I’m watching the tracking every day…interesting route though, can’t wait until it arrive next week.

The route my Warbow to be has taken so far

Using fletchers tape, I managed to replace the lost flights/fletchings easily enough, I then took it one step further and used linen thread to increase their strength. I also had to replace the plastic knocks, which don’t seem to work well with my Warbow, as they just snap.

(TIP: Hot Glue is useful, as you can reheat the area to remove them at a later date).

Anyway, heres the first arrow which I totally destroyed:

First Arrow I totally destroyed, there was a split up the grain for about 5" so I couldn't just saw and add a new target bodkin.

I’ve made a Fletching Jig from old wood and metal scraps based on a design I saw on youtube, it works, but I need to refine it, it’s a bit too big in all the wrong places, pictures of that to follow, but here’s an arrow I made using the jig.

Brass Tip, apparently using steel tips annoys "pro" archers at clubs with £500 sets of matched arrows, which get damaged if they hit one of yours in a target if it snapped off

I'm getting neater, I've noticed the White and Black fletchings have differnet angles, which makes it difficult to thread it evenly, so I'll be picking them so they match as closely as possible when I make my next arrow.

The arrow length is as long as I can make them, I've got 12x 28" arrows which I can draw with minimal effort, 34" uses a different set of muscles, and I'm still struggling full draw, but hey, it's early days...4th week coming up Tendons/Muscles take time to adapt, and I jumped in at the deep end.

It’s good fun, and I enjoy it, more to come at some point.

But, just getting a game is hard enough, check the screenshot.

Oh, and I waited until the end of the timer, and it found no new players, it was like that from the moment the screen came up.

Sunday 16th of May 2010:

“another failed MM…”

Even after Patch 1.01, I’m still getting some problems:

So, it found all 10 players, went to load, then gets stuck right there, it never loads, so you have to cancel MM.

Went to load, then bam..the message displayed

Nope, nothing loading....

Not always to others, but I have files like photos,  old websites I developed, exam work, TV shows I’ve recorded (OMG it’s illegal, it was on a VHS tape too) on my drives, which I migrate to every new PC I purchase, it’s been 4 or 5 since 1996 (I’m 26 next week, that’s 14 years using PC’s.

I’ve got a few TB’s of data, not massive, there’s people I know who download all day every day. But here’s my tips for protecting your data:

Tip 1 – Protect your Hard Drives from Heat

I learned the hard way in the 2002, all 3 of my hard drives failed due to heat stress, I had a small room, a computer that was constantly on, it’s a bit like having a radiator on during the summer months, it was 30 degrees and more in the summer in that room.

After losing all my data and having to restore what I had left from CD-R backups, I realised the drives didn’t have adequate airflow in the hard drive cages of old (all squished together in the 3.5 inch bays), so I mounted them in the wider 5 1/4 bays where most people had their cd drives, I had a few spare slots, so it was fine. Saying that, even some modern cases still squish all the drives into a small space.

A few years later, I found some hard drive coolers, they also seem to work, I’ve not had a hard drive failure since 2002..until this week May 9th 2010. I have a Dell XPS, it has 6x hard drives in, and as you might guess, the hard drives are all crammed together, there’s no air space around them, a Western Digital Raptor 10k rpm drive failed me, which is a high quality drive, so it shows that, constant above average heat will kill drives.

So, do whatever you can to keep your hard drives cool, install fans, use rails and mount them in the optical bases, and put as many screws into them as you can, if you only use 2 screws, you’ll get an uneven transfer of heat through them to the case, which can act as a passive heat sink to some effect, water cooling is ace if you can afford it.

Tip 2 – Raid 1 is a must

All my data is mirrored, and so is the operating system.  I have two 1.5Tb hard drives set-up with Raid 1, okay so I’m losing 1.5Gb of storage capacity by mirroring the drives, but if I have a hard drive failure, my data won’t be lost, if you lose a single drive in Raid 0, you lose everything on both drives, keep than in mind when you’re looking for a slightly faster setup, I personally don’t feel it’s worth it for my data.

My second raid array is four Hard Drives, they were 10,000 RPM Western Digital 160Gb raptors, which is where my operating system and applications reside. I initially tried raid 5, but I found it far too slow for every day use as well as gaming, whilst you get more room to store data, it really is slow, slower than mirroring due to the way raid works, I do accept it depends on the raid controller.

Raid Controllers generally pass the hard work to the CPU (I have 4 cores, so not a big deal) when the raid is embedded in the motherboard, and on low end (less than £100 usually) controllers, it’s only the high end corporate cards that can actually do the hard work on the raid card without taxing the cpu, sometimes up to 5% cpu usage I’ve noticed on my 2.93Ghz quad core (it’s getting old now), typically it’s one or two percent through normal use.

