Landing the Trekking

Hello everyone,

It felt like this today when I emerged !

Although a lot of that was self inflicted wounds again after spending maybe an hour too long in Star Trek Online yesterday. I've been enjoying that game, despite its short comings.

Every game has shortcomings (I've gone from hyped to a Nope for the new Star Wars Squadrons game) but we'll stay with our favourites because of what they do well. In Star Trek Online's case, it's a mix of the starship combat stuff, combined with the Star Trek stuff on the ground. They've managed to make it fairly star trekky too, although perhaps more in the Discovery era or DS9 rather than TNG.

However, it has that MMO playstyle again which can wreak havoc with the old injuries I carry and in particular, the shoulder. I felt twinges start up, which I should have listened to ... definitely when they were becoming more intense. And then I stay 30 minutes longer than that in the game and I'm paying for that today. Oh well. It's just moderate pain, which is ok.

I have been greatly enjoying the game though and moved on another 5 levels since that start of the session yesterday.

One thing I haven't done is use the new Elite internet spaceship for anything more than following the start of Drew Wagar's latest tour :

There we go. That's the Icarus Rising, a Mamba class heavy combat ship. I like the design there, there is a huge gun amidships aft, two large guns alongside the cockpit and two little guns up front. They're all on the top side of the ship, whereas the Fer-de-Lance has its big gun on the lower side. (It means that if you're chasing someone in a pitching up motion, all guns can be brought to bear). There's also a huge amount of visibility and the only angle with more than a minimal profile is the top and bottom.

It has great potential ...

... to be used for shooting things as well as following Cmdr Wagar down to a planet in loose formation. That was the only time I got into the same instance as the main group though sadly.

And then there's other ships in a universe long ago and far, far away ... which I've been ignoring in favour of :

There we go. The ships in the spacedock looked great, no idea what they were though. The one to the lower right looks like an improved Defiant class and I think the upper one is actually two. One has a weird massive nacelle and I think the other has underslung nacelles like the Miranda and Nebula class. Looks like there's an Ambassador class (Enterprise C) down there too. I'm current in the Constitution class Dragon Spirit :

And the game would give be another ship at level 20. (Unless I gave them money for a special ship but I don't intend to do that). It is a bit odd though seeing that ship being a main ship in a game that has its main elements start in 2409. The old Enterprise is a bit ... ancient there.

Outside of that, cricket watching was curious yesterday with it being the end of the domestic season with the T20 blast finals day, delayed from Saturday due to rain. I don't intend to watch much IPL. It's a predatory influence on all cricket, to the cost of the game as a whole. And some of the commentators should not be allowed behind a microphone due to their attitudes. It's sometimes telling who gets allowed on to the Sky commentary teams here and who aren't invited back after a guest spell. No, not impressed with much about IPL although English cricket needs to learn from the overseas leagues but not having the finals day months or so away from the main league. Get the competition done in a single block so that the specialist T20 only players can be around for the finals as well as the league, the teams that make it to the finals tend to lose their overseas stars which makes the competition be a bit false.

But there are other issues with the game as well at the moment, although the standard in general has improved since I started with a lot of innovation coming in. I was playing when KP was doing his switch hit (and could play that shot), I'd have been really tempted to try out ramp shots if I was still playing now, if only because pulling those shots off would have hugely amusing consequences for the state of mind of the opposition. If you can knock the opposition out of thinking clearly, then you have an advantage. I used to wear a floppy hat while batting, to give bowlers a target ... you could say that the person encouraging bowlers to aim at his head wasn't the one who was thinking clearly :-D.

And then you shake hands at the end of the game and step away from all the on field psychology stuff.

Landing ? I did a little bit of the Lego therapy over the weekend ...

4D looking suitably impressed there.

However .... After that horrific example of shameless temptation, I better leave that series of pictures for another day as I can see from the scroll bar (it gets littler as the post gets longer) that this one has hit that Certain Length.

Obligatory Outside World Stuff :

Numbers have been going up again here, we're in that second wave that means we should be in lockdown already ... I'm ok. Put that trace app on your phone so you have a bit of warning to tell you if you've been around someone who's been exposed, watch out for idiots and look after yourselves. And that can be reaching out to people, being a Good Person in the communities like I try and be at work and with the various discord communities. If you find yourself doomscrolling in Twit/Book, just step away from them. People talk about fear of missing out but I doubt whether you'll miss out on much there and social media can and will cause a massive hit to sanity. Don't engage with the idiots.

But if you need a bit of help, reach out. We are in extraordinary times. The last time the world saw a pandemic like this is 100 years ago with the Spanish Flu. Be well. Stay safe.

