Black Box

Well, after getting all geeky last week and realising my 5 ½ year old desktop PC was really just a wee bit slow with the latest apps, what with trying to run Dreamweaver 8 on 512Mb RAM when it requires at least 1 Gb AND trying to knock up graphics & photos at the same time AND browsing AND getting email AND doing climate change data processing in the background... I couldn't resist the temptation to finally upgrade, using this little list of items I selected from various purveyors of fine electronic componentry...

• Akasa Eclipse-62 black Aluminum Case
• Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe Motherboard
• AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 4200+ S939
• Akasa AK-920 EVO120 Heat Pipe Quiet Processor Fan
• Seasonic S12 600W Silent ATX2.0 PSU
• Akasa AK-183-L2B Ultra Quiet 120mm 3pin Fan
• Akasa AK-174CB-4BLB blue LED 120mm 3pin Fan
• Vantec 120mm Case Fan Vibration Dampening Kit
• Vantec Power Supply Vibration Dampening Kit
• Corsair 4GB DDR XMS3200PT TwinX Ram
• Asus N6600GT 128Mb graphics card
• Creative Sound Blaster Audigy SE 7 Audio card
• Sony Black 1.44Mb Floppy Disk Drive
• Western Digital Caviar 320Gb SATA150 HDD
• Pioneer Black IDE DVD+-R/RW Drive

It's a timely replacement for my old 900MHz Athlon so it's not designed to be totally kick-ass awesome... but with a great motherboard, dual core 64 processor, 4Gb RAM, room for twin VGA cards and another 3 RAID drives + 2 external RAID + 3 IDE HDDs + another optical drive and the trusty old Zip drive it's already quite an impressive "little" system with tons of potential.

All black box with just a blue led on the front and a blue LED fan at the back... it's like Chanel's little black dress... with an East German shot putter squeezed into it!

Bring back Amphitheatres

Waddya reckon?



There's a lot of numb-nuts in the world who want to kill; think terrorists, insurgents, racists, violent thugs, lager louts, vicious hooligans etc etc. Now, if we brought back Amphitheatres we could throw all the violent nutters, various assorted criminals and wannabee killers in the ring and let them just sort eachother out. No more prison, no more psycho killers, job done!

Such a horror, oh such a farce!

Sunday. A day of rest. What better day than to talk about... peace on earth & goodwill to all men

Now, for those friends of mine who been living under a rock for the last XX days then you may or may not need a reminder that the publication of these pictures in a Danish newspaper have prompted such great anger and furious vengance that there has been the burning of Danish flags, Norwegian flags (?), the Swiss flag (?? - probably just because it's a white cross on a red field) and now the American Flag (???)

The comedian David Mitchell remarked last week they're not *really* just the countries' flags; they're the flags of the protestors who burn them! That's why guys like this are in business!

Anyway, burning flags is dangerous, it could have someone's eye out!

But it's worse than that, he's dead, Jim, dead, Jim, dead, Jim. It's worse than that, he's dead, Jim, dead, Jim, DEAD!! (It's life, Jim. but not as we know it...)

And does unfortunately misguided humour really equate to calls for a real holocaust, threats of terror and actually setting fire to embassies? Well people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones!

The upside of this international debacle is that you could win a car or get your satirical retribution against the west published (yes all of the west, not just the evil Danes, but the Christians, Pagans, Atheists etc too) if you insult the Jews.

But don't worry, there will be no condemnation of the contradictions here, for freedom of speech is important but we must do our best not to insult, though I do wonder just how long this will go on for and whether I should rally my own militia of volatile hotheads against artistic impressions of global warming, the processes used in "farming" the land or even the r@pe of mother earth; all of these illustrations insulting to my own icon of belief. (Actually it's true, it's real, I'm standing on it right now. Can you see it too?)

Anyway, does anyone else see the utter irony in the term "Cartoon Riots"? It's like "Kitty Deathsquads", "Poofy Barbarians" or Harry Enfield's "Gay Hitler"

But I waffle, I digress, so back to the title of this post...

Back in 1987 I bought the 7" EP of New Model Army's fantastic single White Coats with the great B-Side "Chinese Whispers", a song whose lyrics have stuck with me for nearly 20 years, especially the verse...

"Such horror, oh such a farce,
a little bit of broken glass.
You should think yourself lucky that this was done
You'll have something you can whine about for years to come."

