Ocram’s Blog

Do you get the error message “This application failed to initalize properly (0xc0150002)” when starting Football Manager 2009 on Windows XP? Chances are that it’s trying to tell you that the .NET Framework 2.0 is not installed. I don’t know whether this an isolated issue or whether it affects all XP installs without the framework, but it’s a problem I’ve come across half a dozen times already.

To resolve it, you can either download the framework here, or run the installation from the program directory (from memory) “C:/Program Files/Sports Interactive/Football Manager 2009/directx/dotnetfx.exe”, substituting the drive letter if necessary.

On a side note, why is it that activation is such a pain on this game? The serial number, instead of being printed in a normal font, is one where you can hardly establish the difference between various characters, and is in dots rather than solid lines.

Then the phone activation, you have to enter 25 (?) characters five times, and then a 7 (?) digit response key a total of 8 times. And I thought Windows activation was a pain.

For somewhere I claim not to like, I manage to put in a hell of a lot of unpaid hours there. I managed 10 and a half today instead of the nine I was paid to do (8.5 if you want to get technical). :duh:

All throughout my time off, I’ve gone to sleep/woken up at strange hours. I went from waking up at midday to falling asleep at midday, and all the times between then. Of course, the day before I went back, I had to wake up at 4PM. So althroughout the night I couldn’t sleep, until I finally drifted off around 6, a whole 90 minutes before my alarm went off. And still managed to wake up 5 minutes before it went off, and actually get out of bed instead of falling asleep again, which never happens.

Being my first day back, I wanted to be there on time, so I left 25 minutes minutes early for a journey that normally takes 10-15. Upon getting there, I found that I was an hour early, as I was due to start at 9:45 instead of 8:45.

Today was incredibly hectic, and normally I would end up completely stressed by this time. We’re have almost a 3 week backlog of jobs, and the times promised to customer apparently range anywhere between next day and 10 days, so most of the people I dealt with today were pissed off that 3 weeks after bringing their machine in they still haven’t heard from us. As per a typical day, I didn’t get anything done that I wanted to and I left 30 minutes late because I want to get a 20 minute job finished that I didn’t have time for during the day and I thought I would be playing it safe my saying tomorrow than trying to get it done today. At the moment I feel fine, apart from my legs aching like a motherfucker, I’m possibly ready to fall unconscious at any moment. How long it will last though, I don’t know. I really think I need to take a week off every three months or so. And one of those times I will actually do something or go somewhere. Honest.

What exactly the point of this post is I don’t know… :-P

At the moment, I feel so relaxed and de-stressed it feels like such a shame to have to be going back to work next week.

Even though I haven’t actually done anything with my time off (unless you count completing the main storyline in Fable 2) despite my wonderful plans to find a new job, update various websites, migrate everything to a new host, start losing weight, start working on a business and, I don’t know, starting thinking about actually getting a social life.

Anyway… good times.

While I was outside having a cigarette, one of my neighbours asked me whether I was cold standing outside in only a t-shirt. Rather than saying good morning, or no, I starting looking at my arm in fascination, completely unintentionally, like it had been grafted onto my body by some unknown person during the night. :wacko:

Other than that, I think that last night was the first night in months that a) I’ve slept for 8 hours straight and b) I’ve woken up when the sheets and pillows aren’t strewn across the room.

And I’ve been issued a new product key… Apparently the one I have has already been registered.

As a side note… I really need to set up my custom smilies again, which I lost after upgrading Wordpress.

I’m strange. It’s ok, I’ll readily admit that. I’m the kind of person who will be uncomfortable warm when the temperature is below 10°C and you’ve set the aircon at 24. My ideal temperature is like it is now, around 5°, as long as the sun is out. I can’t sleep at night unless I have the fan constantly blowing at me, and I have both the windows in my room open.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m only ever going to quit smoking if I’m jobless. I’m currently 4 days through my 2 week holiday, and I still half a pack of cigarettes left from Sunday. Most of which were only half finished anyway. I normally smoke around 10 a day.

Windows Vista is becoming a great pain in the arse for me. Generally I’ve found it quite usable to be honest, but I can’t get the damn thing to activate. It seems to switch between two error codes, 0xC004C003 (activation server determined the specified product key is in use) and 0xC004F061 (product key can only be used for upgrading, not for clean installations)

I’ve tried to run another upgrade installation, but I get an error message about my product key being unable to be validated.

I managed to take the wrong day off work :wacko:

I would have sworn that for the next two weeks I had Saturday and Monday off. But I checked the rota just after midnight on my iPod touch and I had today listed as off and that I was working yesterday. So of course, I figured that I had probably just entered it incorrectly… I do double check it, but it could happen. So I find the paper copy, and it matched up. Oh, shit…

The most annoying thing is that I don’t know where I got the idea that I had yesterday off. All I remember is on Sunday questioning the logic of having two days off and having to work a six and a half hour day between them. But, as far as I know the rota hasn’t changed for this week either, so I’m at a loss as to where I got the idea from.

The other thing is that nobody phoned me. No messages, no voicemail. If somebody doesn’t turn up for work, wouldn’t you question why? Call to see whether I’ve overslept (I was up before 9 today), or whatever. And it’s not like it would have gone un-noticed. I work in a department with 3 other people directly and I would have had to have been in to cover the last 90 minutes, managers notice when I’m 5-10 minutes late, so they must be checking when I start.

As something like this has never happened to me before, I have no idea what’s going to happen about it. I’m going to call in tomorrow morning to well, apologise first and foremost, and I guess at least find out whether I should come in today to make up for it, whether there will be an investigation, whether I’m suspended, whether I’m fired, whether it’ll be counted as an unpaid day (which would be pretty sweet), or anything else.

I think it’s pretty much guaranteed there will be an investigation, but I don’t know what the normal proceedure for such an incident is.

OK, I’ve checked the staff handbook, which says “Payment is not made for unauthorised absence, and, when appropriate, disciplinary action is always taken.” On the plus side, under the disciplinary section it also says “You will not be dismissed for a first breach of discipline, except in the case of gross misconduct.” Unauthorised absence isn’t specifically noted under gross misconduct, although some of the examples given are quite vague. So yes, I won’t be paid for it, which I completely expected. I (hopefully) won’t be dismissed for it, but I still after reading the handbook don’t know exactly what the disciplinary procedure is. If I had a decent manager, she would probably let me work the time today and just forget about it, but unfortunately I feel the odds of that happening are similar to that of winning the lottery. I think the most reasonable thing to do is just to phone in tomorrow morning, and find out what happens from there. Hopefully they will take into account that it was truely a mistake, but… who knows? On top of that I probably won’t be able to sleep all night through worrying about it, and then oversleep tomorrow morning thus not getting a chance to call before I was supposed to start yesterday (11AM). :rolleyes:

Some days I feel like the only reason that I’m alive is because I’m too scared to do anything about it.

I hate my job, I feel like a stranger in my own home and the only woman I’ve ever loved…. well, I’m not even sure if we can be considered friends anymore :unsure: -_-