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.

The word of the day is .... fish ?

I'll explain that title in a bit.

Checking in again with some randomness ... I keep getting ideas to write posts around but by the time I get home and near the keyboard, they have escaped. Fleeting ideas that taunt me with their promise.

Something else that's taunting me in the corner at the moment is an advent calendar. A Star Wars Lego advent calendar to be precise. I'm quite looking forward to going through the calendar and I'll share the pics as the doors get opened and the Lego gets put together.

I'd be quite tempted to acquire some more Lego .... although I don't know what I'd actually get. I think I've mined out the Star Wars kits. There are some very interesting Technic kits but .... I don't really want to build trucks ? I did enjoy putting this together :

The Lego Le Mans car was a good kit. And it's now discontinued alas (in other words, it'll be available at 3 times its value from Ebay sellers). I'd have been miffed if I had missed out on this one.

The motor racing has finished for the year now. I dunno what to think about the motor racing actually, it's good to have on in the background but ... not much actually happens during the racing in Formula 1 ? Ok, there's usually mayhem at the start or at some random point in the race but the aerodynamics of the cars works against them having close, exciting battles and the result is usually ... yawning procession. The World Endurance Championship races are better. At some point, I'll watch a whole Le Mans 24 hour, either at home on the telly or by actually heading over to France to watch the race.

That's getting closer as a possibility. Hurrah ! Need a passport though.

My outsides are finally deciding to get better ... There are still some hold out areas but I've had 3 good weeks so far. And good days are when the condition doesn't worsen, allowing steady healing to happen. My feet and legs are still messy but they're steadily getting back to normality and .... I didn't wear my ankle bandages today.

I'm in two minds about those ankle bandages. On one hand, they protect the bad areas and in these colder months, they add a bit more insulation too. On the other, they are really irritating to put on and there is a big chance that they'll double up and wrap over, causing more pressure on the areas they're intended to protect.

I won't miss putting those bandages on. Partly because it means my feet are mending.

Back to that motor racing - I'm enjoying having another look at Motorsport Manager. I'd gone away from it after winning one of the achievements and completing that particular goal of building a weak team up to become the champions. I might go back to that game because it might feed in a few other achievements.

But I've actually gone over to a new set of DLC, an Endurance Championship (disclosure note - bought by me ! Not provided by devs). It allows for races up to 6 hours long ... The idea being that you spend maybe 2 hours in the race with most of the time spent at 12x fast forward. I'm enjoying it so far but I'm actually about to cheat the save by adding a couple of zeroes to the amount of money. There are two reasons for this :

1 - I don't think it's balanced at the moment. With some reasonable sponsors and 1 pay driver, the team is losing 500k per race. So it isn't looking likely to be profitable over the season and be able to build up.
2 - It lets me skip about 5 seasons of building and boring races coming last all of the time.

So it won't be cheating on the core mechanics of the game, the racing ... but it will let me skip a few boring years of building the team up.

I've also been playing Stellaris and got my first win in the game. It took just less than 50 years in the tiniest galaxy. My mob only needed to own 21 planets to win and had beaten up 2 of the 3 competitor races in the game. I'll throw the same race into a properly big game at some point. I've changed the mods around to have a different set of expanded ship classes and I've been playing with a fleet of :

Imperial designs. Spot the Victory class Star Destroyers making the core of the fleet. There should be a few Nebulon B frigates in there too.

And I should really acquire the Magic Vegas video editing package while it's on discount at Steam ! That would be £25 for the middle package. I'd like to make some more videos (and should really add my channel link on the right).

One last word about the cricket. It was good to be watching the games again over the weekend but I was very disappointed in the performance. The big difference between the teams was in the bowling. The Australian bowlers had real threat and menace, the English bowlers just didn't turn up. They can bowl at 90mph+ and our spinner can turn the ball square but in this game .... just didn't.

Hopefully they'll do better in the next game.

Come on the England cricket !

PS Word of the day is from the bus tickets. I've moved to electronic ticketing to save 50p per ticket and ... each day there is a random word. Today, fish. Last week, girl and toad. Tomorrow ? I dunno cos I'm thinking I should quarantine bugs at home. I did feel steadily stronger and stronger as today at work went on though. We shall see !

When tech and chocolate meet ....

And a bit more too.

I think this week at work showed that last week's chill time let me recover a fair bit of the energy that's been lacking lately. I'm not back up at the level I should be .... but I do have more energy than I had before.

I was a bit worried this week actually because my usual pattern is to heal reasonably over a long time ... and then reset that healing very quickly. And I do have problems with the office at work due to the atmospherics there (it's a very dry atmosphere, more people than me have problems with it). My outsides are doing much better in general, although the healing isn't finished yet and I still attack the healing bits out of just wanting to remove the imperfections.

I think I'm doing better at resisting that. Hopefully it won't be long. It wouldn't be quick enough to support playing cricket, as the April 1st post wishfully looked for. Besides, I have too much pain in my right hip and my reactions are not nearly good enough any more.

About those reactions ....

