Pump up the bass

A very nice man on bit-tech asked me about my band today and it dawned on me that I no longer maintain a band website. Criminal. On that note, what follows is a very e-peeny showcase of my basses, just because I can. And because, deep down, you know bassists are cool. That's what all the girls say. Once most of them have left with the singer, guitarists and drummer.

My main axe when I'm trying to be sophisticated is a Musicman Stingray 5. I love the Stingray sound, with new strings they growl like angry bears. They're just the sound I hear in my head when I think of how I want to sound. 'Course, my amp might have something to do with that. As far as playability is concerned, the balance and the unfinished, deep neck mean that things are effortless on this bass that would have your fingers falling over each other and your hand aching on some other basses. I'm looking at you, Gibson.

Make:  Ernie Ball Musicman

Model: Stingray 5

Year: 2005

Colour: Honeyburst

Strings: Ernie Ball Super Slinkys 40 60 75 95 125 

My main gigging bass is a Fender Precision. This was the first 'good' bass I bought and it rocks out like no other. Pick, low strap and a little bit of dirt in the sound and it just sings. As such, she is very much set up to be a rock bass. Lower action and thicker, more aggressive strings. It's a bit more worn than it was when this photo was taken as it's had a bit of a hard life. I should be more careful with whom I lend it to and where I put it down. You'll notice another all-maple neck, I just cant stand the feel of a fingerboard. 

Make:  Fender

Model: M.I.A. Precision

Year: 2003

Colour: Chrome Red

Strings: La Bella Deep Talkin' Rounds 44 61 85 110

I still have my first bass, though it doesn't get used all that much these days. A Squire Precision. La Bella Deep Talkin' strings on here too. It's really nice to have two basses so similar. Firstly, I always have a backup. Secondly, whenever people question why I spend so much on basses (they aren't much too other musicians, but to a layman I think the cost sound quite high) I can give them a P copy and a 'real' P to play, which proves my point pretty well! 

Actually, this picture is about the only half-decent one I have of my amp, so you're getting another Squire shot:

Gallien-Krueger 1001-RB II. GK Neo 1x12", GK Neo 2x12". That's a small head and small cab for either very small gigs or gigs where the PA is doing most of the work and I only need a little stage volume. Or there's the 2x12" for when I need more stage volume. And a Laney R1 practice amp, which I simply love.

And thus concludes our tour.

Housekeeping 10/08/2010

What up?

So, y'all up for general updates, twitter-style, 'cos I haven't written a post for ages? 

Since speaking last, I have:

• Graduated (Please, call me Jack Elliott BSc)
• Gone on holiday
• Done 3 summer schools with the uni
• Moved house
• Started claiming Jobseeker's Allowance (exactly where  I thought my degree would get me)
• Bought more pc parts (the relevant blog posts have been changed)
• Spent what time I haven't spent doing those things either looking for a house, a job or playing Starcraft 2.

Good night.

An apology

Quick one today:

When I wrote my last entry, entitled 'Chess is so 15th Century', I was both a) drunk and b) typing on a netbook.

These two factors combined to produce a worse-than-usual post in terms of spelling, formatting and grammar. Sorry.

In other news, I did not buy a GTX260. :-(  I bought a GTX280!

Chess is so 15th Century.

Well now hasn't this been forever? Seems like between my exams, my end-of-uni-forever parties and my general incompetence and laziness I have neglected this blog and, ashamedly, both of it's readers. For that I apologise. But rather than say anything else, hows about we just pretend like nothing ever happened and instead concentrates on me. 'Cos if you fancied hearing about somebody else's life you would be on their blog.

Conundrum: I wanna buy a graphics card. Technically, I want a powerful, gaming GPU. But this bothers me.

I don't much care for video games. I live with 5 video games design students and I'm bombarded by computer games all day and every night. The closest thing this flat gets to a social event is us all playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 as a clan on Xbox Live. (In other news, I bought a 360)

Now this game, despite what you may have read, is actually awful. I'm not easily offended and I will defend video games to the hilt. To the point where I actually wrote in to complain about the Alan Titchmarsh show featuring a 'debate' on video games. But the game just plain sucks. If I have to sit through one more stupid campaign which is the same as every other campaign ever (and fooshin' IDENTICAL to Bad Company 2). The weapons are samey and so are the characters. A lot of people think it's wrong to criticise something for being unoriginal but I disagree. Replace the ruskies with aliens and the P90 with a MA5B and it's Halo. First-Person Shooters hold no interest for me.

