I’ve just added two reviews to the reviews section. Call of Duty 2 for the Xbox 360, and the Western Digital 320GB My Book External Hard Drive, which I recently purchased to backup all my data onto.
I’ve been feeling quite poor recently, after the New Years celebrations. I’ve felt unfit, and unwell as a result too, so I really need to get back into shape, not that I went on a mad drinking/eating spree during the festivities, but I did stop going to the gym for a solid 3 weeks and I can now feel the effects of that decision. This unwell feeling isn’t helped by the fact that my Laptop has died, while I awaited parts for my new PC (below). I was meant to use the lappy to write reviews while my main PC was out of action, but that plan backfired. So after spending well over £1100 on components for a new PC, I’ve not got to get the lappy repaired too. Great 
More Power!
I’ll possibly be away for a few days while I do a total rebuild on this PC, which is an ancient beastie. To be honest I don’t need to build a new rig, but given that Windows Vista arrives towards the end of January, I do want my machine to handle this bloated behemoth of an Operating System (OS). I’d roughly guess that about 90% of PC users who want this OS will end up doing a rebuild of their machine.
It’s slightly absurd that an OS should require so much resource power just to bloody run, but that’s just typical Microsoft. I’m going to stick to XP for as long as I can though, because I’ll be buggered if I’m paying £220 for the Home Premium Edition, I’ll wait for a price drop. I’m not too clear on the upgrade version yet as the info is a bit clouded. So this Friday 5th, my new PC parts will arrive along with XP Media Center 2005. Hopefully everything should go well, because I’ve got a heap of reviews needing checking.
This new rig will be mainly built for non gaming use, as I have the Xbox 360 for games now. So I’ll be doing video encoding, general office use, blogging/php work, photo editing and multimedia on this new rig for the most part. One half of me doesn’t want to spend the best part of £750 on new parts, given that this machine still does and can easily do anything that I normally throw at it. Hell XP flies on this. However it struggled with the Windows Vista Beta, although it was a beta. See ya soon!
So I’ll be moving from:
Abit NF7-S Motherboard
Barton 2500+ (running overclocked at 2.4ghz)
1.5GB of DDR3200 Ram
3×160GB Hitachi Deskstar Hard drives
Creative Audigy 2 Sound
Nvidia 6800GT (running dual 19" Widescreens)
Geforce 2MX PCI (running one 20.1" Widescreen)
To:
Abit AW9D-Max Motherboard (its got blue leds!)
Intel Core 2 DUO 2.4ghz (will be overclocked)
2GB of DDR2 PC6400 Ram (further 1gb to be added later)
1×160GB Hitachi Deskstar (got enough external storage as it is)
Creative Audigy 2 Sound (I’ll stick with this for now)
Gainward Geforce 7900GT (to drive my dual 19" screens)
Did 2006 fly past for you?
Well, it’s that time again. Time to reflect back on yet another year. I’m quite shocked at how fast the year has progressed. Mind you, I guess you all hear the same thing being said every single year. I still remember everything I did this same time last year, in minute detail too.
This time last year, I wrote down my New Years Resolutions on this blog. Now looking at those 6 ‘resolutions’ if you could even call them that, I’ve managed to do all but two. I still haven’t worked out how cows make milk (what state of mind was I in when I came up with that?!), and lastly I’ve failed to make any use of me camera. I was really hoping to take scenic shots of areas around London, and Scotland especially but I can’t find the time to get away from work.
I’ve not given much thought to my resolutions for 2007. Is there even any need to I ask? Well here are five of mine.
- Get myself my dream Toyota Celica and stop using public transport
- Ease up on my mad spending sprees
- Consider moving out of London or the Uk
- Make sure my mad cousin Ayesha (sitting with me) passes her uni course. It’s important to me!
- See my family over in San Francisco. I’ve not met hardly any of them.
I’ve spent some time today just reflecting back on everything that has happened in 2006. I’ve had a lovely year for the most part. Work wise things have been great, and I couldn’t be happier. I’ve got a solid circle of friends who always keep my spirits high at work and I’ll miss them horribly as I move to a new section at work mid Jan 2007. I’ve no idea how long I’ll remain at work because the lease for my workplace expires towards the end of 2007, and there’s strong rumours that my lab may be moved to Canada, Toronto. I first mentioned this last
December when I first heard about it.
On another note, I’ve seen more close friends leave the Uk, I only have about 4-5 friends left residing here now. I’ve seen two friends, close to my heart move away from my life, which saddens me whenever I think about them 
They know who they are, and they’re probably reading right now. If you are, I miss you and I wish you all the best for 2007. As for everyone else reading this, what are your resolutions?
I’m being pestered by Ayesha to take her to London tomorrow for the New Years celebrations however I’m not sure, over the past years they keep clamping down on areas you can celebrate in over there, so its less enjoyable then the past years, also drinks cost a ton of cash. I’m also worried about security given the media events of today (30th Dec).
So that’s all I have to say. I hope everyone has had a lovely Christmas, and have a joyous 2007. I know I am I’m looking forward to it 
What celebrating will you be doing this year hmmm?
