No problem ! 🙂
I shall have to cut you a cd of the b-side to the Star Trek Motion Picture soundtrack currently playing through the wall … It's effectively an audiobook of a record cut by Gene Roddenberry and friends.
Essential listening for Trekkies.
I'm just sorry it took me so long to get it to you! Enjoy!!
Cheers Cyberkitten 🙂
Had a birthday present from my very good friend and neighbour CK tonight, an iTunes voucher. Now … what to spend it on.
First up – Edie Brickell has 2 albums out that I don’t have in my collection yet, Volcano and a self titled “Edie Brickell”. Can’t get the second on iTunes so it’s just Volcano for now. Hopefully there will be something on there as good as No Dinero from Stranger Things. That’s another slow burner that I wasn’t sure about at first but it’s a standout track from the album. Makes you think of abandoning your cares and just chilling out, ignoring the outside world.
I would like to get the Elkie Brooks collection, which is a semi-discovery from a Driving Songs collection of cds. I’m saying “semi” cos I always knew Elkie Brooks was a good singer, it just took an hour or so of scanning Youtube to find out just How Good. Check this out … A pity that the compilation is £10 on iTunes (or about £4 on Amazon). Oh well, will restrict the Elkie Brooks just to Fool If You Think It’s Over for now.
One thing that’s kept me in WoW all these years is hearing the voices over the comms. There’s some great people in the guild aka the Hot Swedish Girls. It’s not just the accent, it’s the attitude. And that accent and attitude came together for quite a few wonderful albums by The Cardigans. They split though, with the lead singer forming up into a new band called A Camp. Their second album (Colonia) is the next purchase.
And while I’m there, the Ping popup in iTunes is Piggin’ Annoyin’. Even though I’ve disabled Ping, it still insists on telling me that it’s ready to annoy me.
Oookay … must not rant 🙂
Few random tracks seeing as it’s a certain time of year :
Tom Jones & Cerys Matthews – Baby it’s cold outside – sure is !
And that’s it for the random Xmas tracks. Just listened to Kylie’s Santa Baby off Youtube which put me off the idea. Muahahaha
Although having just seen a version of “Fairytale Of New York” sung by Ronan Keating (don’t care) and Moya Brennan, voice of Clannad, I’ll couldn’t resist that.
Another for the “not getting that just now” : Evanescence are back with a self titled album which I’d like to get … But. £5 for the normal album, £11 for a deluxe version that has 4 extra tracks plus a remix and a video. I could upgrade the normal album with the extra 4 tracks for £1 each but that stinks of profiteering, which is something I go to lengths not to indulge.
What else, what else … Having a peek through Amazon’s recommended feature for ideas and it really wants me to grab that Elkie Brooks collection …
Just watched the video for Laura Marling’s (new artist to me) New Romantic. Love it, tempted. After watching a couple more though, the videos are better than the music and considering I listen to stuff as audio only most of the time, won’t get this one for now.
Last one for now will be Snow Patrol’s new album, Fallen Empires. Well, it will be if iTunes decides to cooperate … I need to boost the available credit by a measly 6p before the transaction will go through …
PS I fixed it by buying more stuff – Emmerdale by The Cardigans has some tracks I already have plus some I don’t. I’m the sort of person who likes to have everything done by the bands I consider special, hence one nickname (old) of “Alisha’s Addict” after me buying all the Alisha’s Attic singles for the excellent B-Sides.
Oh and bad tech too.
I think I needed somehow to balance the excellent tech buy with the new machine (still rock solid stable). Bestbuy are getting out of dodge at the moment (retail sector’s not so good here) so they have a lot of offers on at the moment. Pretty attractive offers too. Good enough to tempt me into a new keyboard and mouse. That’s been on my list for a little while now, as it’s a pain to move the old ones around if I’m wanting to put the desktop PC on the telly.
So I picked up a Microsoft wireless keyboard and mouse combination. Oops.