I got a little scared reading a post on the News about a judo player. She'd been suffering really bad symptoms from repeated head injuries incurred while doing the judo. Her symptoms were worse than mine, with tunnel vision joining the slowed reactions. Different head injuries are different. I get the odd dizzy spell with mine plus my memory is still garbage compared to what it was. But that slowed reactions was a curious correlation. My memory problems started with the Nose Job incident in 2005 but my reactions were ok until I almost ate a cricket ball in ... 2011 ?

That was my last year and the big warning signs from it were 3 dropped catches due to just not reacting fast enough. My hands were ready and in position to take the catch, I saw the ball all the way in but ... I just missed the moment to cushion the ball into my hands. Ok. That's not the whole story ... the one catch I took didn't involve reactions (it was a bob up into the air gentle one) and one of the drops was when my feet literally went out from underneath me due to the ground conditions ! Haha. Plant feet for catch, next thing I know I'm on my bum watching the ball sail above my head.

Oops.

No - the moment for me to be enjoying playing the cricket is past now. Those reactions are too slow, the hip is too far gone and the shoulder was most definitely too damaged !

I do get a little worried though sometimes. Relieved maybe. Definitely thinking I am lucky to have avoided more serious injuries with the running around. I was hit on the head without a helmet twice, which has had long term effects but pretty light ones. Especially compared to the ongoing seclusion of Michael Schumacher, who is still very unwell after bouncing his head off a rock while skiing. (A cricket ball is a different shape but is just as hard as a rock !)

Take head injuries seriously ! If you get a bump on the head that affects your consciousness, even just to the limited extent of getting headaches, see a doctor ! Get checked out. There may be more going on than you know about. I wasn't aware of my memory being damaged, I figured that out after. I didn't connect slowed reactions with the last head injury, I just thought that was old age.

Wait. Chocolate and technology.

When I went up to the Mall on Tuesday evening, I came away with a Thorntons Easter Egg. They're on sale now until the stocks run out. These are £7 250g eggs for £2.50. Bargain ! Or 3 for £5. When I finished it last night, I was immediately sad and regretful that I hadn't taken advantage of the 3 for £5 so I'd have two more.

What does this have to do with technology I hear you wonder ...

I break up my Easter Eggs by dropping them from a suitable height onto a suitably hard surface. Lately, that's my computer desk and the tray the keyboard sits on.

Pick up egg;
Drop egg;
Ponder why the youtube video I was watching went on pause;
Investigate dropping the egg again (it was too solid to break on just one dropping).

Yep. The shock of the egg was activating the microswitches in my keyboard, which made the video pause.

At some point, I must research this .... I need to have something like Notepad open to investigate this shock thing some more. What mysteries will my keyboard write when subjected to more Egg Dropping Shocks ?

I thought I should check this out more. Do research.

And it is for these purposes of research that 3 more Thorntons eggs (other eggs are/were! available but they are nowhere near as solid as what Thorntons do) escaped from town with me today. I'll check that out at some point. Munching my dinner at the moment and I have Mini Eggs to consume as well. Mini Eggs are life.

Oh and I'm also looking into acquiring more tech.

Desktop upgrade - which will be almost certainly to AMD's new Ryzen chip. It'll be either a Ryzen 5 with 6 cpu cores or an Intel i5-Kaby Lake processor. The upgrade would go into a new box with 16GB of memory but would harvest as much as possible from my current machine.

Laptop change - I'm thinking more seriously about this as issues start to mount with my Macbook Air. It's a late 2013 model, so it owes me more life but .... the wifi is ok for home .... but can't support streaming Sky Sports at my mum and dad's place. However, the laptop is how I run my music and I have a lot of investigating to do there before I make any jumps. I'll want something that supports audio streaming to my hifi (might switch to Bluetooth) and the Party Shuffle feature which is the reason why I hang onto iTunes 10.7. Oh and I want it to sync music with either my Android phone or my old iPhone.

Oh and that laptop might well be running Linux after I lose patience with Apple's attitude to customers (you don't own what you buy from Apple, they think you're effectively leasing it) and Microsoft's Creators Update on Windows 10 is showing worrying signs that Microsoft is going the same way. Stability of Windows 10 was good when it came out but .... it's showing bad signs that emergent bugs might be coming in.

Linux is the alternative but there are many software compatibility issues with it.

We shall see !

In the meantime, I am curious as to what masterpiece may emerge from my keyboard when I next subject it to the shock of an Easter Egg bouncing on its tray.

Weekend Wandomness

I think this counts as a good weekend !

I have apparently been healing a lot this weekend ... About time too if you ask me.

Not quite sure what I've been doing though. It's been a chilled out weekend starting with watching Logan on Friday afternoon. It's a great film. I've been watching a few films lately ... On Saturday last week, it was A Cure For Wellness which was a very curious film. It had its theme running through and you never quite know whether the central character is imagining what's going on or not. Oh and there was the now traditional smuggling in of the popcorn too.

Yep. Great company made last weekend's film outing great fun.

Logan was good too. The highlight of it is looking at what happens to faded heroes. I identify with that a fair bit. It's been a good long while since I've Run. And by Run ... I mean Run Very Fast. Don't worry, that's not a harbinger of me coming back to cricket. At least .... it probably isn't. We'll see.

That might give you a clue to what's been happening this weekend.

