Pixie's Pad

4pm and we were flopped on the sofa contemplating life in an un-air-conditioned bungalow in the middle of a South African summer. Not good. Usually when we’re fed up of the heat we escape to the nearest mall and go to see a movie, but there was absolutely nothing on at our mall here that even remotely piqued our interest, so we decided to drive out to ‘The Big Mall (TM)’ to watch a ‘proper’ movie.

We got to the mall at 5:10pm and Ninja Assassin was starting at 5:15. We rushed over to the cinema, gawked at the queues at the ticket line and hurried to the fast-pay machines that were empty. Picked our movie, swiped the card. ‘Printing Tickets’, it said, and then returned to the start screen.

… No tickets. Hmm. Jaco didn’t get an SMS confirmation of his card having been used, so we assumed the machine was broken and tried another. Picked our movie, swiped the card. ‘Printing Tickets’, it said – and still no tickets when it returned to the start screen, but this time we could see the tickets HAD printed and were stuck behind the loose front panel of the machine. So we called the attendant over, aware that our movie was about to start any minute, and just as I managed to get our second lot of tickets free by prodding at them with an emery board, he had freed our initial pair of tickets from the first machine we tried. We explained to him our double-booking scenario and he assured us that we could get a refund if we took the tickets to the front desk after our movie. Fantastic.

Hurried in to the cinema, found our seats, sat through an inordinate amount of trailers, and our movie started. For those of you who don’t know or haven’t seen Ninja Assassin, it’s one of those movies that has no small supply of blood and gore and gratuitous violence. I mean, it’s about a ninja assassin – what did you expect, right? Even the poster kinda hints that the movie will contain a tad more than a small modicum of blood (see below). One of the very first scenes is a guy getting his head sliced in two horizontally, with lots of brain goo spattering about.

I have come to notice, since moving to SA, that South African movie-goers are rather more… vocal, shall we say, than their UK variants. They don’t seem to realise that being in a movie theatre is akin to being in a library, and TALKING in a movie theatre during the movie is worse than tempting the wrath of any bespectacled, power-bun-haired librarian. It’s just something you don’t do. Ever. But since Ninja Assassin wasn’t a ’serious’ film that we were expecting to ‘get into’, we weren’t too bothered at the prospect of hearing some mumbling around the theater.

But at that first scene of the guy getting his head sliced in two, the outbursts from behind us were a tad more than just ‘cinema mumbling’. There were two young couples sitting behind us, and I don’t know what kind of movie they were expecting from Ninja Assassin, but what they were seeing in front of them clearly wasn’t it. The boys managed to get a grip of themselves and rediscover their apparently tiny scrotums after the first few limbs went flying around the screen, small kudos to them, but the girls were something else. All through the movie we were assaulted with ‘Eeeee!’ and ‘Aaaaargh!’ and ‘Ewwwwww!” and ‘Ohhhhh!’ and ‘Uuuuughhh!’ and ‘Yuuuck!’, couple with disgruntled elbow-nudging and muttering of one telling the other to shut up, and the boys ‘Ssssshhh!’ ing their weak-bellied girlfriends at every outburst. It was kinda amusing. They’re only lucky Ninja Assassin wasn’t taking itself too seriously, and so neither were we, or they’d have had severe talkings to from me.

At the end of the movie when the credits rolled, we stood up to leave and I was on the verge of informing the two girls that perhaps in future they should stick to choosing whatever Disney movie was showing, but as I turned to look at them, the fantastically, stupendously large afros they were both sporting stopped me in my tracks with a moment of gaping silence. They were both typically thin, flat-chested, skin-on-bones female girls who’s necks really shouldn’t have been able to take such a weight, but there they were with two spectacularly oversized afros cocooning their craniums. I could but stare at the marvel, and so they exited free of my snark.

Aaaaaanyway. Jaco dug the two ’spare’ tickets from his pocket and we wandered on up to the ticket sales counter and explained the situation to the ticket lady.

You know you’re in trouble when you ask for a refund and the sales person replies with ‘Oh sweet Jesus…’. She mumbled something about having to check with the manager, exited stage left and we were twiddling our thumbs (or at least, I was – Jaco was looking for things to throw for biggest scene-making impact when she inevitably returned with a ‘no-go’ from the manager) for a good ten minutes before she reappeared. Not quite a no-go; the manager would need proof that we had been charged twice, and the attendant really seemed like she was trying to brush us off. Eventually we were escorted to the manager’s office where we stated our case against their broken machines and the manager spent all of 10 seconds tapping the first four digits of Jaco’s card number into her computer where she found that yes, he had been charged twice. We got our refund. Jaco thinks there’s some situation whereby they have to pay about R250 for every refund they issue, and considering that our tickets were R39 each, you can understand their reluctance – but hey, fix your ticket machines and you won’t have a problem, y’know?

Then we went and had coffee and spent money on stuff like a PSP game and a picnic blanket ready for the impending family visit next week, and all was well with the world.

Amen.