PS I think I recognised a similarity ...

That's the star fighter from Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. I wonder if it inspired the Mamba ? Two big engines, very slim rectangular profile, incredible visibility.

Mining, Reading, Working

Hello everyone,

What have I been up to for the week ? Feels like time is flying by still at the moment.

I've actually turned the Seti sums back on again, because it's cooled down enough here to be putting the jumpers back on.

Let's see. Work's been fairly intense lately and it really should have been a bit more intense. I should actually be in a different country at the moment under quarantine ahead of a little period away. But I'm not, partly due to physical condition, partly due to mental condition.

My head's ok now, my mental state picked up considerably after I was stood down from going away. But there is that nagging sense that I've let the mental issues win this time. Some of those issues come from the frustration I was having with arranging my end of the trip. (Arranging for me seemed to be much more of an unknown than the other people - can't go in to why here) A big one was the prospect of over a month away from home. I get anxiety when I'm away. Some of it was the conditions I'd be going into. Again, can't say why here.

What caused the decision to be made though was that the mental issues were causing tensions that were manifesting in physical conditions. My back has mostly repaired itself now from when it tried to decouple itself and I've been back in the internet spaceship piloting seat as well (more later). Mining has been a good activity there, feels productive. I haven't attempted a shooter or MMO style game for a good while though, if the spaceships are close to aggravating the wrist, then the shooter / MMO games are likely to activate that issue again.

Oh and I also needed to take a moment when I was picking up shopping last week and my hips were  getting crunchy ...

Things do feel a little like making excuses though and I'm not sure if I like that. That's one thing about mental issues, the person with them will feel as if they've let themselves down ... which just acts as negative reinforcement.

It's ok to talk about the mental issues. In fact, I'd heavily encourage it. In being able to express those issues with a few people, it's let me bounce back quite a bit from when they were affecting me so much that the tension was manifesting as the physical issues.

Reading ?

After abandoning David Brin's Existence after 100 tedious pages, I've been reading A Wizard's Guide To Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher. More to come about that in a later post (when I've finished reading it !) but I enjoyed its first 36 pages so much, I had to share part of why I was finding it a fun read :

It's been light hearted fun so far, very readable and the early parts quite happily drew me in to the story and I was wanting to continue despite it getting late.

Existence was a bit different. The first couple of chapters were ok ... and then we hit one with a travel journalist experiencing the Mixed Reality rich areas. That was tough to read, not for subject but for readability. I don't like the Wall of Text tendency that I can have, this was Wall of Text to the extreme. And then it goes into intermission sections between chapters, some of which were a talk show type set up that I was essentially just skipping over. There's a lot of self indulgent stuff in there, it was distracting heavily away from any semblance of plot and I gave up on it after 100 pages, perhaps 15/20 of which felt plot related.

Internet spaceships ? I've been mining again ...

Mining is a bit broken though, so fairly soon I'll be switching ship again. ZoomNarr is potentially next, although I'd like to open up a little more engineering first for weight savings ...

That'll be what Zoomnarr looks like and I'll be aiming at around 3 hours to get to the Galactic Core in this one. My record is 3 hours 6 minutes ...

I'm not switching ships due to a lithobraking incident though ... honest. (All the dents came out from this planetary approach).

Gotta say, the colour scheme of Hand of Caledorn was fitting in rather nicely with the surroundings she was mining in. However, mining has suffered a little lately in the metagame area. Low Temperature Diamonds were the main highly lucrative item, these are now scarcer than scarce. As a knock on to that, the Painite I've been mining has lessened in value as the market saturates. So ... time to test something new :

Mining with explosives ! Charges set ...

BOOM TODAY ! (Well. Yesterday.)

Hmm. More boom needed.

That's better. The idea is that you use the seismic charge launcher to embed explosives into the rock and then ...

Pick up the goodies exposed from the insides, find the high buyers and profit. I cut the session short a little because I was struggling to fill the hold ... and also because the wrist issues were threatening again. Still, it was a nice 128m credits from the session although that took 4 hours to get, rather than the 2 hours that a Painite session currently netting 121m would take.

So I think I'll leave the mining aside for a little bit. Next up will be a brief combat session again in a Mamba. Not the best ship but the only useful role I can see for it is mining. A Beluga Passenger Liner will happen at some point ... and also the Anaconda class explorer ship Searching For Dragons will go round the galaxy. That'll be all of the ships owned at the that point, although the Admiral Luperza hasn't been out of the hangar yet.

