Miracle! Or not.

Any debate around here on "it's a woman thing" and I'll be round your place like a shot!

My new PC is not dead, after all. At first, I was going to concoct these elaborate tales of how the motherboard was miraculously reclaimed from the frazzled, no-hope state of 'dead'; indeed, I was even going to name it Lazarus! But in case Allan of a very wonderful computer shop about two miles from my butt is reading, I will be honest. It was, erm, an unplugged cable on the motherboard...

Oh, SHUT UP and quit the laughing!!!

* note to self: leave the case of the PC in the state of fastened and padlocked. Do NOT touch innards!

I could WEEP!

I know, I KNOW!!! I go on all the time about PC woes, but this is THE woe of woes...

I bought a new PC in the end. Bye-bye flunked motherboard, bye-bye everything, in fact. New uber-rig ordered and installed...

And just THREE DAYS LATER, it is clinically dead. Oh yes, very dead. It won't even reach that happy POST state of beeps and meaningless BIOS scribblings.

That is woeful enough, but the REAL woe is that this is likely MY fault! WHY can't I just (for once) leave the cover ON and stop tinkering with innards? But it's like this compulsion thing. I just have to poke around, move things - for aesthetic reasons, naturally. I just hope I haven't aesthetically sparked the motherboard chipset this time and that this is simply due to a graphics card failing to sit properly, or a wobbly RAM stick! But I have been told to leave it alone now. Someone who actually knows what they are doing will be performing emergency surgery tomorrow - no doubt at some horrendous cost-per-hour...

Meantime, I'm wailing via my partner's PC. This PC is working because I have not yet tinkered with it. Funny therefore how this one is STILL working four years after it was bought, whereas I am now on my fourth (and final?) PC...

When I said I'd "got the thing"...

On 8th May, Boring-Blog-Entry-Number-3787 I was crowing about how I could do anything! ANYTHING! Well, I could cure blue screen crashes anyway by ripping out a hard disk drive that was reporting as failing...

WRONG!

The blue screen crashes restarted with a vengeance, and increased in intensity, with reports of another two hard drives failing, my DVD burner not working and the floppy drive (yes, I really do use this relic) failing too. Apparently not the hard disk then. Glad I didn't throw it out, which is hardly surprising given I can still have last week's take-away box not thrown out too......

A dying disk controller, ergo a motherboard replacement (or, in my non-technically-adept case, a new PC). And so here it is, without Sims installed or anything yet. But it DOES have the keyboard plugged in, which means I can still bore you to tears. Now, isn't that simply WONDERFUL?!

The art of over-promising!

It's an art. My speciality: over-promise, then under-deliver; the antithesis of expensive advice given by business experts to wannabe consultants everywhere. "Promise it tomorrow but deliver it today to delight your customers and keep them coming back!" So, I expect I've caused the reverse effect of 'customer delight' by promising today, and delivering, well, some time within the next decade or so.... Just one over-promised and not-yet-delivered creation: gothic windows set... And I've promised so many things! I have an offset corner column (I've borked the textures so this needs fixing), I have a new Fine Architecture set (I can't even remember what meshes come with that), I have a near-complete gothic stone window set (borked diagonal on the master means the whole set must be changed), I have a not-at-all complete sliding sci-fiesque door waiting for a diagonal, more colours and some windows, a pile of tyre meshes that need shaping into something and some screenshots, a wooden ceiling tile set (floor tiles that act as ceilings too) also needing screenshots, and the beginnings of some Pueblo-style building items barely even begun (you won't believe the scale of this project!). Oh, and I've also begun a Periscope (yes, really!) and some new building plinths (correct name 'buttresses' but I've got it wrong all along and see no reason why I should change this trend now) to match the Mediterranean wallpaper set. Of course, I intend to do all of these things [insert sound of hollow laughter here].

Air of the countryside...

Approximately two feet away (yes, that's right: I'm far too fossilised to bother with metric), sleeps a baby Whippet (he's the one on the left)... Now, anyone here who likes dogs might well be thinking how cute he looks, but if you were sitting right where I am now, you'd soon change your mind. You see: this creature is emitting THE most hideous of foul smells. He might be little, but he's giving out more pong than our neighbouring cabbage fields at the end of harvesting season. I WAS going to finish a nice set of Elizabethan windows for you, but I don't seem to have any suitable breathing aparatus to hand and so I'm going to bed.

Glass block correction - my fault AGAIN!

It seems that the diagonal version of the full length glass window actually wasn't this window at all! Thanks to JRon, I saw tonight that this file was a door.

I have now corrected this. Please download the diagonal window again (my apologies, profuse grovelling and pitiful excuses as usual):
The REAL diagonal glass block window

24 people are missing something!

That's right: as at this very moment, 24 people have not downloaded the DIAGONAL version of the glass block full height window. It's not essential, but you'd probably like a diagonal version too.
DIAGONAL Glass Block Master

And don't forget the recolours (only 'clear glass' is included in the master mesh package)...

Mauve
Pink
Blue
Green
Bronze
Black

New colours for the Victorian Radiator

I don't often do recolours (I leave that to people better at it than me), but the Victorian Radiator I made in the recent Climate Solutions set offers the grand total of ONE colour: black!

Not good enough! I've been meaning to put together a set of colours for ages. I've now done that...


Recolours of Victorian Radiator
Expect this set at or around 31 May (if not before).

And now - about radiators!

Whilst I'm on the subject of fixing things (in fact, I seem to spend more time fixing my creations than making them in the first place, though you have NO need to comment on this!)...

MsBarrows pointed out something everyone else was too shy to mention: the radiators are hogging an entire game tile. Of course, I COULD make pitiful excuses about how this is a 'safety feature' so nobody is burned by getting too close to the imaginary heat these decorative objects are supposed to exude, but is what one could call a small oversight on my part...

(or blatant stupidity - of you dare!)

So, I've changed the two radiators so that they will allow sims and other objects to share the same tile and not block walkways. If you would like the revised radiators, you can find them here...



Revised: Victorian Radiator




Revised: Modern Radiator

And today's borked object IS.... (cue fanfare)

The tree house door (master mesh)!

Thanks to JRon who gave me a prodding with the pointy end of one of the branches, it seems that, as usual, I had managed to add a nice blue texture to the game icons of all the doors and windows that take their colours from this master file.

I have now got rid of the blue texture. Simply redownload the door from here...


FIXED: Tree House Master Door
You might need to refresh the icons for the tree doors and windows in your game catalog. If so, hold down the Ctrl key on your keyboard, and click the right mouse button on each icon - including the recolour choices).