I think I’ve scared away my frequent visitors with all the Xbox 360 chat I’ve been doing recently of late! So to bring the people back, I ask you readers - What will you be up to this Xmas? Christmas is here once again, my favourite time of the year!
Everyone is happy, joyous and all that crap and…no wait. Everyone is still flippin miserable, not one damn shop out there in London has got a Baby Jesus in a manger display in their shop windows. It’s Sale this, and Sale that. Has everyone actually forgotten the meaning of Christmas and what it represents? Now I’m not a religious person, actually I’m not religious one bit but Christmas still means a lot to me, so it just gets to me when I don’t see stuff like that.
I always get chirpy around this time of the month, although I’m still amazed at how fast the year has progressed by. I mean, I still remember in detail exactly what I did last Xmas…drunk and sickly for the most part. This year I’ve been hoping to go to Hannover, Germany to visit my pals over there but I think I’ve left it a bit late to get my ticket, let alone make quick preparations to leave.
I just don’t know what to do this Xmas. Most people spend it with friends and family. All my friends have more or less immigrated out of the Uk, so that’s one idea gone down the pan. I don’t really have any proper family here, so that’s another thing out the way. I could spend it with my parents but then again I did that last year! I might call some work colleagues over for Xmas instead and have a get together dinner party or something. Right now given the situation, it doesn’t seem so bad.
So dear readers, what will you be up to this Crimbo?
I’ve been looking everywhere for one of this Xmas’s hottest presents, but can’t find one anywhere! I’m off to France at the end of this month for two days so I’ll be scouring the stores and hypermarkets over there for any chance of pre-ordering the thing. This is a plea for help, Elmo must be found! Seriously lol, if anyone knows where I could pre-order one (apart from amazon uk) I’d be most grateful
While Taz’s ISP is down, she can’t reply to this, let alone read it! So let me state that today she admitted to actually enjoying loving listening to the new Paris Hilton tune! (prefer her videos to be honest) Oh how I’ll mock you for weeks upon end now woman! I thought I was bad being a fan of Phil Collins…
Last night I underwent what can only be described as a stressful 2hrs. I decided to run a Chkdsk (disk scan) on my PC’s hard disk, something I’d not done in a while. Now things were going well, until Chkdsk reported a colossal problem on the partition that Windows XP itself resides on. Without any intervention, the bugger decided to ‘fix’ the problem itself resulting in my entire windows partition rendered almost completely unusable. Sometimes I wish I actually used ghost to backup my data but I prefer to install stuff the manual way.
I ended up doing one of the fastest XP reinstalls I’ve ever done, and now have most of my apps restored, as well as my hardware devices up and running too. I’m quite lucky I didn’t actually lose any critical data because I keep them on a separate partition. It’s quite disconcerting to see such an important utility like Chkdsk do its scan, with the user not knowing weather his/her system will be usable after it’s finished it’s dirty work. Anyway, my PC is back up and running now. I’ve just got minor applications to install over the next few days.
I tell you, just a few hours without Internet access was quite a frightening prospect for me. Not having access to my email, this blog, MSN, IRC, online banking, online billing as well as the various forums I read on a daily basis left me very empty and somewhat lost. Moral of this story? Back up yer sodding data and avoid blonde bimbo’s!
Out of sheer boredom this morning, I decided to shove the ass end of the teddy bear that sits on my boss’s desk, onto the end of a factory standard drill…
The result as I hit the power switch? The bear span round at about 10000000 rpm which resulted in much hysterics in our office. It then worked its way loose and flew out the window at 100mph and almost knocked out two pigeons who were having an early morning chat on some big pipes. Yay!
PS. 1x Teddy was slightly harmed during this experiment.
High! Not updated things in a while, mostly due to being occupied with the World Cup taking up almost all my time, as well as me about to become an uncle, along with work/promotion matters getting in my way. This week has been more then hectic!
The Uk has been gripped by World Cup fever, as has every other country I can surmise, except England, despite having a good team on paper just haven’t gelled together as well as everyone had hoped. So far they’ve yet to put on a solid performance to raise everyone’s spirits over here. The pathetic recent second half performance against Sweden which saw them pile 3mins of solid pressure during the last few minutes of the game showed how poor and disorganised the England squad were as they let in a goal to bring the game into a 2-2 draw. To add to the misery someone stole the two St.Georges flags on my fathers new car so he’s angry…very angry, infact you wouldn’t like him when he’s angry.
The weather over here can only be described as ludicrous of late. It’s hot as hell most of the time, and I’ve got a tan…which makes me even more browner then I already am. Things became so absurd that the road surface in some areas of my town of Harrow began to melt, which resulted in half the town being closed off for a few days. I ended up jumping off the bus to walk home and instead stepped into a patch of melted tar on the road
Yesterday, my new Altec Lansing FX6021’s arrived. I’d slightly made a balls up because I underestimated how large the satellites would be! These things are so tall that they dwarf my 20" LCD! They sound incredible though, thanks to three amplifiers powering three pairs of drivers in each satellite. It’s InConcert technology is stunning and the audio is so loud, clean and feels so tight!
Just to conclude my quick bit of babble, after recently being promoted at work again, I received my new paycheck yesterday…all I can say is ‘life feels good!’