Driving in to CT with Jaco this morning, switched the radio on and heard some generic male singer singing some generic pop song. I commented, ‘Heh, sounds like a teenybopper boy band’, thinking to myself, I wonder if this is what the Jonas Brothers sound like. Jaco replied, ‘Heh, yeah – sounds manufactured. Could be the Jonas Brothers.’ and we dove into a conversation about everything being owned by Disney nowadays.

The song played out, and the DJ announced, ‘Well, there you go, that was the Jonas Brothers…’

I guess we can sense bullshit a mile off.  \o/

So I wrote a blog entry. I think this is probably my first ever hand-written blog entry! (Click for full size…)

In my last post, mere minutes ago, I mentioned the spam associated with downloading PerfectDisk from their website. This morning I received one such spam mail in my inbox, from the South African distributors of PerfectDisk (http://www.foster-melliar.co.za/), asking me how my free trial performed and how many licenses I’d be needing. A pretty standard sales pitch email, but I got up feeling rather snarky and chipper and decided I’d respond to the poor guy;

Good morning Gavin,

PerfectDisk performed amicably. The download was smooth (South Africa’s internet deficiencies aside), the program ran like a dream. In fact, the only bad thing about it (and unfortunately, I consider this to be rather a large fault) is that I had to enter my email address to access the free trial and the disclaimer that comes with it; ‘you acknowledge that you may be contacted via email regarding this or other Raxco products.’.

The world needs less spam.

No licenses, thank you.

Delyth

I didn’t expect a reply, much less an amicable one, but a reply is what I got-

Good morning Delyth,

Thank you for the feedback regarding PerfectDisk.

Regarding the disclaimer, you will not receive any emails from me regarding the Raxco product set.

I get copied on the downloads of the software.

I will forward your email to Raxco and request them to remove your  email off the system.

Impressed by both the speed of the reply (especially considering I’m not a buying customer) and the amenable nature, I overcame my snark (after all, it’s not the sales guy’s fault, right? He’s just doing his job…);

Gavin,

Thank you kindly! Much appreciated.

Have a nice Wednesday!

Delyth

And received one last, friendly reply –

Hi Delyth,

It’s a pleasure.

I have emailed Raxco support and requested that they remove your email address.

Enjoy the rest of you day as well.

Thank you.

Gavin

Hurrah Thank you, Gavin of Foster-Melliar, for adding to the awesomeness that I have decided this Wednesday will contain.

Before I introduce the first tool, I’ll explain a bit about drive fragmentation, in layman-ish terms.

Your hard drive’s space is split into fragments, like ’slots’. When you save something to the hard drive, your computer looks at how much space that thing needs, and allocates it a suitably sized slot. Unfortunately, your PC is quite incapable of allocating related data sequentially – so as you’re filling up the disk, deleting things and freeing up slots only to fill them again with something else, your hard drive gets quite messy. This slows down the speed at which your PC can access the files on your hard drive, because it needs to find them first – and they’re not in any order. This also affects your PC’s performance, because when you’re running something, your PC will use a part of that free space as ‘temporary memory’ to store the information about the program you’re running. The more full your disk gets and the more use it’s seen, the worse this phenomenon becomes. You may have 40GB of your 250GB disk left, but that 40GB isn’t in one ‘chunk’ of free space. It’s spread out all over the place – it may even be in  40 1GB slots.

Defragmentation tools scan your drive, look at the types of files on there and the space available to work with, and re-organise everything to get those chunks of free space in more manageable locations and to organise what’s stored on there so that it’s easier for your PC to read. Effectively, it improves your PCs performance.

Ever used the Windows defragmenter? It’s crap. Sometimes necessary, but crap all the same (it’s Windows, after all; what did you expect?).It takes ages, it’s not particularly user-friendly, and it’s very basic.

Rusty pointed me to another option called Perfect Disk. As well as your normal fragmenting, it offers something called ’smart placement’ – simply put, it organises your files so that the ones that need accessing the fastest for best PC performance are strategically placed on the part of your hard drive’s disk that is easiest to get to. If you’re a gamer, you can specifically ask it to put your games near the center of the disk and that’ll give you a performance boost when you run those games.

Perfect Disk isn’t free, but it does have a free 30 day trial – even if you only use it once, it’s worth it because you don’t need to defrag your drive often. If you buy it, it’s only $40, which I think is worth it for a good defragmenter that kicks the crap out of the Windows one!

This is their website – www.perfectdisk.com

However, downloading from their website requires you to put in your email address with this nasty disclaimer: ‘you acknowledge that you may be contacted via email regarding this or other Raxco products’ – so I’d recommend downloading from CNet instead:

http://download.cnet.com/PerfectDisk/3000-2094_4-10654012.html

The second piece of software is called CCleaner (‘crap cleaner’). It does what it says on the tin – cleans up all the crap on your ‘puter; things like cookies, temporary files and folders, leftover installation files, etc. Usually you’d accomplish this in a Windows OS by lots of clicking around hunting for things, but CCleaner does it all from one neat little free application. I cleaned my PC the ‘hard way’ on Saturday by manually removing temp files and stuff, but when I installed and ran CCleaner it still managed to find and delete 2GB of crap.

http://www.filehippo.com/download_ccleaner/ – give it a go