Immediate comments – the mouse isn’t up to the job compared to my old MS Razer mouse. I’ve actually switched back. Intellipoint gives a fair number of customisation options for the buttons but none where it really counts. There’s no real option to change the sensitivity or to disable mouse acceleration. I like some sensitivity in a mouse, although that doesn’t mean seeing the pointer go crazy across the screen at a twitch. Getting it balanced means I don’t kill my wrist overcorrecting.
So I’ve gone back to my old mouse. The keyboard is similar although I’ve not fired that yet. They layout is mostly fine but there are little or no relevant markings on the function keys. I’m a touchtyper so I don’t like to have to look for some keys. There’s also very little definition to the keys, with them being much flatter than the chunky keys I grew up on. Qwerty is ok, function keys are not and you need those for gaming.
Anyone want a keyboard and mouse ? Still, as they’re wireless I can use my old ones for gaming and use the wireless ones for Pooter-On-Telly. I have one more bit of the puzzle to go there though, need something for sound.
Getting my leg back 🙂
After its wound that wouldn’t go away, the red bit is now much reduced. It’s still there but the skin looks in much better condition. While it was still healing, the skin would actually split again when I walked which has helped to make healing real slow. The real sign of progress will be when I get a hairy leg again :-). All the hair came off as part of the wound but it’s starting to come back as bristles.
Dunno how it got caused, although I have a big suspicion that I was allergic to the washing machine blobs I switched to. I’ve switched back to what I used before. Weird that my mum & sister developed similar things with our skin at about the same time, can’t figure a link there except from genetics.
Hopefully I’ll get that hairy leg back soon. Otherwise it’s totally ready for speeding across cricket fields, although I need to lose a little weight to get back the speed I used to have.
Last bit. I didn’t move fast enough when passing the cosmetic seller stands at the Mall earlier. There was a very pretty young lady asking if I had a minute and while I was going “gaaaa”, I got shown how a bit of buffing would make my fingernail very shiny.
And it’s still shiny now …
What can I say, pretty lady smiles at me I’ll pay attention. Although she was pretty in a “OMG IT’S A RUSSIAN SPY” kind of way. Yep, I’m a sucker for a pretty lady but I also have defenses that come up and start to have fun with them in a “how can I drive ’em nuts” kind of way. Or I’ll look in a completely different direction to the one she wants me to look in.
Not that I’d object to being at the beck and call of a pretty lady. As long as it’s the right pretty lady. Hopefully when I see the next pretty lady who actually has a reciprocal interest in me too, it’ll be Third Time Lucky.
I have had a couple of bad experiences at KwikFit so now i order my tyres online and get my local garage to fit them.
A little while ago, ok years ago, one of the things I’d do to amuse myself was to see what the other extreme would be to the PCs I could build at the time.
It’s only fairly recently that I’d had the spending power to build the PCs I wanted, instead of having to settle for quite rigidly budgeted cost/performance rigs. It actually works out cheaper in the long run, my early PC builds only lasted maybe 3 years before I was forced to upgrade them. This time around, it’s been 5.5 years since Godzilla (and its later Shade incarnation) was built and the trigger for the upgrade has been software, not hardware.
That’s right, if you have a 2006 era PC with the capability of a 2GHz dual core processor and a graphics card like an ATI 4850 then there’s no reason to upgrade. It’ll handle World of Warcraft at decent frame rates (admittedly with the graphics options turned down a bit). The only reason to upgrade is Microsoft’s decision to force people to change (I refuse to call them an upgrade) to Vista or Windows 7 due to needing newer Directx versions.
Doh – I’m getting sidetracked again. I used to do budget builds for my custom build PCs but possibly as a bit of rebellion, I’d see how expensive I could make a PC. Just one rule, it had to be gaming capable and Not Silly. So triple display water cooled machines would be fine, needing a second case to put a RAID array in would count as Silly.
So what’s the build ? Here goes :
Case first. I’d like to say Thermaltake here as, despite me thinking the manual was written by illiterate blind moronic monkeys, the case I have is top quality within its limits. £33 for a top quality case is really good but it loses out on not having multiple 2.5″ drive bays (SSDs) or a removable motherboard tray. The expensive Thermaltake cases look a bit nasty though in an Anti-Bling kind of way.