We'll see. Perhaps even a little FFXIV as well, although that was a catalyst for the wrist issues so I may have to just cold turkey drop that game.

We shall see ! Apart from that, Le Mans is coming up, having been moved to September. Nurburgring 24 hour is the week after. I'll be watching someone down the field and hoping they do well. It's boring to support the winners. Better to urge on the cars that have had terrible luck at some point and you can watch them battle back through the field after repairs. I was doing that with the Lexus cars last year, sadly they won't be at the Nurburgring even this year. But there's a custom sports car, several GT86s and some Aston Martins to keep an eye on.

Should be good.

Stay safe everyone, be well.

Toasty !

Summer's arrived over here ...

Yep. Check out the thermometer.

That's one of my fridge magnets, in the kitchen which is on the sun facing side of my house at this time of day. It won't be that hot in my main room but according to my graphics card, it's still about 6 degrees C above normal.

Toasty indeed !

Lots going on in the world again, after a few stories erupted over the social medias this weekend. I'm not going to go into those though, the stories of the people who have taken steps forward on social media are their stories, it's not for me to retell them.

But ... believe and support, that's what we must do.

Our virus situation over here in the UK seems to be easing and the lockdown is steadily lifting. Part of me thinks that's about a fortnight too early though. Lots of people are still getting the virus and loved ones are still being lost.

It'll be good to head out for shops, wanders, chats with friends and doing cinemas again but a lot of me thinks it's still a bit soon. I have been seeing the sights in other ways though ... but I'll get to the internet spaceships later.

I've been enjoying a new toy/tool. It's called Clip Studio, it was recommended by the lovely Tashnarr (see link in right hand column) and it's another drawing package. I seemed to get on with it far better than I do with Gimp (this one feels like it wants to fight you) and Corel Painter Essentials (this one made it awkward to do revisions). Clip Studio made it super easy to produce a reasonably complicated message for someone's birthday on Monday (happy birthday again!) and I've since embarked on a crusade to make a Dwagon Alphabet. More on that in a later post. It's a bit toasty at the moment to make an L dwagon, which is the letter I need to make a Sleepy. (need a few more too)

Internet spaceships ?

The travels at the weekend took me to a black hole ... (As always, click for bigger)

I'm a bit away from the Core now, so there aren't quite as many spectacular stars around unless ...

You find just the right angle ... That''s the nebula seen through the black hole.

I did a bit more circling ... until the galaxy ribbon was lined up.

And looking backwards towards the black hole. It wasn't just black holes though ...

Shiny planets !

More volcanoes.

Mysterious satellites ...

Are we allowed here ?

I investigated a group of 4 abandoned planetary outposts ...

With treasure ! I do like how the galactic ribbon is shooting out of that promontory in the background too. Like a Space Cannon.

It'll be good to have a look around these places when the upcoming (next year) walk on planets expansion is released.

Time to move on though. I docked up at one of the fleet carriers overnight (and accidentally repaired the paint - oops !)

Today's short session saw me checking out the Goliath moonlet ...

And landing for the night on the David moonlet. This is a pair of moons with very tall mountains ... I'll have to see if I can get a pic closer to the horizon in my next session so that the gas giant comes out a bit more from behind the two mountains in the distance.

That's it for this week though. Bit bad to leave it over a week between postings ... I got back into the Idle Champions game which I think was having an effect on my mental condition. Brain was thinking more about strategies in that game instead of looking at the more fun creativity. I've put it away again now ...

Stay safe everyone, be well. Support your friends when they need it.

Thinking techie thoughts tonight

I've been thinking about techie purchases again ...

Well, it's actually been sparked off by seeing comments about really (daftly) expensive gaming PCs and I thought I'd check the market again. One thing about getting techie stuff, it's good for the mind to just completely ignore the market for at least 3 months, preferably 6, after acquiring upgrades. Because if you'd just held on a few more weeks, you could have picked up something cheaper and better.

Personally, I think I did ok because I pulled the upgrade trigger for Meltdown (this PC) a couple of weeks after AMDs excellent new Ryzen 3000s came out. I'd had enough time to see if they were any good for performance and heating but managed to get bits before the stock ran out. Don't be an early adopter if you can help it, let someone else beta test the stuff first.

This post has two parts to it though ... There's a few items I'm looking into acquiring relatively soon, although not while we're in lockdown conditions. The items can wait and it's not fair on an already overloaded postal service.

Before I go diving in to naming companies though - disclosure note : I've never had anything provided by a hardware manufacturer, this is all stuff I've bought.

