Holidays almost done

Back to work for me on Wednesday. I'll have had a longer than usual break, with it lasting 12 working days in total spanning 3 weeks. It usually takes me less than a week to get horribly bored when I'm away from work but there's been enough going on to stop that happening this time :-)

There's been the excitement mentioned in the post below but I'm going to park that for now. I've not seen anything back from the Eve people yet to tell me if they take honest customers seriously. (Early days still)

Technology has been the key thing over this break :-) Starting with my old laptop choosing the first Sunday of the holiday to finally decide it also wanted time off. So that's money spending thing No 1 :-) The Acer is quite a decent laptop to be honest. I've seen 3 of them so far and the build quality is pretty good. Much better than my old HP, which felt a lot lighter (weaker) in its construction to the point of fit lines not matching up properly. I'd heavily criticise the touchpad on the Acer though, it's not nearly as good as the HP's touchpad.

I think it was the start of the break when I had to hide my wireless network's identifier. The sound on the streaming music would break up and after 10-15 minutes (or shorter) the sound would stop entirely. I suspect someone around here has the virus that takes over a PC's wifi, creating a "Free Public Wi-Fi" network which it then uses to spread. I've seen that a few times. What I think it was also doing was a brute force attempt to crack the encryption security on my own network. Hiding the identifier has made the problem go away.

Come to think of it - the "Free Public Wi-Fi" thing could be where the Nastie that stole my Eve account's info came from. The techie stuff says that laptops will try and connect to this if they don't have any better ideas, so it could be where the Nastie got in.

Hey ! Thought I'd parked that account stealing thing :-)

Xmas was up at the parents with the family there. I got me an Ipod upgrade, with the Ipod having a few interesting toys attached ... I now need an iPod sock to keep it unscratched. Had a few more bits of music appear in the library too - I'm now up to 3655 songs that would take 10.2 days to listen to. Of those, I've managed to listen to 1478 of them over the past 4 weeks. Will probably crack 1500 and maybe get close to 1600 by the time I go back to werk :-)

While up there, I put up my nan's new TV bracket, which has it attached to the wall. Not an experience I'm planning to repeat any time soon ! I don't think I need to in my current room anyway, although I do still need to move things around in here.

28th was the Crazies Xmas Part-ay, with Secret Santa. Was good to see the gang all there :-) I managed to recruit the help of our BionicDwarf to get my old telly shifted off its stand. I put the telly there myself a few years ago but I reckon in the process I busted something in my side which has killed my bowling action. Was well appreciated having the assist :-) Crazie Party - we watched Ice Age, Moon and Dogma, all 3 of those being excellent films. Must watch Ice Age again soon, not got Dogma yet.

New telly ! This arrived on the Tuesday 29th. It's a Samsung 32" LCD with the 1080p extra pixel and detail goodness. With my old telly being on the floor, I had the added incentive of needing to kick myself out of bed early in order to have a telly to watch the cricket on. I also picked up a Blu-ray disc player from Sony (going cheap at £100).

The blu-ray player is a prime example of how I sometimes lose out by not following my instincts. The little Instinct Voices were telling me on Boxing Day that I should pick one up when we were in the retail places in Lincoln. I thought I'd better leave it for when I was back down south - the result ? None left in the retail places in Bristol's Cribbs Causeway ! Cue a trip to Tesco Extra, which still had a few left. I reckon people scoured the Cribbs Mall and didn't think of checking the Tesco Extra nearer to where I live.

So I pick up two of the parts of my future Telly & Movie set up :-) The 3rd and 4th will be new speakers and amp, looks like I'll have to get those due to Trust Issues with the Blu-Ray player.

After enjoying the end of the 4th day in the cricket, it's time to test out the new stuff :-) Star Trek was the dvd chosen. It wasn't at its best at this point, as I had to wait until the next day for the better leads to arrive. Still looked pretty darn impressive though :-) The telly does a good job of filling in the gaps to turn standard definition into sharp higher definition.

Doh - there's actually far more about this on my Techie blog, so I probably shouldn't repeat it here. The first post (linked) is about the early bit of setup and introduces the PC stuff ... The second post (linked) covers what happens with better leads. It doesn't quite have the end of the story :

My MSN Messenger login uses the little status messages. I don't change this too often (inspiration failure) but the latest is "Technology 1 Sleepypete 3". Heh heh heh - the score at the moment is probably a tie ...

I have everything hooked up to the telly :-) But I'm having to use 5 leads instead of 1 for the cable TV box. Sound isn't as good as I'd like, I only get a stereo output on my current speakers. This is the Trust Issue with the Blu-Ray player, it can't get the info from my speakers that would assure it there's no copying going on so it just outputs in stereo. With my PC, stereo is an unexpected deficiency in the capability it offers. Still sounds very good and I don't currently have the room set up for surround sound anyway.

Let's say I'm not excited/disappointed about the sound enough to make me rush to Richer Sounds to get new amp & speakers :-)

I've watched one movie off Blu-Ray so far, Outlander. My good friend Cyberkitten has written a little bit about this one, spookily on the morning before I watched it again :-) Was as impressive off blu-ray at home as it was in the cinema. I'm still waiting for Watchmen, Amazon said they dispatched this at the same time as they sent Outlander but it's now 2 days later and it's not arrived yet. I've been losing faith lately with Amazon's ability to timely deliver. Ordered on Tuesday 29th with First Class postage, not seen it arrive yet. I'm possibly being a little optimistic seeing as it's holiday season but Novatech managed a next morning delivery on 2 leads also ordered on the 29th. I think I'll be checking out the competition when I next go dvd/music/blu-ray hunting.

We watched Avatar as well this week, that's a cracking movie well recommended.

Had one short session of gaming on the telly - that first link above to the Techie blog has what I needed to do to achieve this :-) Mass Effect looked spectacular on the big screen. Not sure how much I'll actually use the big screen for gaming though, as mouse & keyboard on lap on sofa doesn't strike me as a comfy gaming position !

I'm settling down in front of the cricket at the moment. England have a fight on their hands in this game, South Africa have runs on the board and the pitch has become a lot more bowler friendly ... Will be an intriguing game, looking forward to watching it over today and tomorrow :-)