Wow, I’m getting worse and worse at this blogging thing. I was doing really well for a while and now its like “one crappy link post a week”. Sorry about that.
In my defence I have been attempting to post more to Google Sightseeing but still can’t keep up with Alex & Jame’s posting rate. On the upside I think I’ve learnt more general knowledge when composing posts for GGSS than doing anything else for a while now.
In other news Kerry and I took a big step last weekend by purchasing a Dyson DC08 vacuum between us and merging our CD collections. I also got a very shiny new alarm clock form Habitat which is something I’ve been wanting for a while. I’m not going to link to their website as it’s flash and obscenely slow to use, load, and non comprehensive.
Whilst getting software for work we realised that you can go out and buy a really old version of photoshop and then get the much cheaper upgrade option to a super new version like CS2. Saving you about £300 in the process. I managed to get an apparently “brand new sealed” version of photoshop 5.5 for a tenner off ebay. We’ll see how legit it is once it arrives. Of course, I now have to shell out £100+ to get the upgrade to CS2. I think I’ll wait for a good month before I get that.
Uh-oh, it’s ten dollar sale at threadless time. I’ve managed to restrain myself to three new shirts this time. But I did have a whole fifteen bucks worth of street points to use. Awesome.
So, I broke the other day and started using iTunes about 3 months after getting my Nano. It is actually not such a bad programme and hasn’t quite taken over my music collection in the evil-hell-spawn way I thought it might. What lead me to use iTunes was the fact that I totally broke my Nano messing around with ipodlinux. I had to do an ipod restore and it was just easier to use iTunes…damn Apple and their bundled easy to use feature packed software. Whilst exploring the iTunes interface I came across the vast index of podcasts that Apple let you browse through. I’m now hooked on radio five’s film review podcast, and one from “Security Now” is also quite interesting. It’s like radio for your ipod that you can pause! Great stuff.
In Joe’s never ending world domination scheme he has now made it on to Radio Scotland’s Radio Cafe progamme, talking about graphic novels and their corresponding movies. You can of course hear the show online thanks to those nice people at the BBC.
The winners have been announced.
GGSS didn’t get anything, there’s always next year!
We won the pub quiz again last night by a hairs-breadth. We were tied right at the end with one other team, then we tied again on the “jackpot round” so we went to a tie-breaker:
“In what year was Alexander Graham Bell awarded the patent for his telephone?”
…and Kerry got it right on the nose: 1876.
This crazy stuff called from MTek Weapon Systems called “FAST G1” looks scarily like the face masks of Imperial Stormtroopers or some other futuristic fighting force.
It has been predicted that the rebuilding of Iraq will cost more than the Marshall Plan. The Marshall Plan was the effort to rebuild the whole of Western Europe at the end of WWII. Something is definitely wrong there…
Yikes, almost a month since the last update. I’m slipping into Turnbull Bros. territory. So, what have I been up to?
Work is crazy busy with two more sales staff employed and us therefore having to provide infrastructure and hardware to support them. Our latest major project was the awesome Package Builder, which was mainly Sandy.
Kerry and I went home for a weekend at the start of February for “xmas”. It was nice to have a 2nd round of pressies, see everyone, get fed and muck about down at the beach. Didn’t see much of my sister as she was having car troubles. There are some pictures up on flickr. I got a kick-ass watch off my parents and a bottle of Quarter Cask Laphroaig which is great stuff.
On the web front I have done some work on my re-design but progress is slow. I’ve moved to a left aligned layout but still fixed width. I’m still aiming to get the whole thing done before the big reveal, lets just say I’ve used more colours than just grey and erm, grey this time. I finally got around to upgrading to WordPress 2.01 which was surprisingly painless but gawd do I need ssh on my hosting, it’s so wasteful over ftp.
Oh, I finally fixed up the bike I pulled out a skip about two years ago. I replaced the inner tubes, cleaned it up and scraped tons of muck out of the chain rings and derailers (Sandy would be proud). I won’t be entering any extreme downhill competitions with this thing, but it does the job of getting around town.
The Super Shonky™ IBM hard drive that was struggling along in my desktop PC finally starting cracking-up last Friday. I was geting nasty blue-screens with MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION which I tracked down to the secondary IDE channel. If I took the IBM drive off, they went away. Thing is, it has all my MP3s on it, so I’ll need to wrangle them off at some point. I got so annoyed at Windows during this I put my old GeForce 4 card in my linux box, installed a ton of modules and other stuff and configured my X setup properly. With some help from Synergy I now have both my Windows and Linux boxes controllable from one keyboard and mouse, my screen thankfully has two inputs.
I also saw a ton of movies but I’d better put them in a seperate post before you drop off…
I polished this off in less than a week so it must have been good! Very heartfelt story of a guy who “accidentaly” joins the US marines, his boredom, friends, loss of friends and general stupid-ness of war.
This design is starting to bug me too much. I’ve started a re-design which I’m going to aim to finish “properly” before revealing (yeah right).
Me
Getting a new flat with just kerry and myself
Two stag parties! both awesome, Rick’s and James’
Seeing de la soul with Alex and James
Gadgets
Finally ditching my CRT for a flatscreen
Movies & TV
The Serenity premiere
Batman Begins
Sin City
Rome (roll on season two)
The mighty Battle Star Galactica
Lost, if it would stop dragging everything out so much
Web
Google Maps & the rise of Google Sightseeing
…and lots of other things that I can’t remember about. 2006 already….blimey.
So, about 6 months after I realised I needed to upgrade my PC I’ve finally done it!
I now have a shiny AMD Sempron 3100+ on a Gigabyte K8NS-PRO with a Gig of Crucial RAM. This also means I now have the mighty increased speed of USB 2.0, SATA drives, Firewire and lots of other things that my old motherboard didn’t support. Needless to say, pretty much everything runs a heck of a lot quicker.
This whole hardware thing had moved on a bit since I last put a PC together (man, that makes me sound old). The motherboard has a nice plastic guide thing for the heatsink and it all clips in very neatly and easily. No jamming a screwdriver into fiddly bits of metal and forcing clips onto tiny bits of plastic. This motherboard has something daft like 3 RAID controllers, onboard sound, LAN, kitchen sink etc which makes the BIOS setup screen an absolute mess of options – the only downside to all this increased complexity. So far though, everything has run very smoothly and my CPU temperature when under load has dropped to around 30°C (from 60°C plus).
It’s the 2nd and I’m only just posting this….slackness ahoy.
New Years Eve was really good fun. Kerry finished worked at 8 so after that we got ready and headed down to Alex’s flat with two carrier bags full of booze. The place was already pretty jumping when we got there so we set about playing with the mighty Cocktail Machine which now used RFID tags for user logins! Pretty clever stuff. Lots and lots of people were there, about 8 people seem to live in this house and so there were a lot of friends and cliques to invite. At 12 we got a good view of the fireworks off the crags and Graeme had some cute little garden fireworks which we set off. After that it was just more fooling around, eating sausages off the barbeque, covering silly things in chocolate with the chocolate fountain and talking with, ex-flatmate of 4 years, Pete (who I hadn’t seen in about 2 years). We eventually left about 4:30 am and after walking Pete home crashed into bed. Bloody good night 🙂