Sleepypete's Pillow

(warning – long post, lots of rambling! Think I needed to talk through some stuff, not convinced it’s all “out there” yet either …)
There’s a lot of “scared” out there …

I was thinking and wondering about how other people see me. One random outside observation was “do I show fear ?”. Yep, true thought. Completely random observation but it got me thinking about stuff … I think it came from talking about what’s happening in the future as work’s going through changes at the moment. What happens when the current project work runs out of things to do ?

I prefer to worry only about things that I can change and accept the change that I can’t influence, while trying to make the best of what I have. One issue there though is the change that’s coming might end up being a change too far. We shall see.

I came to the conclusion that other people probably see me as fearless, as I refuse to allow fear to have any trace of control over me. That doesn’t mean the fear isn’t there, I’ve just quantified it, analyzed it and figured out an acceptable risk level. Risk can be fun too.

Talking risk – my fielding in cricket used to be pretty rubbish. I was scared of the ball. It’s a reasonable thing, as a cricket ball hurts like hell if you fumble what you’re doing around them. I’ve had amnesia from a broken nose and I’ve seen someone knocked out by one. I’ve regularly broken fingers and have a chipped elbow bone from one. I think I fractured my shin last year.

And yet I still play cricket (or I will if my leg recovers fully!). One question I asked myself was “Do I want to be ruled by fear or do I want to have fun?” I enjoy my cricket too much to chicken out. Another fear is the fear of injury, I have a pretty fragile body because I haven’t put the training in the harden it. I realised that good technique and preparation is the way to counter that fear of injury (although there is one ground I refuse to play at because it’s deadly). If you catch properly, it doesn’t hurt. Drop a catch, you’ll break something. Warm up and warm down well and your muscles will thank you. Drink fluid to replace what you lose and you’ll be less prone to cramp.

There – fear of injury confronted, analysed and accepted. It’ll still happen (like accidents) but preparation means the risk is lessened to the point where Fun > Risk.

Actually, I don’t think it’s a fear of injury, I think it’s fear of letting people down. Season before last, I had 2 injuries that took ages to heal : Groin strain plus the shin. The groin meant I wasn’t that agile (and it contributed to the shin injury) and the shin injury meant I lost a lot of speed and reaction. But – I managed it so I didn’t let anyone down and I did that by fielding even closer than most sane people would …

Ok. That’s enough about cricket. How about other fears …

I think that fear of failure is what dominates me. I love helping people out, I’ll break out of the routine stuff happily if a challenge comes along. But if the answer doesn’t come easy, then I’ll go nuts banging my head against the question until I figure it out.

Fear of change. This is one of those where I’ve accepted I can’t do much about the incoming changes at work because the people enacting them don’t listen to my immediate bosses. So – I figure out where I’m going to fit in and see where I can get best advantage for me and my work.

Fear of being isolated. Being alone is boring. And I hate being bored. But with the team situation at the moment, I feel somewhat isolated. I’m away from the techie side and in with a bunch of people who don’t care about the project I’m on. However,  It’s great being able to natter to (and hopefully make laugh) people like our wonderful Snow Queen. And there’s others on and around the project too who alleviate the sense of isolation. I suspect that’s because of helping them out with problems.

I think I’m a herd person at heart. I like being around people. Maybe that’s part of the “help people” thing.

There’s a few other fears too. I used to be scared of going down escalators. I think I’ve conquered that one. Same with a sense of vertigo. Not so sure about the “fear of losing control”, I had to walk away from an idiot last week who accused me of stealing milk. I think he got an education in manners from the line manager for his temporary placement.

I’m rambling aren’t I …

I think I’ve conquered or accepted most of my fears and I’m pretty good at hiding the rest. So people may think I’m “fear-less”. That said, I still have that fear of letting people down. And I’m pretty wary of the idiocy level on the roads these days, although Fun Of Driving > Fear Of Idiots. I also have a fear of having things stolen, don’t we all.

There’s a lot of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt out there. Some people even make a trade of rubbing in FUD to make money out of scared people. (I find that abhorrent).

If you have a friend who needs help to work through their fear, don’t make fun. What seems funny to you will be very real to them. Fear is paralysis. Help them through it. They’ll thank you later.

I just visited Amazon and ended up at the Elkie Brooks page … Ordering wish list items for people's birthdays can be dangerous : I always seem to be buying stuff for me too – lol 🙂

Cheers for the tip 🙂

"Sunshine after the Rain is a great double c.d from Elkie. It covers Elkie from her early days in the music business. All her hits, plus some great tracks from her days with the rock band "Vinegar Joe. It showcases Elkie great vocal ability.

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.