Strategy games though. Oh, the hours spent building whole cities of bases, setting up infrastructures, intricate defences, micro-managing resource gatherers. Now there's a game. Any ape can drag their knuckles down generic alley #1, shoot generic gun #37 and kill generic henchman of evil #456 but not many gamers these days have the patience for a good RTS. This all started when we began playing Warcraft 3 Frozen Throne in our flat. Not the game proper, but the tower defence maps. That's some good fun. There is only 1 good RTS for a console, and Halo Wars was designed for a console, it's slimmed-down, easy to use and it works very well on a 360 it has to be said.

I am ancient enough to have bought Morrowind for my PC. Oblivion never felt the same on the 360. I bet you Fallout 3 is better on the PC than the 360 too.  These games are 100 times more involved than CoD, and this is why I want to get into PC gaming, I think there is more scope and more depth to be had on the pc than on a console. There are also some PC-only titles I quite fancy. Theme Hospital, Theme Park World and Dungeon Keeper are three of my favourite games of all time, not that these titles stretch my current card in the slightest, never mind an upgrade. The new Command and Conquer looks good though, as does Diablo 3.

I don't want to be a pc gamer though. Not just for the reasons mentioned above, but because pc gamers are obnoxious. They blame consoles for holding video games back and many of them prioritise graphics over everything else. Now there are some VERY pretty games out there but let's be honest, only 1 game has ever been remembered for being pretty, and Crysis isn't usually talked about favourably. I wish developers would concentrate on something else for once, I don;t really care if a game looks as good as Metro 2033, I want the story of Half-Life, the suspense of the early Resident Evils, the humour of anything that Bullfrog have ever done, the incredible attention to detail of Homeworld 2. NONE of these games had cutting-edge graphics, but they are some of the best games on the planet in my opinion. Before anyone says anything, I will concede (if that's the right word here) that Homeworld 2 is undeniably beautiful. It's the Susan Coffey of the gaming world. Extremely, enticing sexy yet grown-up and classically pretty enough that your parents would approve. But it didn't require high-end hardware, my integrated 6600 played it fine, at the time. It also scaled back extremely well. Though why exactly this was so never really made much sense to me. What were you people playing it on, a NES?

Consoles are easier, fact. I can buy ANY game for my newly-acquired 360 or any other console I own. OK, you got me, the only consoles I own are a 360 (with one game and no controller), a SNES and a classic GameBoy. But any game will work, perfectly. I do not need to worry whether a part of my system can handle a given game, I just buy it and put it in. No so with a PC. My 9500GT is a fantastic card. It runs two big screens extremely well and decodes H.264 on the fly. Totally passive too, so completely silent. But it won't run any games. My awesome pc with a weakling GPU is like having a Gallardo with a Fiesta engine. It's an awesome card, just not a gaming card.

So now the long and short of it is that I'm looking to buy a GTX260. With a bit of luck, this should be able to handle most games at decent settings and framerates. Oh my god, I'm beginning to care about those things. Wish me and my wallet luck.

The best games in the world according to Jack:

1. Pokemon Blue (Gameboy)

Just the best game on the planet. Infinite scope, tactics, trading with friends, replayability for years and years. I remember the day that this arrived in the post and I haven't been able to put it down since. I'm waiting for a proper remake. Red and Yellow belong in 1.1th place.

2. Super Mario World (Super Nintendo Entertainment System (oh yeah, full names tonight!))

If you asked me to describe the perfect game I would say I wanted something incessantly fun, something my mates would think was cool but that my mam could also play. I'd ask for a big game with lots to do, a straightforward campaign but challenges beyond that for the advanced player. I'd ask for a mind-blowing and memorable soundtrack and I'd ask for game that I would still want to play over 18 years after first discovering it. I'd ask for Super Mario World.

3+4. Theme Hospital + Theme Park World (PC)

Couldn't choose between these. Never could. Bullfrog have never made a bad game but these two really stand out. I could wax lyrical all day about the ultra-easy beginnings and the ultra-hard endings, the micro-managing of employees and the funniest games ever made. But all you need to know is that these games will make you smile more than any others. And isn't that why we play games anyway?

5. Homeworld 2 (PC)

Star Trek was boring because there were never any kickass battles. Put all of that right with what I still probably the most stunning game ever made. Hyperspace a Hiigaran Battlecrusier into the middle of an Vagyr fleet and revel in the awesomenitude.

