Month: January 2006

Yep, my baby will soon be hitting the water.

Not sure if I’ll be able to post a picture though, as it will give information that would let people guess the occupation of my blogmates who wouldn’t want that ! I will be taking pictures though, will have to see if I can get a postable one.

Ok. What am I going to be getting up to. Gotta go to bed early tonight to let me get out of the house at as close to 5am tomorrow as I can manage. Then it’s a 7.10am flight up to Glasgow, followed by figuring out things to do between landing and the launch. They want us at the yard around 12pm, with launch happening at 2.25pm. We’re hoping that an event labelled “hitting the other side” won’t be scheduled for 2.26pm. Then we hit the pub and head back to the airport at around 6ish.

Should be a fun day out but going to bed at 10pm (ish) will be highly weird.

Addon – think the laptop needs a better name than Minibox. Will have to peek in Godzilla lore for something that could resemble a faithful, but slow partner.

Cos the laptop works extremely well, it just can’t do graphics and the cpu isn’t as quick.

I think I got ’em big time …

And I blame my sister – muahahahaha !!!!! 🙂 Think my envy centre has been pinging since she got her laptop over the weekend. Anyway – here’s what I plan to build :

Athlon X2-3800 (cheapest dual core)
2Gb Ram (more Ram helps and I’m not planning to fiddle for ages after this upgrade)
Radeon X850 (ok – it’s not the newest but it’s the most cost effective …)
160Gb hd (current 120 is fine but a newer one is needed cos of a faster interface)
Water cooling

And the rest of the spec is fairly insignificant when you get down to it …

The monster above will be called Godzilla, to accompany my Ipaq which is now called Godzookie. The water cooling is something I’ve been interested in for a while but I’ve never had the excuse to check it out. The chiller system pulls in some curious considerations though. With an internal chiller, it needs a decent size box to give somewhere to put the radiator. With an external chiller, it adds an extra box and extra fittings (fittings = potential leak point) but gives easier access to the reservoir for checking the water level.

It’s kinda fitting in the way that Godzilla will be water cooled, seeing as Godzilla is the monster that arises from the sea to save the day. Sea, Water cooling … Yeah I know. Any excuse to go for an expensive toy.

Which reminds me – must try out my other new toy – the vacuum cleaner. Watching Batman Begins at the moment though.

I’m surviving without central heating – thick dressing gowns and additional blankets wrapped round me while I’m watching TV are making it bearable – but SOOOO moving into a new place before next winter…

Blimey it’s cold in here.

I’ve been at my parents’ place over the weekend, which means I sensibly turn things off before I leg it because the house stays empty. The thing I always, Always have second thoughts about turning off is the heating … Currently typing here on my main pooter contemplating putting my gloves on. It’ll warm up soon. At least I have a working boiler … which is more than can be said for one of my dearer friends. She has lots of heaters though 🙂

Anyway, it was my dad’s birthday today, which is the reason I went up there. He got stuff, my sister found a rather impressive laptop in clearance sale, I got a vacuum cleaner (mine died through overwork – yeah really !) but I didn’t manage to get mum & dad to spend money on buying bits for putting wireless broadband into their house. Must keep trying there.

I got to see the dogs too. Ben is still a lovely pup and happily exuberant. Goldie is suffering a bit though, I don’t think he’s got that long left in him. I reckon he’s got steadily worsening arthritis in his back end, which is making it harder for him to move around. But he still manages to get a Big Tail Wag going when he sees me for the first time on a weekend. He’s done well has Goldie, I think we’ve had him for about 13-14 years so far and I think he was about 2-3 when we got him as a rescue dog.

I better get the washing on so I can wear my black jeans on Wednesday … We’sa going up to Glasgow to see a ship launch and I want to wear my black jeans. Even though I should probably retire them for being too big. That’s right – my black jeans are now feeling rather too loose 🙂 Something must be going right with my diet. This month, 13 stone, next month 12 stone (heh), this summer – more cricket due to less breakages caused by carrying too much weight. We shall see.

Washing time ! More tomorrow.

Missed posting yesterday …

We did go dragon hunting and it was both an excellent display of teamwork and a let down for me at the same time … The dragon in question is called Onyxia and the fight to kill her comes in 3 phases.