Let’s go for an Antec 1200 V3 for £153 (+£120 on what I paid)
Every case needs a PSU, to keep to the “what did I buy?” theme let’s look at Corsair. To fit the rest, it’s going to need to be big … A 1200W PSU would cost you £239 (+£185).
Next comes the motherboard and a cpu to put into it. Make it an Asrock Extreme 7 Z68 board for £233 (+£113) and an Intel i7-2700K for £252 (+£84). There’s really no point in going beyond the 2700K because you don’t really gain anything. Unless there’s dual cpu monster boards out there … There’s no real point actually in going beyond the i5 2500K.
Memory, we’ll go for the maximum for the board (32GB). Looks like G.Skills, the people who supplied my memory, only go up to 4GB modules so we have to go for Corsair Vengeance memory. That’s £465 for 4x 8GB modules, compared to the £45 I paid for my 2x 4GB modules. The difference is the top speed they will go up to, mine are rated for 1600MHz while the Corsair modules are rated for 1866MHz. Both are more than is needed and won’t be put under any strain in a system that isn’t overclocked.
Cooling is key to any system. Good cooling means great stability (especially in the summer) but you need to be careful to make sure you don’t end up with the equivalent of vacuum cleaner noise. Mine’s not too bad there with the Zalman cooler. I’m aware of the fan when in the room but not when in bed, which is upstairs a floor. Staying Zalman again, they have an air cooler for £69 (I paid £43). It’s worth putting a few extra £ in here but I wouldn’t go above what I paid. Watercooling is an option too, although it’s harder these days to find the bits as mainstream suppliers like Novatech don’t stock them.
Graphics. This is the fun part. I went for price/performance here by buying a single GeForce 560Ti for £185. That’s not good enough for the Ultimamega PC, it needs not one but two GeForce 590s for £770 each.
Yes. This is a Silly PC.
Drives make a machine go. I’ve really appreciated having Pumpkin’s Windows on a Solid State Device drive and Overclockers.com have made me appreciate that more with this review of the upsized version. Mine’s a 64GB version, SillyPC needs 2x 256GB SSDs plus 2 of the biggest conventional drives on the market. The 2 conventional drives get paired up in RAID to keep the data safe. The bill ? 2x £305 for the SSD plus 2x £280 for 2 3TB Hitachi drives. I paid £84 for a 64GB SSD from Crucial and £73 for a 1.5TB drive from Western Digital
Oh – also noticing that SCSI drives (old tech) cost about £1 per GB still. Not putting them in this PC because I really don’t see the point of getting an old tech drive that’s far inferior to SSD for almost the same price/capacity as an SSD.
That’s actually most of the machine now, it’s just sundry items to go :
Windows 7 – Home Premium is £80, Ultimate is £155
Bluray drive – I bought a Samsung for £46 (Cyberlink’s software bundle is repulsively bloated these days), SillyPC wants a blu-ray rewriter for £70.
Monitors – that’s right – plural ! Actually, in the widescreen era having multiple monitors fails the Silly test. 3d monitors are ok though. £530 for a 27″ 3d monitor from Acer.
How much is the whole thing ? I’ll exclude the monitor as I don’t have a good comparison :
My PC – roughly £930 plus or minus a bit
Ultimamega PC (but not really Silly) – £4346 + £530 for 1 of those 3d monitors. And you’d also want a Silly keyboard, mouse, headset and sound system to go with it.
Ouchies. But not as Ouchies as the SillyPCs I was having fun pricing up 10 years or so ago. Those had more stuff in too like DAT tape backup. Does anyone still use those ?
Is it worth paying Silly Money ? No. Definitely not. The only change I’d make from the My PC if money was completely No Object would be to replace the single 560Ti with a pair of 570’s and even there, I think I’d just go for a pair of 560Ti’s. A lot of the extra cash in the Silly PC is going on stuff that adds no real value past shininess and boast potential. Unless you’re going for recording photorealistic 3d rendering in real time that is … Example – my PC during the SWTOR beta test was using 4.7GB of its 8GB and could run it as maximum detail with no frame drops. Same for WoW, max detail at 1080p with minimal frame drops, including while raiding. Anything beyond 8GB is overkill.