The bits I want are keyboard, flightstick and a graphics card.
Keyboard - this one is double bouncing more and more. I should really take the case off to see how much of a clean it needs (probably a lot). I'm looking at Logitech, Corsair and the own brand one from the local computer store (you know, the big one that shall not be named) actually feels good too. The own brand one is around £50, the Logitech and Corsair mechanical keyboards are around £100. It's worth it to go up the scale to mechanical because they feel really nice to type on.

Flightstick - probably more Logitech, with the X52 that they inherited from Saitek :

It has many buttons. This is a bit unnecessary though because my Thrustmaster Hotas X is still pretty strong and my hands mostly get on well with it. That's the real issue, the tendons that control the outside of my right hand are getting sore more and more lately.

And the last one is a graphics card. I have a nVidia 1060 3GB which was still offering great performance with Mass Effect Andromeda (probably my most stressing game) and it makes Elite Dangerous look amazing. But it's 3 year old technology in an area where performance is still improving fast. The issue here is that I look at £180-£220 graphics cards, think anything more than that is overpriced and there is nothing interesting in that range. The 1650 cards are typically £170, these would be a step backwards. The 1660 cards start at £210, this isn't an upgrade worth the money. The potential card is the 2060, at £310. I think not.

The 1060, 1650, 1660 and 2060 numbers there are all for the generation of cards and how high up the range they are. The 16x0 cards came after the 10x0 cards and the 2060 has extra performance bits included.

I'll be holding on to my cash for now. Everything else is just fine. Monitor's great, the Ryzen chip powering the desktop is excellent, I have future proofing for years and the (Logitech) mouse does me great too.

New techie stuff is always nice though.

But how about if we go money no object ... What would I actually get ? This won't be the absolute max components though. There are things I wouldn't go up to for reasons. For comparison purposes, Meltdown ended up costing about £900, not including the graphics card.

The core of all machines is the processor, motherboard and memory. With the benefit of knowing how good the AMD chips are now, it has to be :
AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X 32 core (64 thread) at £1,957. Yep. Bit daft and not actually the best chip. There's a 64 core chip as well, the big difference is speed. The 32 core chip goes at 3.7GHz, the 64 core chip goes at 2.9GHz (it's also £3,700). Considering that most applications will see most of those cores being idle, go for the higher GHz.
This has a TRX40 socket which tells you which motherboard you need. In this case, I'm looking at the Asus ROG Zenith II Extreme costing £770. This is "E-ATX", which determines what cases you can look at.
Memory - the specs tell you what to get as well here, in this case the cpu page says it wants DDR4-3200. (Double Data Rate 4x running at 3.2GHz). You could get faster ... but you wouldn't get much benefit from that. Systems aren't held up by memory, they're held up by hard discs although if you buy silly amounts of memory, the spare will be used to hold info instead of going to the slow hard discs all the time. Memory comes in sticks and it's best to get matched pairs (they work in parallel). I'm kinda surprised that the 32GB I got from Kingston last year is still £180.

Polish that core off with a nVidia 2080 Ti card costing ... £1,100 and you've got the core of an incredibly fast machine that costs over 4x what mine did and it's not complete yet.

Keeping the budget honest means you have cash left over for other things, like Lego Star Destroyers (got my eye on the new A-Wing), movies, going out to catch up with lovely people (hopefully soon although +3weeks from now at least) and marshmallows from the internet people. Budgeting well means you can enjoy more stuff, rather than looking at just one megashiny thing.

I digress ... Every PC needs a case to go in, plus a few more things :

This looks all right and it doesn't have stuff I'm not interested in like flashy distracting lights. That's an E-ATX box from Phanteks and apparently has 5/5 for its review score. The case was the only thing I got burned on for Meltdown and that was from lack of research. £95 for this case and it looks like it's got the necessary like fans front and back and drive bays that I haven't used in Meltdown's box.
A computer needs a power supply and it's Essential that you get a decent quality one. Power supplies do implode and the budget ones will damage components as they go bang. This system will likely gobble the power more too, so it's a 1200W unit from Corsair costing £240. In comparison, Meltdown has I think 750W costing £75.
Cooling is important too, we want something big and metally to keep this cool. I'm looking at the Noctua NH-D14 dual 140mm fan cooler costing £75. The bigger the fans, the more diameter they have and the better the cooling. They can spin slower as well, which means you don't hear them and that's really important. (Normally, I'd look at £40 on a cooler).

Notice a lack of water cooling ... Cooling with water came back into fashion when kits appeared which made it very easy to implement. But. You still have fans on a radiator that make noise, you have a pump which makes noise and the fluid is subject to biogrowth which can gum up the works if the biocidal additives degrade and become ineffective. Having a water cooling system go wrong is an incredibly expensive disaster. If air cooling goes wrong, you'll see it on the monitoring applications first and it'll fail just as crashes that shouldn't get as far as physical damage.