6. Mario Kart: Double Dash! (Gamecube)

Gamecube, Mario Kart, Alcohol, Friends. I admit that the N64 version was better as a game (not to mention my first Mario Kart, I missed the SNES) and the Wii version was better in many technical aspects. But Double Dash is the one I played as late-teen, getting drunk in Paul Phillips' house, swearing and screaming, spilling Jack Daniels and coke all over his big brother's console. It's my Mario Kart

7. KKnD2: Krossfire (PC)

Hilarity, destruction, and the movie where the Juggernaut commander squishes an Evolved trooper, that's quite hilarious. Oh, don't forget the Kamikaze troops either. Did I mention the hilarity?

8. Age Of Empires 2 (PC)

I like strategy games, so I love AofE2. I still get goosebumps whenever I seal of my base with an all-encompassing wall or build a huge navy to have total dominance over the waters.#

9. Star Wars: Republic Commando (Xbox)

I do not like first-person shooters. That said, I adore this game. It's well-thought out. The campaign is the feature, not the multiplayer afterthought. The squad moves fantastically, the 'stack up' in front of a door still makes me weak at the knees and thr game looks gorgeous. The thought that went into the game, things like the windscreen wiper for your HUD and the atmospheric sounds of creatures really boggle the mind. But the best bit about this game are the Deltas themselves. The acting, dialogue and movement are all spot-on, you believe these guys really are bond brothers who have been to hell and back together. Except Sev, he just went.

10. F-Zero (SNES)

This was a 3D (ish) racing game. It was released when I was 1 year old. It is fantastic and has the best video game soundtrack ever devised. It's so beautiful to watch, play and most of all listen to that I just want to lick it, caress it and dribble it into my ears at the same time.

11. Twisted Metal III (Playstation)

Cool cars, kick-ass weapons, arcade-style play and some mean bosses. What's not to love? I named my Mewtwo 'Primevil' after the boss from TM3.

12. Command and Conquer: Red Alert 2 (PC)

Classic. Not pretty like Homeworld and not devil-in-the-details like AofE. But brilliant. That mission where the Navy shows up and starts destroying the enemy buildings around your spy is just as cool today as when I first saw it.

Teletubbie Bye-Bye

Ever since I moved out of my parent's house, my little brother has taken in moving into my room. Especially as my (rather lovely) desk is there all empty and ripe for him to fill it with Microsoft rubbish and practice his mad xb0x1ng ski11z.

Deciding that I could a) free up some space in my flat. b) win favour with the 'rents. and c) have something to do uni work facebook on when I went home. I have gifted (how American) my server to my parent's house. It got a fresh install of Windows 7 ultimate 64-bit (which, as much as I hate Windows, is bloody awesome). So now he can do his homework, play CounterStrike: Source(my fault, that one is) and watch movies in my room. My mam also has a pc to use at long last as there isn't really a family one. My dad has his, as does my other brother. The invading brother (let's call him George, that is after all his name) has an ancient laptop that struggles through Vista. Needless to say everybody is over the moon with our little arrangement and all it cost was the £11.99 (after a McDonald's voucher) for a Trust keyboard/mouse set from play.com.

Result.

In other news, my summer is ridiculously busy! And I have an interview for a I want, nay need, on Wednesday. Wish me luck, internetz.

All change please, all change.

As is probably the way when  somebody leaves university, I sense a lot of changes on the horizon. I have applied for a job for a start. Not like a crappy job, but a proper one. One with a salary and hours and a desk. It's at the uni at it's pretty much what I'm doing now except with a bit more organisational stuff. Good money too.

I have quit my old job, so I'm now just working as a student ambassador, I'm no longer at the electronics shop that shall not be named, which is always good. I am also now single, and I'm wondering what a new woman will bring to my life, if and when this happens.

Presuming I graduate but don't get a job, I have been offered the opportunity to go to Japan to teach English in a secondary school there. I have to move house soon, and I'm either living with a guy from my course or just by myself (depending on finances) but not with my current flatmates.

Many many changes, all of which are pretty brilliant.

HAL9000: An addendum.

Just a quick little note with regards to the solution to problem I've been having. I have an MSI 770-C45 motherboard in my main pc and it's a fantastic bit of kit. But one of the things that has always annoyed me is that it, like most other AM3 boards, only allows the far two memory slots because the near two are blocked by any kind of third-party cooler. This was especially annoying for me as I have Corsair Dominator memory which stands a full 50mm proud of the DIMM sockets.