On Friday before Logan, I took the chance to pick up more of the Miracle Healing Gunk ... (aka HC45 hydrocortisone cream). I was on the last dregs of what I had left, having been very sparing with it over the past couple of months. I'd been using Eurax cream which seemed to be helping but open wounds on my feet and ankles just weren't healing. You have to be careful with this stuff, at least I have to be. Too much and it'll cause problems of its own. It seems that if I keep swapping around what I use, I get the good benefits.

Guess what ...

Yep. I'm going to brave going to work tomorrow without the bandages that I've been sporting lately. I'll take them with me in case I have to put them on again. The worst bits of my ankles were on the place where the seam of your shoes are. I've been wearing my work shoes a lot lately when going out. Normally I'd only wear them for work but because my trainers are much harsher on that ankle part, I haven't been able to wear them. Same for my boots, they press in on the bad bit and rip it up.

It feels weird. The progress over the weekend has been very encouraging (on Thursday, the left ankle was especially nasty although that sorted itself out even before the HC45 influence). Chinese was the choice on Friday after getting back from Logan and I could feel that urge to pin the ears back and go for Speed.

Not had that for a while.

It's a good feeling. Maybe cricket ? Maybe ? The reactions are shot and I'd need new glasses but I bet that muscle memory is still there. Wonder if the arm would support bowling. Last time I tried, none of the various bowling actions I have or their variations worked. But the arm has had a few years to heal ... or stiffen.

More random thoughts ?

I've had a few random thoughts bouncing around lately. The good ones tend to evaporate before I can write them down though.

Actually won the lottery yesterday ! No silly. Didn't win money, just a free lucky dip entry into Wednesday's draw. Curiously, it was on the "pick least often drawn" system. The other systems have got me nothing, although I don't actually enter the lottery too often. It would be good to have that boost to the coffers though.

I'm watching too much telly ... Too much Star Trek Voyager to rewatch ! Plus I'm watching Earth Final Conflict as a daily. (Which means I save up a few episodes and watch several in a stretch). There were a few things that I missed out on about 15 years ago when they were on first time and Earth Final Conflict was one of them. There is a tree in the back yard that blocks the satellite signal ... and these shows were on satellite ...

This weekend's gaming has been a bit of Stellaris again. I started up a game which looks like it will be a rock solid foundation for rolling over the galaxy. It's a fairly well modded game with expansions that won't work when the next patch comes ... That's the thing with mods on these games, it can take time after a patch before the mods are available again and some mods just don't get maintained.

I started another Motorsport Manager campaign as well ... This time it's with another weak team looking to build into a world beater. I'll be mercilessly exploiting the lower division this time in order to farm achievements ... When I press the button on going for performance, I fully expect the team to be a few seconds ahead by the time I go up the leagues.

Can't just play the motor racing game though. I want to go through XCom 2 again at some point, especially as I bought a couple of expansions for that which I haven't tried yet.

There's a saying I keep coming up with though :

"If you're not enjoying something, give it a break. Don't do it. Do something else."

I apply that to games most of all. Some games, I've sunk lots of time in and realised that ... I'm not actually having fun with this game. You want to continue to see what kind of story is in there but sometimes that story is far too much effort to unlock. Stellaris gets like that. Cosmonautica definitely gets like that.

Elite is a very pretty game but ... very shallow. Once you done one trading binge, exploring binge or combat binge, there isn't very much new in there. Perhaps later when they add more to it. Multiplayer isn't the answer. I should look at Rebel Galaxy again, I quite enjoyed that one. And then there is the temptation of Starbound and Stardew Valley.

Cricket can be a mixed bag. Some games, are over almost before they begin. Other games are far more balanced. I liked cricket because something different could happen with every ball and I could genuinely make a difference by being a Scary Person in the field, madly capering around, pouncing on the ball (and not knowing what to do with it when I got it - but the batsmen didn't know that).

Gosh. The diminishing scroll bar tells me this post is getting long ... time to close.

Gaming - is being fun. Or is it ? It's definitely being a time filler.
Healing - is very promising .... Hopefully this week at work doesn't do much damage. Not out of the woods yet though.
Energy levels - hmm ... could do better, although that might be to do with a Stellaris induced missing of dinner last night.

Oops.

Back to listening to .... more Stellaris !!! Enter Elysium is doing a playthrough of the Star Trek total conversion for Stellaris and that mod looks pretty promising so far. The game engine seems well suited and they've done a good job with the mod.

PS One more wandomness ! I may need to upgrade the PC soon ... and I'm torn between looking at AMD's new processor and staying with Intel. The usual thing of : Intel expensive but better quality, AMD cheaper but dodgier ... that's turning around apparently with AMD's new chip. But ... they only have the flagship model out at the moment which is too expensive for me. Oh well.

254 Pages

That's either a lot of pages or not very many ...

And of course, everything makes more sense with context.

In a story driven book, it can be a pleasant collection of short stories. I've really enjoyed a few of those collections, especially :

Anne McCaffrey's Get Off The Unicorn;
Heinlein
Larry Niven with the Known Space short stories
And many more too.