Air cooling is maintenance free (outside of occasional dusting), water cooling is not.

Storage is next and I'm going to go for a slightly Mad Scientist solution ... I only use 1 set of drives in my machines because I like to live dangerously with reliability but there is a technique called RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Drives) which lets you duplicate data across multiple drives so if one goes bang, the data is available on the other one. But ... there's a catch. If the drives all come from the same batch and are used the same way, they're likely to fail at the same time. So :

SSDs (need these for speed) : Crucial 1TB M2 drive costing £110, plus a backup from Kingston costing £171.
Conventional (slower but masses of data space) : 6TB drives from Toshiba (£200) and Western Digital (£270). These are more expensive than most 6TB because they spin faster, which means less time to get to the data and it's quicker to read it off the disc. (This might be a moot point due to the electronics)

What's left ?

Keyboards and mice are heavily up to the individual preference but I'd steer people towards mechanical keyboards and gaming mice with reviews that say they stay reliable. Around £150. That sounds a huge amount ... but they're how you interact with the machine, which is the most important aspect of all. It's worth it to spend more here.
Flightstick depends on what you want to use it for. There's loads of toys and addons you can get if you're into flight sims but I'd be happy with the £50 Hotas X or the £130ish X52s.
Monitor is a key one too. The things to look for here are "IPS Panel", which makes the monitor have a crisper image that can be seen from more angles. I'm very happy with my 24" 1440p monitor from AOC, if they're any bigger than that physically, I struggle to see the sides of them. Yep, I think a monitor can be Too Big :-D. It would probably cost around £200 to replace mine. Again, it's worth spending extra here because it's how you interact with the machine. I'd actually look at having two screens here, one for game, one for everything else although I'd need a bigger desk too.
You'll want speakers or a headset as well, again this one's up to the reader. Personally, I have a cheap set of desk speakers that do a great job. Headsets are definitely and literally what fits on your head !

It's good to look after your hands and eyes.

And the last bit is that you will need a Windows 10 licence ... as it's a pain to try and play games on Linux. This is £110.

And that all adds up to ...

Way too much. Don't spend that much on a computer ! Spend only to what you need, save money for more important things.

Stay safe, be well !

Hello again world, it's been a while again

Crikey ! Almost a month again since my last post.

I think that's the longest I've gone between posts since I had the break between 2006 and 2008. There's been a few things going on ... Let's see. But first ! Thumbnail pic. Thumbnail pic is very important.

Yep. It's a chocolate dwagonsaur and it was glorious. When I saw it in the service station on Saturday, I knew I'd seen my latest Easter Avatar. And like the marshmallow advent calendar, I got to munch him too.

This post looks like it's kinda going to go a bit backwards in time but Saturday saw me in the Gloucester services again. The one with an amazing farm shop ... Sherbets and bonbons may have jumped in to the shopping basket as well as the chocolate dwagonsaur. Oh and I suspect their canteen gave me some hidden extras that saw me going back and forward to the loo on Saturday evening. All ok now. But I'm waiting until next weekend before I attack the Pineapple chunks again.

Or it could have been that ^.

Oh - Gloucester services, on the way back from getting the car serviced and people attempting to sell me another new car. I've only had this one for a year ! To be honest, I was getting a bit irritated by it, which is a first for that place. One thing that sets Lexus apart is how they treat their customers and I thought trying to get me into another new car after just a year was a bit much.

The car they were looking to get me in to was their fairly new Lexus UX which, thinking about it, nope. It feels like they've let the designers run with ideas that shouldn't necessarily have been let out of the design school. The CT was a genuinely luxury small car that combined great practicality too. It's only real flaw is that the Prius powertrain isn't powerful enough. The IS suits me just fine, it's a comfy cruiser, fairly minimalist but that also means it's uncluttered. The UX is more compressed and a few bits of its design don't really make sense. It has more toys ... but it's also more cluttered and I think less intuitive on the inside. It also has a really high boot floor. I don't use the boot that much but I do like not having to lift things too high to get them in to the boot. Oh and I'll also change boots/shoes (work stuff) with my feet on the boot sill and I think that sill was high enough to endanger trousers.

So - Stan* is all serviced for another year, tyres are all pumped up and the pointiness is back in the steering. All good. I think the tyres were steadily going down, which led to bad fuel economy on the last few tanks. And some sponginess in the steering too, which I didn't notice until it was gone. (Small gradual changes tend not to be noticed !)