I found the Zalman Flex cooler which is around as deep (front to back) as the cpu itself, measuring only 74mm. For around £30 you get just the cooler, but even an awesome 120mm PWM (I chose the Sharkoon Silent Eagle SE as I already have 2 in my pc) is around £10-15. Any 120mm will do. What attracted me to the Zalman was that, unlike any other high-end cooler I could find, it allows but doesn't require, a fan on either the front, back, or both.

Zalman recommend that if you're only using 1 fan it should go on the front, but I thought I'd try my luck mounting just a fan on the back pulling air through the heatsink. This means that there is no overhang on the memory side allowing you to use any memory in any of the sockets. There are a couple of reviews out there already so I'll spare you installation (painless) and the noise (depends on fan) issues but I will share my results using only one fan in the 'wrong' place because I can't find anyone else doing it.

 Mounted Zalman and Sharkoon with the 

standard Antec fans in the back and roof.

My case is an Antec 300 with 2 Sharkoon Silent Eagles SE in the front two fan spaces, both of these are set to 'ridiculously slow' airflow using the blue (4V??) cable. There are also the standard Antec Tricools in the back (120mm) and top (140mm) both set to slow. Processor is a stock speed AMD Phenom 955 and there is that third Sharkoon fan on the back of the heatsink pulling air through the fins and exhausting out to the rear Tricool. Nothing else in the case puts out much heat, there is a passive 9500GT, an SSD and a Green Drive. Basically, my PC likely creates less heat than yours, bear this in mind.

Having said that, ambient room temp is currently 21C. The cpu is idling at 34C and a 100% load stress test on all four cores for an hour leveled out at 54C, I did see 55C for few seconds in the middle too. Considering how quiet it is, and that it isn't really set up properly, I think a delta T of 13C (idle) and 34C (load) isn't that bad. These figures put it a degree or two better than the Titan Fenrir at idle (not that I've ever used one, I'm nicking those bit-tech's review on the overclocked AM2 cpu) and the Fenrir blocks half the memory sockets.

Not a wonderfully in-depth review but I thought a few people must be in the same boat as me and I thought I'd share my experiences and a very successful experiment, this is an awesome piece of hardware, even when used incorrectly! I think a low-profile fan might fit on the front if anyone is interested.

As a result, guess who now has 8GB of RAM? :D

An Introspective

I graduate pretty soon. I have spent my entire time at university not enjoying myself and genuinely wishing that this day would come as soon as it possibly could. I didn't like uni, I could barely force myself to go in every day, it resulted in me being diagnosed with depression and being a general bastard to my friends, particularly my (now ex) girlfriend.

This is perilously close to turning into a livejournal post with me just feeling sorry for myself for a few hundred words but bear with me, I need to get this off my chest. The problem is that recently I've had somewhat of a revelation, an epiphany if you will. You see, I don't actually want to grow up.

Very soon, I will lose the opportunity to do various things forever: be in a society, dress up in fancy dress on a regular basis, be a summer school rep, get up at 4pm and think it 'early' and, as much as it pains me to admit it, never will I be surrounded by such cute and uninhibited women ever again.

The horrific part is that I never took any of these opportunities when I had them and now that I have merely a few weeks left at university I have no time to take any of them. I very much enjoyed my time with my long-term girlfriend and would not have changed any of it for anything, ever. Honestly. But part of me still wonders if I somehow 'missed out' by not spending my time at uni chasing young women up and down campus. God knows I have the rest of my life for long-term relationships.

I'm not doing particularly well academically this year, there's a real danger I might not pass some modules. This time last year I was awake at night being sick because of the worry over my exams and the possibility of failure but actually, I wouldn't mind failing at all this year. The prospect of being a university student, with the lifestyle and friends that I currently enjoy whilst only doing one or two modules is incredibly appealing. I could be in societies, write for the Courier, get involved with the volunteer's service and do all of the things that I missed out on doing over the past three years.

I have applied for what is practically my ideal job at the uni next year, and getting that would be a dream come true, not only would I have a job that I truly enjoyed, but I would be getting paid enough to start paying off my debts and, whilst I wouldn't still be a student, I would at least be at university. Hopefully that will allow me to pursue my interests and actually be productive.

"Of course the shortcut isn't easy, if it was it would just be the way" Well this one is.

Despite having used Ubuntu for the past 3 years I have just discovered the coolest feature ever. I wanted to go to my /media folder and without thinking I just typed '/media' on the desktop, I hadn't bothered to open a terminal because I was talking and I wasn't paying attention. Low and behold Nautilus has popped up at my media file.