But I have fun indulging myself pricing it all up anyway 🙂
PS Just under £1000 is still hefty. But it should last me another 5 years, hopefully more. Which makes it more cost effective than doing what I used to do, which was to spend about £700 on a machine that wouldn’t last more than 3.
In a galaxy far, far away …
Classic lines – everyone must know where they come from !
Been beta testing today. That’s when you use a bit of software that’s just about complete but the developer’s not quite ready to unleash it on the world. Started at about 4.30, logged off at 9.30. Didn’t even feel hungry, just knew I had to get some munchies inside me sooner or later. Good games can get you like that, they don’t take it out of you physically so you just keep on going.
What’s the game ? Star Wars The Old Republic.
In a moment of madness, inspired by one Totalbiscuit and a steady diet of Star Wars movies, books and games, I pre-ordered this one. It’s expected around Xmas time and I’m now seriously considering extending my leave period to get some more gaming in 🙂 I won’t. I’m not quite that bad plus however good the game is, it’s not worth sacrificing being around some of the people at work.
Plus the canteen do great sandwiches. (Yes I have eaten, that’s not the pangs talking!)
How’s the game ? It’s pretty awesome so far. Well, awesome wrapped up in the limitations of beta software and a look and feel that’s immediately familiar to any player of WoW. It’s heavily story based, far more story based than WoW.
WoW – quests are a way of tying together moving around where the mobs live. Apart from maybe the Cataclysm zones, which had a little more story involved. The story stuff felt very loose and fluffy.
SWTOR – you’re playing through a story, the mobs just happen to be in the way.
I played through about 7 levels of Jedi Consular earlier, I’ll try out one of the other classes later.
But for now, will head back in game soon and hope to extract myself before the sun comes up.
One for the paladins … We can do it too !
This being from the days when Horde didn’t have paladins …
We headed up to Lincolnshire again this weekend – twas Birthday weekend. The “we” is me and my sister, although “we” doesn’t really apply because we come from separate directions.
Good weekend too 🙂 Here’s a few of the highlights :
I got to drive a manual gearbox car again for the first time since I changed to my Lexus. Quite pleased that I managed to switch straight back into a smooth driving style with clutch & stick, although I could have done without massive quivers in my left leg … I blame the cold and caffeine.
Sister’s just changed car too, her old MR2 was getting a bit long in the tooth with some big repair bills looming around the corner. She’s traded to a Saab 9-3 turbo diesel convertible which definitely ticks all the boxes. She needed something with back seats and something with better mpg for work trips. It passes those tests quite well, we managed to get me & my mom in the back seats. It feels like a normal car with the roof up too. Performance is good, with a high boost turbo that caught me out when the turbo made the wheels spin up when it passed its lag phase.
CTs handle better than Puma’s and definitely better than the Focus. There’s a roundabout where if I’m lucky, I can test the handling characteristics out. The Puma could hit 60mph over the bump by carrying speed through the roundabout. The Focus never gave enough confidence to carry speed through there and didn’t have the engine flexibility to get the acceleration. How did the CT do ? The chassis handled acceleration through the cornering, which is better than what I remember from the Puma.
There we have it – heavy medium 5 door hybrid beats small 3 door sports coupe on performance and handling and utterly thrashes the Focus ST. It got to 60 on that bump without the front wheels lifting up too. When you switch to Sport mode, it keeps its composure incredibly well when being asked to make sudden changes in direction, the Focus would just lean over and say “do I have to ?”
Old programs – there’s a company out there called VMWare who make a fantastic bit of software. What it does is make a computer within a computer. Why is that useful ? Because you can run programs on it that won’t run on newer machines. Just fire up the virtual machine, throw it some software and you’re away. My new desktop and my dad’s laptop have copies of it now running Windows XP meaning my dad can run his bridge games again. Those bridge games refused to work on our Windows 7 64bit machines.
