Plan B Time

I had a plan for tonight ...

It involved finishing up at work, getting home and ensconcing myself in front of the cricket. It was due to start at 2pm, so I wouldn't have missed too much of the game. However ... British weather intervenes ...

Seriously - who would schedule international cricket in England in September ? It's doomed ! Doomed I tell you ! Oh - this is the same people who scheduled back to back home and away series for England not once (India), not twice (New Zealand) but at least 3 times (Aussie). We want some variation in who we see England play.

At least that insanity breaks up after the Down Under leg of the Ashes tours. But this did tickle my grin :

(apologies if that appears multiple times - Google is throwing a wobbly)

So - no cricket. What was Plan B ?

Well - after a not so good day yesterday, today was a lot better. I managed to leave myself alone and felt a lot better through the day. I still ended up needing to walk with a semi limp to protect the skin around my left knee but ... much better today.

Oh - I also had more than my fair share of very fair ladies smiling at me through the day. It's not just the smiles though, it's the interaction. We try to look out for the people who pay our wages and we do that by keeping a certain spirit of cooperation going within the team. It's to make sure we're in the strongest position to get the most out of our contractors. They do it too.

That's probably a bit of an unfair statement though, as one aspect I especially concentrate on is to try and break down the barriers between everyone I work with on a project. I want everyone on the same page thinking towards Ultimate Shininess, whether they work for my organisation, my customer or whether they're the ones delivering to us. We all want Ultimate Shininess but we have different pressures that can get in the way.

Ultimate Shininess is a good thing - but you have to know exactly what you want. It can be something that's completely ordinary, it can be the best in the world at what it has to do. My Lexus CT is Shiny but there were other Lexus hybrids that were shinier in terms of performance. The GS450h has a 0 to 60 of about 7 seconds. That's shiny. But the car is also way too expensive to buy and insure and is bigger than what I'm comfortable with. It's Shiny ... but it's not exactly what I want.

And that sums up the main activity of this evening - looking at laptops (and not buying) again.

It was the last day of the PC World sale tonight, so off I pop for a wander over at the Mall. To be honest, there's not much I'm looking to buy at the moment. I've got the newly released blurays I want, the new albums I want are more than I'd want to pay for them and the laptops don't fit the requirement.

What am I looking for in a laptop ?

Cost - less than £500. We are getting gouged on prices ... the only way to avoid that is to Not Buy.
Screen resolution - at least 900 lines. All the 15" laptops are 768 lines, which isn't good enough.
Touchscreen ? don't care. Don't think I'd use it enough to justify the price.
Size ? Doesn't matter as long as the resolution is up to the job. Trouble is, to get 1080p in a 15" means Apple or a custom build.
Reliability ... this is a biggie, it's why Dell aren't being considered despite them having a 17" laptop which is definitely perfect* spec

*(there's just a small matter of a wifi card with questionable performance and considering that the number 1 job of my laptop is to stream music over wifi to my speakers ...)

So - tempting offer but I'll leave it.

There's another factor there - so many times we're convinced into parting with cash when we don't actually need to. Sale on sir, get it while it's cheap. Nope. I'll stick with what I have, it fits what I want better than your sale item and it has more life left in it.

Still. If I see £1 per Wispa Bites packet type sales, you know what's going to happen. It's inevitable. And yes, I did empty a shelf of them on Monday. (There were only 4 packets left on the shelf - honest)

Looking forward to a few things now :

Holiday time ! 7 more days of work then it's off to Devon for a week's chilling out. Although I may do a work visit on one day because I'll have a chance to see something that's Pretty Cool. It's work related so I can't say what it is (although I'll answer on the Facebook link post because that's locked down).
Listening to the Goldfrapp album, from what I've heard so far it's a good one.
Listening to the Rachel Sermanni album. Ditto. (I cracked cos of getting £2 worth of Amazon credit)
Watching the rest in the Iron Man movie series, Iron Man 3 hasn't arrived just yet.
The PHO event in October.
Being healthy again - it's improving, I just have to avoid "helping".

To close - I ended up in the Apple store for some reason. I was checking out the Macbooks.

Yes. Very Shiny indeed. Also very expensive. I said above : "Cost less than £500". Macbooks are seriously more expensive, although they do support the primary need that stops me looking to ditch Windows for Linux : iTunes.