It can be the length of a novel with a good story which rattles through its tale and leaves you very satisfied by the end (Man Plus was an excellent 215 pages), or the length of a short story that has been thrashed out far beyond what it should have been (like the various Mass Effect books).

It could be part of a series of books which just keep getting better as the series goes on with the cliffhanger at the end of one book leaving you eager for the next and cursing the wait until you get your mitts on it.

(And then there are the books that start around this mark but then fester, grow and mutate into pretty crummy books. Yep, I'm looking at you Mr Weber with the Honorverse that went on too long).

254 pages is about what you get in computer magazines now, it's a far cry from the 1000 or so you might have got with your PCW mag or Computer (spit) Shopper where you got a massive doorstop which was excellent for a variety of reasons : many adverts that were worth reading and collapsed the price down. The last time I bought a Computer Shopper (yep, I know, never again), it was 4 times the price and a quarter of the size. And one reason I got it was to find out about computer bits sellers. The ads in these mags are actually useful ...

But the reduction in ads in recent times for those mags is probably a sad reflection of the industry, where instead of huge numbers of suppliers, the bad ones have died leaving fewer suppliers to fight for your business. Margins are tough and so is the business. Means we get stuff cheaper though :-).

The 254 pages refers to none of those though - but I am going to tease it out some more ... cos I'm like that :-).

Yep. Evil.

And I will be wearing that other t-shirt at some point.

After having a bit of a collapse last week, I'm actually much better this week. I'm not back to as good as I have been lately, not yet. But a lot of the angry red has been reclaimed by Healthy Pasty White. Not fixed yet and I could very easily set it back again by being careless. But it is a good sign that my outsides have been reclaiming the bad again. Gives more hope.

Good signs. Must see if I can keep that improvement going with things like drinking lots of water to balance the hot muggy conditions we have here at the moment.

And no, 254 pages is probably not how long my doctor's notes are. I have mixed feelings about missing seeing them last week. On one side, I made a promise which I didn't manage to keep. On the other, I was so heavily affected by the allergy problems that an allergy test would have been a waste of time ... again.

Wonder if 254 is anywhere near to the number of orders I've put in with That Delivery Place Which Does Not Pay Taxes. I think you know who I mean there. They're big and the EU branch is based in the tax haven that is Luxembourg. I put in an order for Something Large and the delivery option I chose said to expect it Friday or Saturday when I'd have a chance to be in to accept it.

Imagine my surprise when an email pops up saying that it was arriving today ... when I was committed all day at work. Cue an email to the customer service people, who allegedly acted and moved delivery back to Friday. Nah. It still came today as a happy surprise with a knock on the door around 8pm ish.

254 pages ?

That's how many pages are in the book for the Lego Le Mans car.

It is in its box, silently taunting me. I can hear Vroom Vroom noises in my mind. Yep. And it's not the neighbour with the deliberately broken exhaust either.

It's going to be so tough to resist the temptation to put it together ahead of the Le Mans 24 hour race, which is 10 days away.

There ! Such a tease tonight. And I am so completely unrepentant.

And I'll leave it there before another group of people joins that list of those who are going to hunt me down and murder me in my sleep for deeds done. My current boss will probably do that if we go through with the idea to get him a Metal Earth kit (DEFINITELY!) or a Nanoblock Titanic (cos - reasons) for his leaving gift.

Still in the oven

Hmm - three things to talk about today ...

Ovens, money printing and blank minds.

I think I've missed out tonight, I watched Deadliest Catch, Falling Skies and now there's cricket on. I could have been watching :

Love it. I'll watch it at leisure tomorrow when my brain isn't fried. Ok, I might be destressing somewhat but I'll be starting a 3 day weekend with lots of cricket on the telly. Mel and Sue, the presenters, are awesome and the Top Gear Lunatic Fringe missed out by scaring off Sue, who was just an innocent bystander in the rubbish around a certain arsehole being fired. Ok. Judging by what I'm hearing about Bake Off, perhaps "innocent" isn't quite the right word.

Where would we be without a lovely bit of innuendo to make us chuckle, swell with laughter and wish we were nibbling the muffin of our own local Master Baker. (Good job this isn't a show about fishing).

It has been too long since I've had the pleasure of grabbing our Snow Queen's buns. (Our local Master Baker) I wonder what a soon arriving Master Baker's cakes will be like. I also fondantly remember the cupcake that the wonderful Pixie made for us a few years ago. You probably get the idea that I like cake. Cake is life.

Money printing ?

A recurring theme here is how much I've been loving playing Elite Dangerous. Here's one reason why :

I've let GIMP have a go at enhancing that, which is why it's a bit stylised. It's a game where you fly about the place and then see something utterly gorgeous, like the purple star. It's purple ! A screenshot was totally necessary. The original was very dark and didn't show the ship at all well. Lighting effects are excellent in this game but that does make it tough to get proper illumination on your ship for screenies.

Outside of the very pretty graphics, it's actually a bit boring. There is no epic storyline like in a classic like Freelancer. I find it cathartic to play, very relaxing and there's that sense of seeing new pretty spacey things just the next jump away. Is it strange that I find hot boiling suns to be visually appealing ? Maybe I've been watching too much Andromeda with Trance Gemini, wonderful character with a lovely smile.

