Long time, no post

Well, my birthday was OK. Didn't really achieve much. Sadly I was in work, but it was a reasonably nice day. That afternoon we had BlackBerry training, which was quite interesting. But I think BlackBerries take it just that little bit too far. I mean it's a nice idea to have always-on e-mail, but just look at how many people seem to be battling addiction to these things. They're called CrackBerrys for a good reason. Bleh. The actual devices are quite nice though and the technology behind it is quite clever.

Andy moved into his house yesterday, so cue an evening of Chinese food, Wii Sports, Super Monkey Ball and a rather peculiar card game. As you can see in the picture, Rob, Em and Andy are happy to be in Andy's house, and Will seems to be VERY happy indeed!

New Xbox 360 updates...the Dashboard is different now and there's also been an update for Crackdown. It adds lots of modes and features which is nice, but I really dislike the way that they have added stuff that you have to pay for. I keep finding something interesting and it goes 'Oh! You have to pay for this!' and that includes several weapons in the inventory. Annoyingly it doesn't make it obvious which ones. Also you can now take certain cars back to the Agency garage and use them. This doesn't include the Volk gang car that looks identical to the Land Rover 101" Forward Control.

The 360 looks good on an LCD monitor - I found a 2nd hand VGA lead in a game shop and hooked the 360 up to one of my 17" TFT monitors. It is capable of running it at the 1280x1024 native resolution and it did look very nice indeed. The screen is a little too small to use instead of a TV, and the response time on it isn't great. But it was interesting to get an idea what the 360 would be like on a HDTV.

Here's an interesting comparision:

A house for sale in Denbigh at £96,000.
A house for sale in Cornwall, Canada, at the equivalent of £76,000.

Average house price in Canada is $259,331 which works out to £117,747. UK average house price is £217,624.

I think I have finally found a compatible 2nd CPU for my Dell Precision 450. It needs a 2.4ghz Xeon with a 533mhz FSB and 512kb L2 cache. However I can't afford to buy it until next pay day, and the VRM and heatsink needed to get it working are impossible to find in the UK - may have to order those from the USA. Damn it. I suppose I could always fire up my beastly Compaq Proliant 5500 which is maxed out with quad processors - sadly they're only 200mhz Pentium Pros. It hasn't been fired up for a long time now, mainly because of it's huge appetite for electricity and the fact it takes 10 minutes to get going. In a fit of geekiness, I fitted it with blue LEDs in the drive trays and a cold-cathode light in the main vent.

I was going to write something else, but I can't remember what it was. Now I'm tired.