*Car names ! Not all of my cars have had names, just the well liked ones. There have been two Buggies ... The Astra and the Puma (I'll get back to the Puma) were both well loved Buggies. The CT I had was the Tardis cos it was just the right blue :

Shiny. The first IS I had was the Grey Ghost, because it was really quiet and grey. This also happened to be the nickname of USS Enterprise in World War 2. So when the next grey IS arrived, it became Alpha. Because NCC 1701A was almost identical to NCC 1701. And then following that meme, NCC 1701B was an Excelsior class Enterprise and Stan Lee (RIP) loved using the word Excelsior. NCC 1701C was an Ambassador class Enterprise, only seen for one of the best ST:TNG episodes (Yesterday's Enterprise). What ambassador could it be ?

Puma ... here's a proper Puma :

I had that car for I think 7 years. The car itself was a big upgrade from the Fiesta, built on the same chassis but given a lot of improvements. It was a lovely little sports coupe and on one occasion, pulled a "MOMMY MOMMY IT'S A SPACESHIP" from a very young passing by boy, which pulled an ear to ear grin from me hearing it. The new Puma is a small SUV. That's heresy. At least pull out a new name !

I've been recovering from jet lag too. A significant amount of the time since the last post was spent in Canada ... Yep. Different country ! (Not counting Wales and Scotland there ...) Different continent ! 3 different time zones ... Or was it 4 time zones. Might have been. I didn't switch to Toronto time on the way back although I did do Ottawa time. Or was Ottawa on the final location time.

I have to be a little careful about that final location because I've already had a "I know exactly where that is !" comment from a picture that went on a discord. A local identified pretty much the exact spot I was standing in. It didn't have anything work related on it (the pic was a moody shot towards a bridge, illuminated by the morning sun) but the Canada trip is definitely a case of potential 1+1 = 3 and you have to be really careful about that on the internet.

So what I mean there is : You know the country. If I said the city, you know the dates as well. And if you saw things in the news about unusual events going on ... then you guess what I was working on. That's not information I want aggregating up to be on the interwebs. Because once it's on the interwebs, it doesn't come off, despite what GDPR and Right to Delete would like to safeguard.

But yeah ! Canada ! Enjoyed my time there, although I did have what could be described as dislocation shock for a bit. The people are great and the reputation that Canadians have for Total Politeness is very much deserved. They're a lovely bunch. All of them ! And very patient with the Brit in town looking to not make too many mistakes and social errors.

When I arrived though, it snowed. They seem amazing about attacking the snow and clearing the roads sufficiently for driving around on them with no impact ... but the snow had just come down when I arrived and the 100km/h multi lane highways were maybe 50km/h single lane of ice. And there may have been a 4 wheel understeer skid coming out of the airport too which woke me up a bit ! Maybe "woken up" is the wrong word there, more like "made me sit up and pay attention". I don't drive on extreme ice much but it just needs an adjustment of mindset and a lot of chilling out to avoid getting in trouble on the ice. 4x4 helps too.

Curiosities about Canada :
Road signs are easier to understand, although I pretty much blanked most of the main ones due to relying on satnav.
They love their flavoured coffee. I see this as a good thing, although it has pretty much confirmed an issue I have with Ginger. It must upset a problem with my insides.
I really miss buttery popcorn. It is lush. (And 1917 is a fantastic film I got to see there in time away from work).
Pedestrians are king. People stop for you in the designated crossing areas. GB could not be more different there. I was in danger of being run over again tonight by someone who wasn't looking where she was driving in a car park.
They really love their flavoured coffee.
Biscuits come in boxes, not packets.
They have Mini Eggs too ...
4 hours of time zone difference can mess you up when you get back !
All the sidewalks and roads were clear of snow by the end of the day after it snowed. Huge amounts of snow around that mind ...

Huge pile of snow !

I've probably said this already but the people were lovely.

I'd happily recommend Canada as a place to go when it's the actual season. Maybe half the places in the more touristy area were closed, because we went there at a specific time of year to get the conditions we needed.

I was rationing my energy somewhat and attempting to avoid too much time zone shock though, so I didn't get out too much around the actual work stuff. But it was a good couple of weeks out there :-).

Last thought - I'm being slightly wary of coronavirus, although I'm not taking any precautions over and above the baseline of minding my sneezes and washing the hands. I saw a very small number of people in the airports wearing masks, plus one of the cabin crew wore a mask on the way back. I'm not sure if she was wearing the mask for protection from bugs or to stave off potential discrimination. She was a pretty Asian lady, which made me think there was potential for Bad People to think Asian = Carrier. That's bad. We should be better than that as a people. Anyway, she was lovely and got the smiles from me.