So why money printing - I had my doubts about Elite Dangerous when it was in its pre-release kickstarter phase. I didn't believe they'd come out with an interesting product with good gameplay. It's surprised me that they have. They didn't fail by trying too much, they got just enough in and they've expanded the game from there. But now ... we have a release for an expansion, after the game has been out for only 8 months. That's pretty soon ... Eve has released a few but you don't pay anything for those outside of the subscription. WoW makes you pay for them but ...

Original game cost - £40
Expansion cost - £40
Discount if you have it already - £10.
So I could get this expansion for £30, or I could pay £130 now for of the expansions later.

I thought £40 for the original was steep and I'm balking at paying that again for the expansion. It would let me land on planets but to be honest, in Frontier Elite 2, you could do that and the novelty wore off quick. I'm just not convinced that represents value in any way. It should have been baked into the game when it was still in the oven.

What's more disturbing is that the overwhelming impression on the otherwise excellent Facebook community is :

Opposing views are being ridiculed. I'm keeping my head down and avoiding the subject because ... my views are heretical. A usually helpful community has turned bullying with quotes like "If you don't like it, play something else". Not helpful. I will go elsewhere.

After paying £40 for the game after release and another £40 on a flightstick (which will be used for ... it's coming) and getting so many hours out of the game, I have my moneys worth. But I'm not convinced that they deserve any more of my money for features that they promised as part of the base game. Hell, they promised an offline mode, which was a promise broken which upset me (but was willing to go along with). The implication is that they withdraw access to the game because you don't keep up with expansions. Or only people with the expansion get the good stuff.

Not happy with Frontier and this announcement. Certainly not shelling out £130 for one single game. That's very obnoxious. I'd recommend waiting for :

No Man's Sky. It's promising all the stuff that should have been in Elite in the first place and I'm well and truly getting caught up in the hype. Perhaps this is the new Elite we were waiting for.

Enough about games - mind blanks ?

Actually - with that teaser, maybe I'll leave that one until later and just remember those things that make my mind happily go blank.

Pretty Ladies smiling at me;
Pretty Ladies laughing at my really bad jokes;
Trying to find words that fit instead of the ones in my head (words are hard);
Messages coming in from ... you guessed it ... Pretty Ladies;

This one is appropriate and I've been looking for an excuse to use it for a while :

Except it's me smiling, walking into pole and wondering how I can answer the message that just came in.

Stay smiling. I'm going to give Elite a miss tonight because ... tireds. But I'll remember those bubbly chuckles, the helpful prods, the haha's from my jokes, the "yey this tweet was about me" and one lady who smiled today because I asked her how she was. That one is really struggling at the moment, trying to help her as much as I can and at the same time, I'm getting help in staying positive from a few other people I know.

It's a better world if we help each other out.

PS I'd kinda like to get a response from some of the internet micro-celebs who I send tweets to. It's intended to make them chuckle but they rarely get a twitch of a response. Disappointing.
PPS As I hate to end on a downer, it's disappointing that I don't get a response but I made myself chuckle while writing/making the tweets and they tend to get :-)'s from other followers. Which makes me happy.

On those adverts ...

Someone posted a picture the other day which ... I had a look, I had a read and I thought ... Yep. That's absolutely spot on.

Here we go :

Hopefully that reads ok on a click !

Advertising is all pervasive these days. It seems like 90% of what comes through the door is junkmail. A lot of my email is ... advert junkmail. When you look at a website, you're assaulted by adverts that (unless you've got an adblocker) force you to wait until the advert loads before you can read the site.

There's another excellent Heinlein quote :

Do not confuse "duty" with what other people expect of you; they are utterly different. Duty is a debt you owe to yourself to fulfill obligations you have assumed voluntarily. Paying that debt can entail anything from years of patient work to instant willingness to die. Difficult it may be, but the reward is self-respect.
But there is no reward at all for doing what other people expect of you, and to do so is not merely difficult, but impossible. It is easier to deal with a footpad than it is to deal with a leech who wants "just a few minutes of your time, please - this won't take long." Time is your total capital, and the minutes of your life are painfully few. If you allow yourself to fall into the vice of agreeing with to such requests, they quickly snowball to the point where these parasites will use up 100 percent of your time - and squawk for more!
So learn to say No - and to be rude about it when necessary.
Otherwise you will not have time to carry out your duty, or to do your own work, and certainly no time for love and happiness. The termites will nibble away your life and leave none of it for you.
(This rule does not mean that you must not do a favor for a friend, or even a stranger. But let the choice be yours. Don't do it because it is "expected" of you.)

Be wary of those that demand ever increasing amounts of your time. Although if those people bring you joy ? I vote for joy.

With telly stuff, I rarely watch things live. I'm usually watching stuff recorded where I can fast forward past the incessant adverts. Unless the telly company are incompetent and don't schedule their shows properly. For the last episode of Agents of Shield, Channel 4 started it maybe 50 minutes late (I didn't keep watching after fast forwarding through 20 minutes of the end of In Bruges) and I had to watch it off their awful on demand service.

