managed to catch all the action in these amazing pictures.

"Fire extinguishers leave a mess on your suit and belongings; pack your stuff (if you can) and leave, leave, leave!" he advises.

We don't have any further details of the model of the computer in question. In light of the evidence, however, we'd suggest you avoid actually using a laptop on your lap. Ouch.

(source: "The Inquirer", on the internet somewhere 😛)

Here, have a picture of the exploding Dell:

Well, I was working on my Linux testing server, and it stopped working for some reason... I tried to restart, but the computer wouldn't even boot (even from a CD). Upon unplugging all the IDE devices, and only leaving a CD drive in (a different one, in case it was faulty for whatever reason), it still wouldn't boot 😦. I guess I won't be using that for a while...

Anyways, I'm buying a new server on eBay, so it isn't that bad (all I need to do is wait for it to get shipped to me).

Old server:

  • Celeron 300 MHz
  • 4.3GB Quantum Fireball lct and 4.3GB Seagate hard drives
  • 48X CD-ROM drive
  • 192MB membory

New server:

  • Pentium III 650 MHz
  • 8.4 GB hard drive
  • 48X CD-ROM drive
  • 256MB membory

Don't say that it isn't that powerful... Linux makes any computer look powerful 😄. Besides, it's only a server for testing stuff.

EDIT: Computer arrived today, 30th June 2006. That company on eBay was quick!

Well, I've just finished my ICT Fellowship. I must say, it was a great thing for me to do; it gave me something to do over the holidays 😃. I made some macros in Excel (which was not all that difficult, because I used to work with macros when I was younger)

Anyways, I did learn a few things... Some of the things I learnt were:

  • How to use Microsoft Access properly
  • That you can get images from Google Images and resize them to 32x32 to make good looking icons 😄
  • The help in Microsoft Access's VBA doesn't function very well (see previous post)
  • How to use Microsoft Excel macros to do stuff like turn an ugly-looking worksheet to a nice one... The macro recorder is also quite handy

It also gave me a good feel of what working in a workplace is like. Although I did have to spend 1 hour commuting every day, it was definately worth it 😃

So, yeah... I'll be waiting for my cheque to arrive in the mail 😄:D

Well, it's the holidays again, so I'm back doing my ICT Fellowship. I'm currently doing work in Microsoft Access, and also creating icons in a program called 'Easy Icon Maker'.

Speaking of Access, I encountered a weird error... I was drafting some Visual Basic code, and needed to look up something in the help file (as I was using Access, which I don't have much experience in). I got this error:

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Interestingly enough, I clicked the 'Help' button, and got this:

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A bug, maybe? After all, the help article opened in the 'Windows Help Application', yet the article was saying that the application wasn't installed! 😛

Well, my mid-year exams are now all done. I think that exams are the stupidest thing ever... Whoever invented them should be shot... in the foot 😛

...erm... Yeah, anyway..... For our maths exams (Specialist Maths, and Maths Methods), we have a 2-hour exam where we can use a calculator, and a 1-hour calculator-free exam.

These are the exams I did:

  • English - Bah, the English exam was stupid. We needed to write three essays in two hours! Having said that, I got a B on that exam (and I thought I was going to fail it 😛)
  • Physics - Physics was alright (I quite like Physics). The exam was actually just questions that were cut and pasted from various revision books! I got an A+ on this exam.
  • Specialist Maths - This was hard, it involved maths stuff such as partial fractions, Circle theorems, and other stuff. If there's one maths area I hate, it's circle theorems! Having said that, I got an A+ on this exam
  • Maths Methods - This was easy! Maths Methods is incredibly easy compared to Specialist Maths. I got 97% in the calculator-active test (the highest in the class). This involved stuff like quadratics, cubics, quartics, solving equasions, etc, etc. The overall mark was an A+
  • Chemistry - This was the one exam I was dreading (I'm not really that good at chemistry). Nevertheless, I got a B on this exam (which I'm quite happy with)

Yeah... That's all my exams...

In other news, someone recently spammed the CWH Networks forum:

It took me the whole of 2 minutes to clean all that up. Seriously, when will these spammers learn? Geez! 😄