Now, whoever you are, if you've still got my vinyl I'd like it back please!

Green Geek

Fancy doing something geeky and green at the same time?

How about the BBC Climate Change Experiment?

The experiment, the largest climate change experiment ever, is a Met Office model of how they think climate patterns work and it's being run by Oxford University on a distributed-computing network. If you've got a PC and can donate some spare processor power then all you need to do is download the software, install it and then get your own personal set of data and your PC crunches the numbers whilst you're working.

The whole experiment is going to take about 4 months on an average PC (whatever the F that may be?) so be prepared for you processor to get a bit warm and the fan to be busier than usual.

I signed up when there were around 1000 people and the initial goal was get around 10,000 PCs together to have more power than "the world's biggest computer" so when I checked yesterday and saw nearly 35k Brits amidst a total of nearly 45k machines worldwide I thought that was well impressive! Good on ya, people of the world. Maybe we can help provide some credible data to stop muppets like this from simply badmouthing climate science because he gets paid by Exxon Mobil!

There's even a table of top computers and top participants but my 900MHz Athlon 512Mb Ram & 1.7GHz Pentium 2Gb Ram machines aren't anywhere in sight and the 6 year old Athlon is mega slow so I won't even waste my time on hooking up the decrepit Pentium III 733 with 128Mb ram... pathetic :(

I even considered building a custom AMD X2 dual core 4.2GHz PC with 2Gb Ram to see how much data it could crunch too. Not that I'd build a machine just for this experiment right ;) I mean, cummon, I do have to do intense graphics, design & development on a machine that was new in the year 2000. And I can build a PC better than Dell and for half the price I reckon... although I do have to get the bike on the road sometime and MOT the car...

*taps fingers and stares at credit card*

Calleva Atrebatum

February. Rain. At last.
Drive. Silchester, Calleva Atrebatum, 43AD, Roman town.
GoreTex boots, expedition jacket, merino wool fleece, warm hat.
Muddy lanes, Rhododendron tunnels, slippery stiles, soggy fields.
Followed by a horse, barrow of dung. Sheep. Lots of them.
Bulls in another. Small mercies.
Rain. Under pylons, crackles above, gains in pace.
Stream, footbridge, copse of English Larch.
Rose cottage, old brick stables, snakey lanes, holly bushes, footbridge.
Another field, another copse, deer. Run away!
Fields, hedges, stiles, pheasants.
Turnips. Rabbits... were here.
Red post box. Wall Lane. Amphitheatre. Yes!
Hard floor, flint walls, trees too young to have seen the show.
History. Imagination. Visions.
Street. Pond. Church. Graveyard.
Roman Wall. Big Roman Wall. Tons of flint.
Rain. More rain. Perimeter, ancient tracks.
South Gate, West Gate, once thriving, now abandoned, empty, thrice 500 years.
Boots off, boxer engine, engage gears, greenlane.
Slip & slide. Shit ones pants, weak bridge, thanks for the warning.
Home. Dry. Football. Beer.

How was your Sunday? :)
[Read something comprehensible about Silchester Roman Town]

Only went out for a spot of lunch...

...and came back with one of these.

1987 Yamaha XT350, just 5000 miles on the clock. It's been stood for 5 years under a tarpaulin so it'll need a good service, an MOT and a bit of TLC.

Super Bowl Xtra Large

Wow, Super Bowl Xtra Large stats

• Longest run (Herndon, 70 yards)
  
• Longest name for a receiver (Roethlisberger - 14 letters)
• Oldest swinger in town (Mick Jagger)
• Most expensive TV ads? ($42k for 30 seconds)
• Longest run of still not entirely understanding the rules (me - 26 years)
• Biggest microphone headsets in the world (Motorola on steroids)
  
• Longest 60 minutes ever (nearly 4 hours)
  
• Biggest sportsmen outside Sumo
• Most out-of-breath athletes (phew - I ran for 10 seconds, & need a rest & a drink)
• Biggest squads? (99 on a Seattle shirt)

Let's hope next year's Super Bowl is the BIGGEST ever!

If there was NO toilet roll...

...like, NONE AT ALL, not on the roll nor within easy reach nor even in the bathroom itself... what would YOU do?

Just a... err... hypothetical question :)