Some on demand services are ok. Some are terribly inefficient (Channel 5's used to overheat my last laptop). Some are really good and don't cause you any overhead past logging in (there are no extra ads on Sky Sports service, just those on the broadcast). Some are ridiculously obnoxious.

Channel 4's demanded that I disabled my adblocker and wasted quite possibly 25 minutes of my time over the course of a 40 minute episode. That's a few minutes before it started, 4 minutes for every break and more time wasted when their ad server couldn't keep up.

COME ON ! Adverts are useless if they cause annoyance instead of interest. And I am one of those people who will actively avoid a product (even if it's a good one) if I've been annoyed by the people selling it. Or I'll buy the same thing from someone else.

(My hd came from Novatech who had a slightly higher unit price than the rest - however the rest charged extra for delivery and had poor interfaces on their websites).

I do get that there's a certain necessity to advertising. Our content costs money to produce and advertising is one source of funding for that content. It's why we get seasons of shows like X Factor, Strictly, BGT and all the other phone vote shows, the votes help to fund the content.

But if you do the phone vote thing, I applaud you. That's your choice.

I'll be watching Jurassic World tomorrow, which will have probably 30 minutes of adverts and trailers before the show. The adverts will be ignored by either nattering or catching up on phone stuff. The trailers I don't mind, because they let you know about upcoming Good Things (or upcoming Bad Things like half the horror films out there). I would have avoided Tomorrowland as Disney-Meh and Mad Max as Too-Crazy-For-Me but ...

Tomorrowland - interesting trailer, cute film, very enjoyable
Mad Max - EPIC trailer, totally nuts, mindblowing film

And then there's the Interstellar trailer which had me : OMG I HAVE TO SEE THIS.

Some adverts are good. Some are really awful.

I've thought about activating the monetization here a few times because of the junk hits I get. These pages get typically 50 hits a day for maybe 1500 a month. It's a little elevated again this month, I may get 2000 hits due to those junk hits ... By that, I mean the patterns I see where there will be maybe 15 hits in a minute, perhaps a second. Sometimes the junk hits number 100 in a minute. That happens. I call those Junk Hits because that cannot be a real reader ! So I ponder the monetization as a response to the bots.

In amongst those junk hits are you lovely, lovely regular reader people. The Android-Chromes. The iDevice people. The ones who come here via Twitter or Facebook. The Win-IE8 people from a certain address I won't mention. The ones who keep coming back for more.

I think of it as a special little virtual hug every time I see one of those familar patterns on the hit logs. I can't decipher who it is. Google, Statcounter and the defunct sitemeter don't give me enough information there. But my brain always goes "Hey ! That's SQ !" or "That's Pixie !" "That's CG !" "That's LTK !" I could go on but you get the idea. I think it's awesome that so many wonderful people (you too CK !) care enough to keep an eye on me and how I'm doing.

What message would it send if adverts started appearing ? How would I feel if one of those special people got their device infected with something horrible due to something that a 3rd party advertising person put on here ?

Terrible. So the adverts stay away. Besides, the bots are probably all using adblockers so I wouldn't get any monetization from them anyway.

That brings me to my last point. One mantra of the web is "be careful where you browse to" (for there be nasties infecting your system). Well, with all pervasive adverts, even if you browse to a well known site (and I always use the Daily Mail example, not that I read that site) you may get caught by the not so well known site that serves up tainted content.

The internet is dangerous. Harmful effects come from tainted pictures (not just the porn!), anything Adobe has anything to do with, hell even certain text messages can break phones.

Be careful out there.

It's just really, really sad that advertisement people not only suck up our time, they make our lives tougher too.

Stay safe !

Monday randomness

Random thoughts today :-)

There was a science experiment in the work kitchen today. And I know what you're thinking but ... It wasn't me ! Honest ! Actually, I didn't believe that Scotch Eggs could grow furry, I thought they were fairly inert. I reckon they were left behind by someone who's now left the team.

It's a curious thought actually ... whatever was growing on those eggs is similar to the drugs I'm taking at the moment. It was one of those wonderful accidents that brought us Penicillin.

I still have a few days of drugs left and I'm hoping that the improvement in my skin keeps going. I have to avoid damaging my arms any more though. Thinking of damage though, my legs are so much better and it was great today to have full power available in them again. Not that I used it but I did push reasonably hard on the walk from the bus to work (it was raining!). It was good while it lasted, the reason I didn't have that full power available last week was a tight hamstring which is a side effect of how I damaged my back. Oh and a month or so ago, I couldn't use power in my legs because it would literally split the skin.

Oh the bus ... It's ok having the stress avoidance of the bus. I get on, turn off my sense of time and avoid the stress of coping with Bristol traffic. However ... it takes literally 1 hour to get from bus stop to desk. That's to go just under 3 miles as the crow flies. Not acceptable ... I'll be getting out the door early tomorrow to make a 9am meeting.

Since getting the Macbook, I've been enjoying listening to the library again with a fresh ear. I've managed to listen to 616 tracks so far (1.4 days worth so Itunes tells me) but that's just a tiny dent in the library. I'd like to get more music and have my eye on singers like Lucy Spraggan. However ... I refuse to spend £8 on an album speculatively. It seems a little sad that music prices are set high and stay high. I and others would buy that album immediately if it were available for £5. Same with the Rachel Sermanni album. It was worth the high cost but you can't really justify spending that much on someone new. And the cost stayed high months after the initial release.