Turns out pressing '/' when on the desktop brings up an 'Open Location' dialog box. People have really put thought into the way you use a computer and made it as easy as possible, love it.

That horse hasn't been flogged enough!

After the unbearable tedium of my last post I thought I'd make today's short and sweet. Ignorance's old guitarist is involved in a Movement called Youth Fight For Jobs that strives to get, amongst other things, a decent working wage for everyone.

It's something the whole ex-band believes in an we've worked to promote in the past. They are having a fund-raiser/profile-raising event on the 11th March in Trillians Rock Bar in Newcastle and  . . . . . . . . . 

Ignorance is the opening act.

How cool is that? It's our first gig in almost 3 years and no one is anywhere near ready. Cue a mad rush to rehearse and generally get assorted shit together. Awesome!

Rejected titles:

Jumping on the bandwagon

Reunion tour

Getting the band back together

Youth Fight For Rock 

etc.

Going green.

I'm quite the hippy, you know? With that in mind I've been doing some energy calculations recently. My server runs at around 45W whilst seeding some torrents and basically idling, it's usual state. So, to run this thing 24/7 for a month would cost the princely sum of £3.72. Hardly a fortune.

My desktop tends to run around 80W with just the tower running. Adding the dual 22 monitors and the speakers can increase this to 300+ if the processor is digging in but usually even that is usually scaled back to 800MHz/core and as I type this (tower, two screens and listening to music) I'm reading ~130W. Assuming an average of 100W (bearing in mind whenever I leave the room the speakers and screen go off) and 10 hours a day usage this take us to £3.10 a month. To have the desktop running 24/7 for a month would cost £7.44, a not insubstantial sum.

But hold on, currently the server is on 24/7 and the desktop for 10 hours a day, totaling £6.82/month, which is only 62p less than just having the desktop on all of the time. That difference will get smaller when you assume that a greater proportion of the desktop's uptime will be with the screens and speakers off if it became the torrent mule, not to mention the reduced strain on me managing two separate pcs.

My point? Well there isn't one really, it's just I either write this or my bioremediation essay. But I guess you could say that computers don't cost much to run and don't hurt the planet. They will however, hurt your brain if you've actually made it through this blog post. Now if you don't mind I'm off to bed and I'm turning my server off, the desktop can torrent tonight. Far out.

I've been served

Stupid Western Digital. I have quite a nice server, usually. But my 1.5TB Caviar Green drive (an identical one to the storage drive in my desktop) has just failed. Which means I've had to send it away for a warranty replacement. Which means that the main drive in my server is a three year-old WD drive with a whopping capacity of 320GB. With the way my data storage works I didn't actually lose any data as everything that is on the server is on my desktop. (Although the system was designed so that if the desktop ever failed I would have a backup on the server, it's nice to know it works the other way around too!)

My server was going to be my desktop but when I put the Phenom 955 I bought into the Zotac motherboard that I bought I realised the cpu clock speed was stuck at 800MHz per core. After many angry emails with what is certainly the worst customer service team I have ever come across it became clear that, because Zotac falsely claimed that my motherboard supported my cpu when it actually didn't, I was left with a rather underpowered pc. The reason that I bought the Zotac board was that it was the only mini-ITX board that claimed to support that cpu, so swapping out the board for another simply wasn't an option. I was left with the choices of either buying another, much less powerful, cpu or another board in another form factor. That second option would also necessitate a new case and power supply as only the mini-ITX boards would fit in the Silverstone. Obviously I chose the second option (along with some DDR3 memory as it turned out) to build my desktop. The remaining case, power supply, motherboard and memory stayed behind and were joined by the CPU  from my old desktop. Thus, my mini-ITX server was born.

Specs:
Case: Silverstone Sugo SG-05B (With it's original awesome, 80+ PSU)
Motherboard: Zotac 8200-C-E (Integrated GeForce 8200, wifi and lies)
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ (2.4GHz, Dualcore)
Memory: 2GB Corsair ValueRAM (800MHz, DDR2)
Storage Drive: 1.5TB Western Digital Green (WD15EADS) (Although currently it's the 320GB drive as mentioned)
CPU Cooler: Scythe Shuriken

And the other bits:
Operating System: Ubuntu 9.04
Monitors: Samsung SM226BW
Keyboard/Mouse: Advent ADE-AD2

At least having it offline for a bit allowed me a chance to nab some photos.