VMWave make a freeware app called VMPlayer which really does the business. I really can’t recommend it enough. I have to admit I gave up on getting Windows 98 to play on it but it gave a hassle free virtual installation of Windows XP on both machines. It’s good to see companies offering trial versions of their software that aren’t crippled in critical ways. If you’re needing to do Virtualisation in a hefty way (it’s handy for separating tasks out), VMWare’s VMWorkstation will be the way to go.
(I have no contact with VMWare outside of being really pleased with their software)
From good to bad – Apple software quality has nosedived …
Yes, I can now plug my iPod into my car and get the music playing on it. No, it isn’t at all reliable. I had to resort back to using cd’s earlier because the iPod refused to play anything after a leg stretch stop. This isn’t an isolated incident either, the iPod forgets what it’s been playing and in one instance, it even claimed to have no songs on it despite being connected to its host laptop not too long before. I may resort to an old solution, plugging the thing in with an analogue lead instead of USB.
I refuse to allow iTunes to update itself now because the last 3 times it did, it broke its link to the LittleWhiteBox Airport Express. Would I waste money on an iPhone ? Hell no. Would I buy a Mac ? I’d rather trust Windows.
Erm – was I ranting ? Lol
Mpg – I trust the figures more now 🙂 As it shows in the Fuelly badge on my sidebar, I’ve been getting just under 50mpg from my Lexus. That’s a bit below the claimed 69mpg figure … I’m a bit more confident now though, I filled up just outside Newark tonight and until I reached the 70mph parts, I was getting 70-72mpg. That’s fairly incredible for a petrol car, although it was mostly in 40mph speed limit areas where the car can occasionally glide along on the battery power only.
Back to work tomorrow. I may actually break a habit and go to bed before midnight cos I am actually feeling quite tired.
Ever feel like you’re on the threshold of something about to happen ?
I kinda feel like that at the moment.
Can’t really explain it though. I know there’s a few changes that are definitely going to happen at work sooner or later, although part of that is inevitable because no project lasts forever. One change has already happened with the car (novelty hasn’t worn off yet). That’s not it though. I have a feeling this incoming change will be far more wonderful than just mundane things.
I don’t tend to deal well with change though. My mind likes a certain amount of stability which extends even as far as preferring other people to be happy instead of me. Even where there’s some people I really fancy, if I know they’re happy with their partner that adds another little rock for that stability. In a way, I value their happiness over mine. It contributes to an “all is well in the world” feeling.
Tis a little lonely though.
Maybe I’ve been thinking about relationships (and lack of) a fair bit lately. Maybe I’ve met my dream girl already but didn’t actually realise it. Or I mentally locked out the possibility.
Who knows what the future will hold, what I do know is that there’s a certain someone out there who dominates my thoughts to the point where there’s barely any room for anything else. And as far as change goes, I have my granite like inertia but as soon as I commit to a change, I commit whole heartedly.
Oh, maybe my brain isn’t completely mushed – other stuff going on lately includes :
Birthdays ! Cheers to Bionicdwarf, Craziequeen and Aginoth for much appreciated birthday stuff.
Cakes ! Birthday tradition at work. And with us merging with another team, lots of new people not believing me when I let slip my true age :
Age – people still think I’m at least 5 years younger than I am. They want to know my secret …
Pooter – it’s working well, handling a 10 man Warcraft raid without dropping many frames at maximum detail. Outside of power blips and bad software it has shown Total stability.
Leg – is improving to the point where The Boss looked at it yesterday without her running away screaming (I had lots of fun there with Vampire Eyes after my nose got fixed)
Dvd stuff – I know where the problem is for definite now with those silent audio blips – it’s the amp. Meh.
Dvd stuff – Meh turns to more use for Xbox as dvd player 🙂
Old games – I have these working again with a solution that I might put on my techie blog at some point.
Health – leg has improved but I’ve been feeling like I’ve been hit by a truck. My muscles are also rebelling. Need to figure out what I’m needing to eat to counteract that, it’s usually a sure sign I’m missing something critical.
Right – time to hit the shower before a bit of gaming and music before sleep. And despite the theme of the first half of this post, that ain’t gonna be a cold shower. My back would never forgive me !