Be good to people. The Canadians are lovely. Don't trust Samsung ... but that's a different story.

(Ok, ok, I had my Galaxy S7 out there with a temporary SIM card, had to turn data off on it because it was munching my credit and ... it was still using tiny amounts of data, at a much reduced rate but still enough to trigger the minimum 7 cents charge, with the data OFF.)

I have bonbons. Cya !

PPS Books read while out there : Murderbot Chronicles 1 by Martha Wells - short, great. Much enjoyed. Tiamat's Wrath, book 8 of the Expanse by James S.A. Corey - another excellent book in the series that moved the story on in dramatic fashion. Wondering how they'll end it in the next book. A Big Ship At The End Of The Universe by Alex White - space scifi mixed in with a healthy dose of Magic. The premise was new, different, odd and ... actually worked extremely well in this book. I've wishlisted the next two in the series and will read them at some point. And I've made a start on Old Man's War by John Scalzi (mutter car mutter salesmen mutter interrupting reading mutter mutter mutter)

Long time no post

Hello everyone,

(checks clock) 2 weeks since last post ! Haven't gone anywhere ... yet. Although I will have a week and a half away on business stuff. May post things while I'm out there .... depends on data. What's been happening since I've been quiet ?

Random stuff time !

Stellaris happened. I finished off the game where I was going for the Suffer Not The Alien achievement. (Murder everything as a fanatic xenophobe). Got the target ... but not the achievement. Bit annoyed about that but it's just a game. I started up another game, just to get the achievement yesterday. Hopefully it does, it'll have to wait though until I'm back from For'n Parts. The reason the achievement didn't happen was a bug ... a remnant of an event was left over and was blocking it.


Mass Effect Andromeda is also still happening ...

Pretty.

I've been having fun with this one since coming back to it. It's perhaps a bit too long, although that means there is tonnes to do in the game. There's also lots of interpersonal chat that goes on amongst the crew.

Windy here this weekend. I really should have acquired my fuzzy goodies yesterday but wasn't feeling it, so that happened today. I now have fuzzy things that will hopefully keep the cold off next week !

Still need to switch over my memory cards and move my pictures to the new card. One drawback of the Pixel phone is that it's very generous with what it does with data. So pictures taken with it get uploaded at the moment. I'm content with that because it makes it a lot easier to publish pictures from the phone on here. Instead of Bluetooth to laptop and then network share to desktop, it's a one step action. But it does mean that I have to be more careful of what I take pictures of. The proper camera can take better pictures too.

We'll see how it goes this week and next. I may actually be trading extreme weather here for extreme weather somewhere else.

It'll be good to travel again too.

Another couple of emotes got done - can't show those here though because they're modifications of someone else's art instead of being completely my own. I'm still at that point where I can do much better by modification than by pure creation. That said, the dragon drawings were getting chuckles still.

Politics - thought I'd mention those ... I try and keep this a completely politics free zone. But that doesn't mean I'm not affected by them as well or that I don't feel affected by the various issues. I just think that this should be a safe place where people don't have to think about the nasty stuff. You get that stuff pushed at you from all the other places, it's good to have a rest once in a while ?

That goes for the posts where people go "Repost so I know you'll listen". PLEASE ! Don't do that. It's a guilt trip for everyone involved. Both from the people like me who will eagerly lend a listening ear if someone needs to talk. And the people posting the Thing who then psychologically tot up who replied, who responded.

Just because I ignore all of the posts like that, doesn't mean I won't be replying to your Skype, Messenger or other message. I'll be eager to help anyone out best I can. Sometimes I help too much. That's just me. Sometimes hyperactivity makes me blind to how people are reacting to what I say. That's me too.

But at the centre - I like to help people. Whether that's answering problems, listening to things they need to discuss with someone or .... just bringing a smile or a chuckle.

Anything else occurring ? Easter is almost upon us ! Must tidy up the avatar pic from last post.

Someone read all my posts over the last week. I've been seeing the hits on the Google hit counter and I think it's been awesome to see someone so interested in what I've been writing. Don't worry about GDPR or similar from my end, all I see on the Google thing is Operating System (or phone), browser and country. I don't get any more than that. I have the Statcounter thing as well but I'd be very surprised to see that pick up anything. It rarely does these days, I suspect it gets trapped by adblockers. Which is ok. I run adblockers too.

But ! Person who's been checking me out ! You're awesome and all those hits make me happy. Thank you.