I firmly believe more revenue would be gained if prices were dropped to "bargain" prices. Even if it's like occasional quick sales. Some minority items just stay at high prices long after people stopped buying them.

Talking of music. One disappointment with the Macbook is that it's more susceptible to interference on the wifi. However. I have a Cunning Plan. In a couple of days, I'll pick up a new Apple Airport Express. This is a device which accepts audio being streamed over a network and sends it to a hifi. Magic and it works effectively. Except ... when there's someone nearby with a jammer.

I haven't got the pic handy but the jammer was giving a signal strength of about 0dB. My own router was giving about -40dB, neighbourhood routers were about -80dB. So this jammer was producing a signal far stronger than my own router, through walls. I hate to think of what it's doing to the people who own it. Perhaps it's a baby monitor (which operate in the same frequency and are anything but cooperative).

Oh - the Cunning Plan - the new Airport Express will let me shift to a different frequency band which should avoid the interference. It's a necessary buy anyway because my current one is too old for the software to recognise. (I'm buying it on Ebay for half the price it is in the shop).

I've made a note about Xmas stuff and can't figure out why ... It'll be in the shops soon. Oh I remember ! Xmas munchies are popular this year. I'll be at one with the wider team, one with the project, one with the old project's acceptance people (will the Pretty Contractor Lady return ?) and there will be a Crazie gathering too.

I've been comparing Microsoft and Apple more. They both have their disasters, there's actually two reported this week. Microsoft have seriously dropped the ball again with Windows 8.1. Apple have a problem with the hard discs in the last generation of Macbook Air and the reason I stumped up for Applecare is because they have issues with display screens.

I'm getting to be more of a fan of Apple now. They make genuinely usable software and the hardware backs it up too. There is that price premium though. However, it's good to see a genuine minority alternative survive when the big boy in the game tends to knock the little boy out of the market. Especially when the big boy's products are as bad as they are at the moment.

Talking of stuff that's a disappointment ... I've followed gaming for as long as I can remember. There's highlights and there's lowlights. One that caught my eye over the weekend was called Dark Matter, it's a survival game set on a spaceship. Right up my alley you'd think. However ... word is it's not finished. Ouch. Glad I didn't leap and buy it. We see that a lot at the moment, products being unleashed on the market before they're ready and the product is effectively left like that. We've even seen that on big names like Championship Manager 3, Windows 95 and a bunch of others.

That's enough randomness for now. Except. I still need to find a TV guide application for the Macbook. I have a workaround but it's clunky. I can install the TV guide on my desktop and look at it via a web browser running on the Macbook. Or I could install a virtual machine on the Macbook and run the TV guide app through that. That's clunkier (and would involve running cursed Microsoft software).

Any recommendations for a TV guide application ? I used Digiguide but it doesn't have a Mac version.

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.

Feeling spoiled ... and the opposite ...

I don't think we realise how much we're spoiled in this modern technological age.

We have so many things that help us out. So many devices that make it easier to do things (or make it harder to concentrate on the important things like housekeeping !) and so many devices that just make it possible to do things we wouldn't have thought possible 5 or 10 years ago.

It's the little devices that help out most of all. 5 years ago, I used a separate satnav. It started life as a Hewlett Packard iPaq 4150 running the Tomtom software. Good little device, even though I didn't use it much for its prime reason for being. It was a Personal Data Assistant, before phones became powerful enough to take over that job. The only problem it had was the glitches in the Tomtom software.

Even then, we're spoiled. When I started working, satnavs were incredibly rare. We'd plan our routes on pieces of paper (big writing !) and we'd panic when we lost track of the route. Nowadays GPS takes all the fun out of getting lost because it's an ever present thing on everything keeping us in the picture for where we are. GPS used to be a luxury reserved for the military ...

I was watching the Doctor Who prom concert before moving over to the desktop, even there things have improved. Video recorders have been in the home for decades now but digital video recorders make things so much easier. No more hunting through the tape library for the right tape, just look in the list. I could watch that on a stream from the internet too if I missed it.

That's another thing - when I started with Blueyonder, I had 512kbit/s download. Now, I have 30Mbits/s and my upload is faster than that original download.

Where did the inspiration of this post come from ?

Mostly from gaming. I've bought a few things from Good Old Gaming over the past year and barely played any of them. To be honest, it's so cheap there that I've had my money's worth from the goodies (soundtracks, pictures etc) they throw in with the game.

The latest attempt was to have a go at Arcanum. The concept here is awesome. It's a Dungeons & Dragons type setup with orcs, elves, dwarves and magic crossed with technology. Kinda like D&D moved into the Industrial Age. The concept has spectacular potential, the implementation does not. It's ok for the time but is missing things we take for granted like a big sign saying "Go Here To Progress Story". After the intro, I literally had no clue where to go next and the game wasn't helping.

Bit of a pity that.