 

 

Nominally the server is headless as all of the functions it performs are administered via the network. Having said that, it is connected to the VGA input on one of my monitors and there is a dongle for the wireless keyboard/mouse kit because sometimes it helps to actually use the machine. Why wouldn't I? It sits right beside my other pc in a cupboard in the desk so it's close enough to use the same monitors as the main machine. Switching between my pc an my server is as easy as pressing the 'source' button on my left hand monitor.

The original memory was 4GB of OCZ Platinum DDR2. When I bought the new system I decided that DDR3 was the way to go so I had no use for the nice DDR2 that I'd bought as it would be way overkill for a server. Thankfully a flatmate was more than happy to take it off my hands for a very nice price. This paid 2/3rds of the Corsair Dominator that sits in my main pc. The server's memory was replaced by the Corsair ValueRAM that used to be in my main pc. The cpu is the one from that old machine too. Just to clarify then, the memory in the pictures is the old OCZ, the ValueRAM looks nowhere near as impressive, although for a machine that sits in a cupboard that isn't a big deal.

I have re-installed the image from a backup I'd made and I'm currently deciding what I desperately need to have on the server and what I can live without should my main system fail. I haven't seen that 'home' percentage useage bar so empty in a very long time.

300 miles, 280 pupils, 6 undergrads, and 5 schools in 4 days.

Cumbria is a rather beautiful part of the world. I've been away for four days as part of my Student Ambassador job I hold with university. Basically, we're a team of undergraduates who promote the university (and universities in general) to the public. Not as bad as it sounds actually, there are no cold calls or leafleting or anything, we get to do some quite interesting things.

My favourite aspect of the job is working on the summer schools that the university runs bit I also get to go into secondary schools around the UK and talk to students about university and university life as well as take things like campus tours and work on open days. There were a stack of schools in Cumbria that wanted visiting so a team of six ambassadors and two members of staff were dispatched to set them right.

Highlights included a school that employed two bouncers, some quick rally driving, sampling one awesome nightclub in Carlisle (and a few terrible ones) and a trip to Royston Vasey. No kidding, there was a certain hotel that was literally straight out of a horror movie. You know when somebody walks into a bar and everybody puts their pint down to glare at the non-locals? Check. The overly-joyous-and-so-must-be-hiding-a-dark-secret manager? Check. The mute and miserable waitress? One of those too. It has since come to my attention that this particular pub is one of the roughest in the area. We left and went to Wetherspoons. Now, I like Wetherspoons. I like it like I like McDonalds, its simple and cheap but who cares? It IS cheap after all and if you go expecting anything else you will be disappointed. But how often has the phrase "This hotel is horrible, let's go to Spoons!" been said? How bad is somewhere for a Wetherspoons to not be a step up but a whole fire escape up?

I slept with my penkinfe under my pillow.

On a more serious note the kids there were awesome. Names of kids and schools are obviously off the menu but I was extremely happy to, once again, prove the people who argue that the youth are a bunch of time-wasting, violent yobs wrong. Schoolkids (like all humans) naturally gravitate towards what they find comforting, in this case their friendship groups. I usually go for the group of rowdy lads. I was one of them at school and I'm hardly one to back down from a challenge. I quite enjoy the peacocking, posturing and the politics that groups of boys get involved in on what I am sure is a largely subconscious level. It certainly beats the boring social interactions of girls. Another, female, rep is even better. We call her the alpha-male and she simply rocks out with her cock out when it comes to taming loud boys. I tried to make that not sound dirty but it failed.

I'll say it again (although to the first time on this nascent blog): People who claim kids are inherently bad do no know how to handle kids. The problem lies with you and your poor social and communication skills, not with them. Just for shits and giggles, go back and replace the word 'kids' with whatever you like. 'Blacks', 'Gays' and 'Women' are fun ones. Funny how it's still just as true, isn't it? This attitude really started to piss me off at Beamish, particularly in the school. Every day I'd hear about how bad the youth of today are and every day I would have to defend them. Victimising and scapegoating a group of people is not a great way to make them feel wanted by society. Why are people surprised when someone whom they have turned their back on turns their back on them? 