Elite - haven't played that for a while. I think there might be a connection to my wrists feeling better ... although that could be the Magnesium citrate tablets. Since starting those, I have had zero cramp. None.

Phone stuff - if you've got my numbers ... I'll be somewhere roaming doesn't apply for a while. So hold off on the texting or phoning. I'm hoping to have wifi access and data and have an alternate sim for while I'm out there.

I better get my dinner before it burns more ! Still need to replace that cooker. Still cooks things nicely though. See you hopefully sooner rather than later.

Fortnight since last post ? What's occurring ...

Hmm, I don't usually leave it this long between posts !

Thumbnail first ... someone found this one and posted it on one of the discords. I may stand accused :

Credit to the artist as always, although I don't have a link as I usually like to put on.

I sadly haven't put any Lego together since the last post but I do have that Porsche sitting waiting. Sometime ... soon.

It's been a pretty busy fortnight at work, with a couple of away trips. So last weekend was very definitely a recovery/breather as was this weekend (and I'm missing words again which is another sign of tiredness with me). I was away for the first Wednesday and Thursday and also for the Monday and Tuesday of this week just gone.

I have good pictures too ... which I can't show here because they give too much idea of work away. Locations and places, things like that. However, one of the trips did see me near one of the hardware techie stockists and I acquired the latest techie morsel that will go in to Meltdown at some point :

There we go. More examples of my techie graveyard of bits that are scattered around the house.

From left to right, we have :
Seagate ST32130A 2GB conventional hard drive
Western Digital Caviar 60GB
Toshiba P300 3TB

I've long since discontinued the use of the 2 on the left but the one on the right is an upgrade that will be swapped in for a 1.5TB drive that's being pretty pushed for space with some of the newer games with more pictures, textures and data. The 1.5TB drive is 8 years old now, I think the one on the left might be around 20 years old, maybe more.

The 60GB drive probably belonged to Godzilla, which was a couple of machines ago and had a companion iPaq called Godzookie, which I used as a satnav for a few years. They've kept the same package over the years, with all 3 of those being in a standard 3.5" box. The interface has changed though, with the 2GB drive needing some special measures to access the whole of it. Those special measures were unnecessary for the 60GB and the 3TB uses a different type of cable.

Be careful taking your Godzillas on the ice.

Yep. Busy couple of weeks, with even a couple of overnights in a hotel. Mustn't forget the chargers next time though. Oops ! It was ok, I have an iPhone and Android charger lead in the car so I was able to charge everything up off my home laptop.

Hotel internet is pants. As was the attempt at doing internet off the 3 mobile hotspot. Oh and then there's Microsoft stealing your bandwidth for windows updates first chance it gets. You can set your connection to metered which means it holds off a little but ... new internet connections default to unmetered which means Windows thinks it's time to grab the stuff.

Talking of trying to watch stuff ... I tried to start watching someone new on the Hotel Wednesday, 3 internet couldn't cope. She's "HelloitsKolo" on the twitch and there's a link over to the right. Another person who plays a lot of Elite Dangerous. I haven't done much in that over the last couple of weeks, I've been feeling a bit too blasted to play. However ...

That's coming in to land at Fowler Legacy, picking up supplies to help out the latest Generation Ship to be found and added to the game. More pics of that one when I pay it a visit.

One thing I've learned ...

Some of these logs (not this one apparently !) have audio attached to them too ... I shall have to go back and revisit some places I've been to already.

Other stuff ...

I've kicked off another Motorsport Manager campaign again, this time in the endurance racing category. I'd achieved what I could with the sportscars and the endurance racing is more of a challenge. There's been a couple of races so far and my people are doing ok. I'm in the process of changing around the drivers at the moment, as there is a Fitness attribute that matters a lot more in the endurance racing because it determines how long each driver can stay in the car. More fitness, more time in each stint, less time lost in the pits.

And there may well have been Stellaris happening again. Patches have been coming thick and fast lately. I have a Fanatic Purifier race that's going to destroy the galaxy (may well do that as something spectacular in the end) and I'd quite like to complete that game before the next expansion hits because it could well shake things up again.

Other news - birthday happened again !

I didn't travel like I usually do because I needed a quiet weekend this weekend. It even got to me thinking that Friday morning was actually Saturday due to a little confusion. Oops. Managed to get in to work for 9.15am (almost an hour later than usual) and I have 3 days worth of flexi credit to use up so ... didn't matter in the end.

There's also the Xmas market opening up in Bristol again ... last week. No cookies !

Alas.

May have to go farther afield for cookies.