A lot of the other games were like that too. They would implement more depth into the game (there's dazzling depth possible in Neverwinter Nights, especially when enhanced with the extra character classes) but it's also possible to get lost in the game. Same with the first person shooter games. They had multiple routes and it was possible to get lost.

A frequent complaint against modern games is that they are on rails. The term "corridor shooter" has come into gaming. This is where a game may look open but you're shepherded (often unsubtly) down set pathways. Things like unopenable doors or sidestreets with an invisible wall. Progress is good but often comes with costs.

Another sign of progress - my laptop is currently streaming the music over the network to my hifi. In ages past, I'd be running across the room to change cds. I'd certainly not be picking from a library with 10,000 tracks. I'd definitely be tripping over the audio cables a few times :-)

I can't help feeling that we miss out though. I'm still in hiding mode at the moment but the modern things lead to a more Indoor life anyway. I'm not needing to venture outside for entertainment. I'm missing chatting up the barmaids at the local or propping up the popcorn stand at the cinema.

A modern life is a more lonely life ? Perhaps.

But then again, before the internet came around, I wouldn't have had the involvement in World of Warcraft which led to me gaining lots of good friends from around the globe. Eve counts there too, although the Eve crowd is a bit more geeky than the WoW crowd if you can believe that.

Another inspiration for this post is hearing the comments about the cricketers. When I started my cricket, it was before the ultra professional era. Now, the cricketers are more in the gym than active in the game. They're a stronger bunch, a more powerful bunch. Perhaps I'd have been a better cricketer given more gym time or more practice time ? Definitely if it was directed practice. But I doubt whether my fragility would have supported gym time.

Apologies if this has gone very scattergun ;-).

We definitely have it easier these days. We have access to massive amounts of information that tell us how to do stuff, that helps us out in ways we didn't know existed 10 years ago. We can get cash from a hole in the wall (I vaguely remember ATMs being introduced). We can call people across the world from a device that fits in out pocket.

But perhaps we're getting a little too reliant on the technology. I definitely think a hug is more satisfying than a win in a game.

Buying ...

... Something old, something new, something discovered, something expensive (not that expensive), something the same.

Got a few things on my To Buy list at the moment. If you'll forgive me, this will be kind of an aide-memoire for me so I don't forget things I want to get !

Something old - already got this one, after hearing Nouvelle Vague on an advert, I just had to get their best of album. It's similar with Daft Punk, I heard their new album running in a shop and ended up walking out with one of their other albums. I want more. It's weird, they've been around for quite a while but I've only just discovered them.

Something new - this will be the Rachel Sermanni album. I've been after this for aaaaages, after hearing Waltz over the iTunes single of the week. Gorgeous. There's also a new KT Tunstall album that I haven't bought yet.

Something discovered - while listening to the Eve alliance tournament, two artists came over the airwaves - Waldeck and Parov Stelar. Both of them rather different to the norm, both highly interesting. Could quite happily chill out to these.

Something expensive (pardon me if I digress here !) - I'll get a new laptop before the end of the month. My current one is suffering due to running out of puff early for video (it overheats) and the keyboard has been a victim of my skin problem with the keys now missing keystrokes. It's done ok for a laptop, it's a good few years old now. But ... I'm looking for something newer and shinier. I have a few points for the new one which are being ... frustrating :

I'd like it to be an Acer but have you tried searching their site for specific laptops ? It's worse than the search system at work (which got disabled if you can believe that).
It could be a Dell - they have an interesting collection on there ...
... But I don't want to be at the mercy of unknown and unstated delivery lead times.
It may well come from PC World, as they have a £100 cashback offer going.
I'd kinda like to ditch Windows ...
... But having iTunes on Linux seems problematic
Not many of the 15" laptops have the display resolution I want.

I'm sure I could get iTunes working correctly, even if I sync devices on my desktop. But there's a few things like Homeshare which I find essential for backing up my library. It seems crazy that Apple don't produce a version of iTunes for Linux, as Linux is much closer to Mac OS X than it is to Windows. By forcing people to use Windows to run iTunes, they keep people locked into their main competitor's product.

I'd have thought Apple would want to try and wean people off Windows by encouraging them to use the cheap alternative to OS X ? Wait ... this is the same company that actively stops people from doing Hackintoshes, despite the typical Hackintosh running off a bought copy of OS X.

Apologies - I'm getting on an old crusade there. The next laptop will be : Intel powered with one of the 3000 chips. It will have over 4GB of memory. I'll hopefully get an SSD speed booster with it. It will be 15" or bigger and it may have a touchscreen.

Something the same ?

There's a lot of music coming very soon from :

Goldfrapp - since hearing It's Not Over Yet, I've been collecting. It's an outstanding cover and the rest of their material equals or betters it. Hoping that Tales of Us is a classic.
Arctic Monkeys - mixed feelings but I enjoy their albums.
Mindy Gledhill - I get the new album on Monday !
Katie Melua - still wondering who's Shy Boy I am. (there's a B-Sides album I want too)
Franz Ferdinand - another of the "curious, not awesome but worth a listen"
Morcheeba have an album coming ? (I'm peekin' at Amazon !)
(I'm sure there's even more I've forgotten)

And I'll leave it there - I hear the Dell and PC World websites calling ...