A middle-aged lady once latched on to me when I was walking from Chester-le-Street station to my parent's house. When I asked her why she was following me she said she wanted to talk to me as she didn't like walking by herself. With a little further pressing it seems she was afraid of everybody under 25 as they are all rapists and muggers. Everybody apart from me, but by this point it was quite clear the woman existed in a constant state of dread so maybe she wasn't thinking straight. She literally just didn't feel safe walking through her hometown without an escort. Most people, on hearing this, would invariably think that she was the victim of some great social injustice where a small minority ruin it for the rest of us. Or perhaps she had been mugged or raped and was understandably worried about a repeat performance. But no, she was just a headcase. "There is nothing to fear but fear itself." If you tell yourself that a place and it's inhabitants are scary then you will be scared, but if you pull your head out your arse and visit some schools and talk to some kids you'll realise that, at worst, they remind you of you.

I'm all for local industry, but c'mon.

So I got this as Christmas present:

And, to be honest, it was a nice gift. Except there were a few small flaws. Whe I first opened it I remarked that, for a 'World Beer Selection', an alarming percentage of them were lagers. On closer inspection however another alarming inconsistency was noticed.

You might have to click on the image and full screen it to read the text.

So, not entirely beery and not at all worldy. Well, at least there is a selection. Or rather there was. I don't think I've drunk the Carling yet anyway.

HAL 9000

It's no secret that one of my main interests is computing. In fact, other than playing bass, I'd say it's even a hobby. Because of this, I'm active on a couple of online forums (fora?) including the excellent bit-tech and eeeuser. Rather than post my specs in my signature and in a myriad of different topics I'd like to have everything in one place.

To that end, this is my main pc as of the time of this writing.

Specs:
Case: Antec 300 (with 2x Sharkoon 'Golfball' 120mm fans in the front)Motherboard: MSI 770-C45

Processor: AMD Phenom II 955 Black Edition (3.2GHz, Quadcore)

CPU Cooler: Zalman Flex

Memory: 8GB Corsair Dominator (1600MHz, DDR3)

Graphics Card: XFX GTX280

/ drive: 30GB OCZ Vertex Turbo SSD

/home drive: 500GB Western Digital Black

/storage drive: 1500GB Western Digital Green

Optical Drive: LG Writemaster DVD Writer

Power Supply: Corsair CX400

And the other bits:
Operating System: Ubuntu 9.10
Monitors: 2x Samsung SM226BW (22” 1680x1050 each)
Keyboard: Saitek Eclipse II
Mouse: Logitech RX720 (on a Razer Exactamat)

This system is pretty new to me actually. I had originally planned to build a Mini-ITX system that eventually became my server (due to the evil Zotac's lies!) My original aim was for the most powerful system possible that was both quiet and not super expensive. I mean, yes, I could have bought an i7 and some more, triple channel, RAM. But what are the performance gains really? I have no doubt that my system is twice as good as a pc that costs half as much. But is something that costs twice as much (or more) as mine really twice as good? I have always believed in buying slightly behind the curve. Cutting edge always costs proportionally far much more for a few percent performance gain. And next year it won't be cutting edge any more, and it will have dropped tremendously in price. Yes English people, that was a sentence that began with an 'And' and then I had a comma followed by an 'and'. And I don't care.

The quad core seemed pretty necessary, I do a fair amount of multitasking and there are several linux programs that make use of two or more cores. The memory was simply because I know Corsair Dominator to be good and because at the time I bought it, all RAM was ridiculously expensive so I thought as might as well buy good stuff. The HSF is easily the loudest thing in the PC. I would like to replace it sometime soon with the Titan Fenrir, especially now that the limited edition is out. But that requires money and time to remove the mobo. I can't get any more memory until I swap coolers as the low-but-wide Scythe blocks the first two DDR3 slots. (NOTE, as of April 2010, I have solved this problem!)

The GPU pretty much had to be a nVidia because I wanted to use vdpau. Originall I bought a 9500GT but then I started gettin into pc gaming again. Result: GTX280. Oh well, at least it won't need upgrading for a while.

Another indulgence I allowed myself was in the storage department. SSD's have really taken off since 2009 and are fast becoming mainstream. The advantages they provide as a boot drive are numerous and can be found all over the web if you don't know already. Suffice it to say that a good one is an order of magnitude faster than any hard disk. Expensive per GB, the sensible solution seemed to me to be a small SSD as a boot drive and then a big HDD for storage. There's a performance-orientated 500GB 'black' drive as /home for day to day use and a cool and quiet 1.5TB 'green' drive for internal backups and bulk file storage. Those 1080p movies aren't small files you know.

Screenshot and a close-up of conky:

 

 

In other news, my dissertation is finished! I'll be looking to try and update this blog more often now, also look out for my server details and the 'why I need a new laptop' post.

No need to shower, I use linux.