Phase 1 – she’s staying still and our job is to make sure she stays on the warrior. Which means our usual Hit As Hard As Possible technique gets watered down. In this phase, she’s on the ground and can either breathe on an area or whip with her tail. Both can do lots of damage, so the thing to do is stay out of the way.
Phase 2 – she’s up in the air. We need to keep her attention on the warrior but in this bit, she tends to do a “deep breath”, which precedes her breathing Big Fire on the raid group. If there’s no clusters of people, the deep breath doesn’t happen.
Phase 3 – she’s back on the ground again as per Phase 1. This time though, she fears people … There’s things you can do about fear but if you break the fear when the warrior isn’t feared, Onyxia will turn around and eat half the raid group. There’s also molten lava coming out of the floor, which people have a tendency to run over.

How did it go ? On a fight like this, with people who haven’t done it before (me!), you would expect to get wiped out a few times and have to start again … Amazingly, we actually did it on the first try ! Stunning hey … Time to go back to Orgrimmar and annoy everyone by having a party in front of where Onyxia’s head gets put on a big spiky pole.

So why was it a let down for me ? I died ! In phase 3, I strayed a little too far south. Add that to a badly timed fear that had me running a little more south. Stir in a little bit of Onyxia style Tail Baseball Home Run and you get a me going for a flying lesson into a pit … Couldn’t see a thing ! Better luck next time for me 🙂

This is Iceangel, reporting from the depths of the Stranglethorn Vale jungle in southern Azeroth.

I, and 19 other intrepid explorers, are delving into the depths of the much feared Zul’Gurub region. Our mission ? To fight our way through hostile snakes, trolls and Damn Big Stone Things to tame a dinosaur, take a few cheeky pictures of the god Hakkar while he’s not looking and to pull the whiskers off the Panther boss.

The scene is set, everyone is here and my fellow mages have made supplies for the rest of the group. Nobody’s going hungry or thirsty in our team. And we’re going in … Hmm – resistance is being observed from some big snakey things … Or rather it was, they take one look at Towwy and just melt into a melted pool of frost … Onwards the group moves, fighting as we go. The natives are definitely restless but their resistance is futile.

We soon reach the “Panther boss” and our Revered Leader Sarai tells us the plan. The “Panther Boss” isn’t actually a panther but has pets. How many pets ! Blimey ! We’re outnumbered … Unfortunately, this is where our resistance turned futile. Even after unleashing hell, frost mage style (our hell is frozen over), we couldn’t cope with that many panther pets. We only escaped when it appeared that Miss Panther tired of feeding us to her panthers and refused to appear again … I think next time we’ll see a note pinned to the wall saying “Do not feed the animals, they ate so much last time they exploded”

Next step – onwards to the moat. What is there in the water ? We expected fish but we did not expect a THREE HEADED HYDRA ! It was about 40 foot tall. If you’ve ever been chased by the T Rex King Mosh from the Un’Goro crater, you’ll know the kind of size I’m thinking of. Oh and what is my friend Skycn doing to that other fish ? He turned it into a sheep. That’s not right. Poor fish will take ages shaking itself dry.

My fellow explorers and I were starting to get tired by this stage of our journey, there’s only so much conjured water you can take before you start to flag. (We need to petition the Blizzard Gods to add conjured coffee to the inventory)

We didn’t manage to capture any trophies from Gahz’Rilla or any whiskers from the Panther princess but I can’t remember a more fun expedition. Even though we weren’t getting much success, we were giving it our best and knowing that we could well afford to express the good humour in which our expedition was held.

Already looking forward to the next one, although I don’t think I’ll get the sun tan in the dank Dustwallow Marsh that we get in the more southern Stranglethorn Vale. Next expedition – we’re heading to the part of the map that says “Here be Dragons…”

Call it a character flaw ? 🙂

I figured I needed a bit of time out of the house after work today, so it was a trip up to the local Mall.

My wallet survived Screenselect. It survived Game. It survived HMV. But it did not survive Virgin’s 5 dvds for £30 offer … It’ll forgive me on payday.

What did I get ?
2001 – wanted this for ages.
Batman Begins – as re-imagininginings of characters go, they did well here.
House of Flying Daggers – beautiful film, martial arts.
Sahara – the Cussler-ites didn’t really like it but I thought it was good popcorn mentality fun.
Team America – not seen but heard lots about it.

You’re a sucker for the young ladies, Son 🙂

cq