So after Raid 5, I went for Raid 1 + 0, which is mirroring and striping, without going too techy about how data is patterned on each drive, all you need to know is, with four drives, 2 drives have cloned data (mirrored), and 2 drives end up with the data spanned across both in a way to increase performance.

Okay, so you already know I favour redundancy over the space the extra 2 drives could offer, but the striping also gives increased performance, which is worth it in my opinion.

This setup was put to the test this week, I had a hard drive (a raptor) fail, when I turned my PC on it said (degraded array), so I had to work out which drive was broken, the Nvidia app tells you the usb channel (so the bios on my board), I did it the easy way, the drive wasn’t powering on, so I just put my index finger against the side of each when I powered the system on, to feel the vibrations of the drive, second touch I found an abnormal one, I could feel it clicking…

So I pulled it, and stuffed a 7 year old 300Gb drive in (it’s bigger than the raptors, and much slower, but I’ll look into buying more drives soon, it will be fine until then), went into the Nvidia Storage Application, and told it to rebuild the array onto the new disc.

It looks like this:

Click to have a look.

So clarify:

• My Computer never stopped working. (no downtime apart from a reboot or two)
• I never Lost any Data. (the mirroring and striping had the redundancy to keep my data safe)
• I was able to build the array onto a spare drive (identicle drives are needed unless the spare is a bit bigger in capacity).
• I’ll be able to upgrade my drives to a higher capacity by pulling one out and replacing them 1 by one, and asking for a rebuild each time.

In my opinion, Raid 1 is a must for everyone who hates having to reinstall their OS and copy their data back from backups…yes, you should do those 2, I have an External 500Gb drive, which I clone my OS to as well, just in case my Raid fails, or more likely, Windows decides to have a hissy fit.

Keep your drives cool, build redundancy in (drives are cheap enough nowadays), and backup (which I’ll leave to another post).

(this article is provided “As Is”, and you use it as your own risk, such as using your fingers to feel the hard drives vibrate, or installing screws in your drives).

If in doubt, get an IT technician or engineer to do the work for you.

Thanks goes to Vulpes for this list.

They send you plenty of info, although you have to fill in a questionnaire every time, which asks some unusual questions, but I’ll let you enjoy the surprise, a few of them made me chuckle to say the least.

You also find out your Blood Type which I didn’t know, I’m A+ if you wanted to know, which is one of the more common blood types, which means they need plenty of it, if that makes sense.

Anyways, my first donation, I didn’t really think much of it, I certainly didn’t feel any side effects.

But last night, I felt some mild nausea, so I decided to walk to my car which was about 3-400m away, except I did this within about 2 minutes of them removing the needle, I don’t think they noticed me leaving, as you’re supposed to rest, I knew this, but I felt fine, just a little sick.

Anyways, I got about 100m down the road and I started to sweat profusely, then another 50m and my ears started ringing louder and louder. After another 50m my vision was failing, it was gradually getting blacker and blacker, I stopped sat on a wall, and put my head lower (it was instinct) and I felt instantly better, I had about 100m left to get to my car, but even with a brief rest, I just about made it to my car, as I got there I was having problems walking straight.

I was glad to be in my car though, I rolled the seat back and sat there listening to the radio for 5 minutes. At which point I felt back to normal. It was weird, the whole time I was walking to my car, ” I was like shit, I’m not gonna be able to drive home safely like this, but was like, shit I can’t turn back, I’ll feel like more of a dick going back”.

There was no way I’d drive if impaired, I don’t drink, and really think people who do it deserve a prison cell.

As weirdly as it sounds though, I sort of enjoyed it, because I’m the kind of person who learns by reinforcing theory with a practical side. I’m not good at copying someone, I have to learn by myself, and make mistakes on the way. So, not sitting and resting and reaffirmed the information I’ve read in the booklets.

I was fine for the rest of the evening, but had a pretty productive day, I put two massive straining posts in the ground to support a new fence line on top of my normal duties. They do say you shouldn’t do anything physical the next day (the doctor asks before hand), but well, I have to work, but I honestly felt really good today, and no ill effects at all, so don’t be put off, most people will never experience that, I certainly don’t plan on doing it again, I’ll stay for the drink and a biscuit.
dinner..so that could be why I struggled

Still, don’t think you can shake off that shit and get up and leave straight away, looking back, I could of easily fainted if I’d pushed myself harder, and could of hurt myself collapsing.

I did some googling, and the symptoms I experienced are classic low blood pressure problems, I just think I didn’t give my body a chance to recover, you should have no problems if you do that and are of normal proportions and in good health.

Here’s a 10 minute photoshop to wish you all merry christmas!