So now that the formal introductions are out of the way I think it's about time we got to writing something actually worth reading. Well, maybe next time. For now, I want to talk to you about one of the great loves of my life. My Parents? Brothers? Girlfriend of 4 years? Even my basses? Oh no.

Ubuntu makes my life so much easier in many ways, so much so that I've been totally Windows-free (on my main machine at least) since early 2007. I like linux in general. I like the idea that software should be free and that it shouldn't cost a penny either. (FOSS geeks will understand, for the rest of you, look up 'Free Software') I like the package management, which makes installing anything totally painless. I like the near-absence of drivers and fact that 99% of hardware is support natively. Speaking of hardware, I like the fact that my machines can be a little bit special, everything from a shiny quadcore desktop to an ancient beige box can run some version of linux and get a very useable desktop. I love the fact that things like TinyCore, a 10MB operating system that only needs an i486DX and 32MB of RAM, exists purely because they can and because they are useful to maybe 100 people worldwide. But that's enough to make them useful enough. I like the fact that the last virus I got was 4 years ago, and I like the fact that that makes surfing for porn much more hassle-free. I like the system stability, that nothing ever goes wrong. And when it does, I like the support and that there are a few million people just a click away wanting to help.

But most importantly, I like the geekiness factor, the exclusivity. I like it when people ask what it is or how my computer does things like that. Candidly, I like the fact that people see it as a little bit nerdy and a little bit different.

On the new-found popularity of unix-based systems, I'm unsure. I don't want more people to use linux. When they do, we will lose our advantages. The support pool will be diluted, the average technical ability will dwindle and the vulnerabilities from viruses and the like will increase as the potential market for said vulnerabilities increases. On the plus side, we will receive more support from manufacturers and perhaps even some more video games. But why? I have a Windows machine for the odd game of Theme Hospital and I buy from manufacturers who bother to support unix in the first place. I bought an Nvidia card because I adore nvidia-settings-manager and because VDPAU is the best linux development in recent years. The nice company who cares about linux and bothers to put this stuff out gets my money. You can twat on all day about there being no money to be made from FOSS. Ask Nvidia and my 9500GT what they think.

Once more, with feeling.

After staring at that first post for a whole day now I'm feeling a little remiss. So let's get some things cleared up.

The name. Well, that sort of comes from my old band. technically, we still are a band, it's just that we haven't really had the time to do anything since we all grew up. Ignorance were Chester-le-Street's premier shitrock band. And don't go thinking that we coined a new genre or anything, oh no. We were just shit. But we had a laugh and total strangers actually paid good money to come see us.

As I was uploading that picture, which I selected because I thought it was relatively recent, I noticed the metadata. That was taken in October 2007, a full 2 years before this post was written. And that makes me more than a little sad. In fact, if I was any more sad this post would be worthy of LiveJournal.



Milla Jovovich

Ok, I'm happy again. As for the ' Café de l' ' part. (How do you enclose something that ends with an apostrophe in apostrophes?) I just thought it sounded nice. I even asked a girl I know who is on placement in France if it made sense.


Myself: Well, I have nothing really to blog about. Which, so far as I can see, makes me eminently qualified to have a blog. I'm currently 20 (although I only plan on being this way until around March) and I live in Newcastle which is in the North-East of England. I'm reading Chemistry and Biology (Joint Honours, BSc) at Newcastle University and I'm in my final year. I'd blather on and on about my flat and such but you don't care. I do work for the university, and I work in a shop too. But I'm not telling you which, lets just say I'm looking to move somewhere else sometime soon.

The very first post.

So, my first entry. And I can't really think of anything worthy of this post to be honest. I've never had a blog before, and I'm not really sure what's going to fill these columns over the life of this blog. Typos probably. And plenty of commas. Mr Hoggart, my truly fantastic English teacher, kept telling me that I overused bracketing commas.

Thing is, I've always been really good at starting things but never too good at finishing them. All I can tell you is, I've been seeing, hearing and doing things lately that I think would probably look good on something like this. I kinda wanted to be a journalist for a bit, before common sense pulled me into science. It was probably for the best to be honest, as I feel you're about to see that what I write about is neither particularly interesting or even particularly . . . . . . . .good.

I'm right in the middle of my dissertation at the moment. Couple that with the fact that I don't have really interesting to say and you won't be expecting frequent updates.

At least the best thing about having a blog like this is that nobody is reading it, so there's nobody to disappoint. Self-deprecation, there'll be more of that, too.


Sincerely,
Jack