Cross legged, I sit. Topless on my bed, fan blowing at me. I’m far too hot. That’s not a complaint you hear much where I am from. It’s usually that it’s too damned cold, but I can’t complain too vehemently. No, I do not like the sun, or rather, I don’t like the heat it brings with it, but it is nice to see it. It’s kind of a scary sight, but it does do wonderful things. It brings life, it sustains life, it does make other people happy. To an extent, it does make me happy, but being out too long in it, well, that’s just ridiculous. It necessitates my current state of partial dress. The unfortunate thing is, I can’t think very well in it.

I was born in winter, February, to be exact. I don’t know if that has anything to do with my dislike for the sun, or if it’s just because I’m a vampire. Yes, when you think about it, I do sort of have the habits of a vampire, minus the eating of blood - except when I eat black pudding, also known as blood sausage. I stay up most of the night. I’m not really a massive fan of daytime. Night time, when it’s cool and dark, is my time. It is when I feel most productive and most sociable, but not everyone is the same way. So I do as much as I can in day, but night is when I come alive.

It is rather unfortunate that I feel most alive at night. It’s not as if I can go playing guitar at all hours of the night, though if I had a soundproofed room, that’s exactly what I would be doing, in between the chatting and writing, of course. And the fixing of things. Yes, fixing things at night is fun.

I put on some music, usually heavy metal and fix things. The only thing I haven’t managed to fix lately was an Xbox 360. That was tough, though. Imagine trying to (bear with me, I’m trying to think of a metaphor). Okay, I’ll start by saying that the DVD drive on this Xbox was knackered. There was little hope for it, really, so my job was made tougher by that fact. Okay, I’ve just thought of a sort of suitable metaphor. I had to extract the key from the original drive and copy it to the new drive, unfortunately the key was already corrupted, so there’s no hope of ever getting a drive to work. Imagine having a pot of soup. You’ve burnt the soup, so you decide to turn it down and transfer it to another pot, to try and get the burnt taste from it. Unfortunately, as it is already burnt, the soup and the new pot are going to take on that burnt flavour. That’s what it’s like trying to copy something that is already corrupted to something new. Quite difficult and usually fruitless, but there are steps to try and uncorrupt the key, but I won’t go into them. Too long and involved for this. Let’s just say that I did all those steps, but nothing worked.

I’m more of a hardware tech anyway. Give me something with burnt wiring, or a buzzing sound (in the case of a guitar amplifier, or just the guitar itself) and I’ll fix it, no bother. Give me something with software to fix and I’ll do my best, usually triumphing in the end, but with lots of headaches on the way.

The only exception to this unfortunate rule is with Android based phones. I’ll try not to talk too extensively about it, but I do love Android. It’s free, open source and fiddling with an Android phone is a good way to pass the time. I’ve done my fair share of Android modding and even made some mods myself. It’s about the only software based thing I really enjoy and find myself seeking new challenges in.

My most recent challenge was caused by myself. Yep, I caused a problem, albeit unwittingly, but still a problem. You see, I was having a problem with battery life and decided to limit some background data. Silly move, Andrew, because what I did was cause some apps to stop running the way they were intended to. I fiddled around and still couldn’t think of a solution. I did research and still there was no problem. I was just about to give up when a moment of inspiration came. You see, I actually hadn’t realised that I’d messed up the background data, so it hadn’t occurred to me to remove the data limit. Once I did this, it started working again and I was able to IM a certain person and receive IMs from her. Yay for me!

As tech problems go, and I’m not trying to be arrogant here, I think I can solve a fair share of them. It’s all about keeping calm and thinking of simple solutions. People often overlook the simple problems, like I did, but usually that’s the best way to solve problems. Like one time, I was building one of my computers. Actually, I was stripping it for cleaning and then rebuilding it. After I’d cleaned it and rebuilt it, the darned thing wouldn’t go back on. I tried every solution I could think of: Reseating RAM, removing non required add in cards, removing and reinserting the power to the motherboard. You know what the problem was? Embarrassingly, I’d forgotten to flip the switch for the power supply. I put the cable in, but forgot to flip the switch. So, once I did that, there it was. Whirring into life and booting into Windows. See? Simple solutions that people generally don’t think of because they are simple. In training to be a tech, you are actually taught that: Think simple, for that’s the most likely solution to the problem.

I think I’ve run out of steam of this musing, probably because I’m hungry now. So, off to get food now. Thank goodness I’m not hot any more. Oh, one more thing, if any of you have computer problems, don’t hesitate to send me a message and I’ll do my best to fix it for you. I enjoy a good challenge and especially enjoy a good computer challenge, so I’m all too happy to help.