On the left is my project guitar. I usually play bass but when I decided I wanted to put a guitar together from parts, it was a lot easier to find guitar parts. It's a replica of a Fender Telecaster, or it will be. It's going to be natural with all black hardware and hopefully it should look quite nice if I ever finish it. To be fair I've had the parts shown for over a year now, but I need a load more parts and also access to a drill press, and it'll need some sort of finish applied. Oh well, it'll be done when it's done.

The displays turned up for the machine today. It's so much better now, the only monitor I had before was a hideous 14" CRT so going to dual 17" TFTs was totally a insane difference. Having two monitors is a complete revelation. I did once have a Mac Quadra set up with two 640x480 screens, but this now has a desktop of 2650x1024, which is quite nice. It looks like my transition from using mainly laptops back to a single powerful desktop is complete (other than some pending upgrades). If anyone wants any laptops, I have a few sub-1ghz machines knocking about which I may be persuaded to part with...

If you're at all interested, the monitors I bought are HANNS.G JC171D 17" TFTs. Nope, I've never heard of them either but they were cheap and had many good reviews on Ebuyer. The picture quality is great and they have both DVI and VGA inputs. I recently found out an Xbox 360 could run on them at 1280x1024 - HD resolution. Admittedly they are much smaller than a real HDTV.

Played badminton tonight. Started out playing like utter shit, but picked up through the evening. I was pleased with the last game as the score was equal right up to the end.

I still have only watched 1 hour of Casino Royale. I'm finding it increasingly difficult to keep watching it for some reason.

Some examples of how utterly disgusting the human race can be:

Man beheads 17 year old girl's dog
Man rips wife's eyes out after she refuses him sex

Just insane. I mean, how? I wonder if the human race has a future, or even if it deserves one. However, here are some happier links:

Cute Polar Bear in Berlin Zoo
Drawing on dusty cars

Work, Second Life, Porridge, a Mandolin and an accidentally purchased computer...

Work was the same as usual today. The only event of any real interest (i.e none) was going to install a laptop only to find that the person wasn't in, despite me being assured that they would be. Great. Also it was dress down for comic relief day, which was nice until I realised that my trainers were releasing a rank odour around me. Got to get some new ones. One department spent the whole day wearing pyjamas and selling cakes. It apparently worked as they made over 250 quid. I admit that I had three pieces of their chocolate cake as it was really nice.

I was supposed to play badminton tonight but ended up eating a bowl of porridge with hot chocolate powder in it instead and noodling around on my mandolin. I know that makes no sense at all. I bought a HUGE box of porridge (Scott's Porage Oats) ages ago and I swear it isn't going down at all despite eating it quite often.

I had another play with Second Life this evening. Once again it just confirmed that it is one of the most irritating experiences ever. It takes ages to download the environments and then after you've taken a few stupidly animated steps into a wall you can't see, it crashes. Then you reload to be confronted by a naked guy with wings and a huge deformed penis saying something like "that;s how u like it btch u derty slut o yah". The very first object I ever saw in Second Life after I left the Welcome area was a giant penis with handlebars and it's basically got worse from there. One day I'll uninstall it but I keep feeling compelled to try and track down an area in it where people aren't trying to have glitchy, badly animated sex.

My new computer plans have gone slightly awry. I somehow accidentally ended up buying a Dell Precision 450 workstation on Ebay. Currently it's a single 2.6ghz Xeon with 512mb RAM, hopefully it could be taken up to a dual 3.4ghz Xeon with a decent graphics card if I can get the parts. Oh well, it'll be something to play with until the new Core 2 Duo Mac Minis come out with Leopard.

It's supposed to snow next week. I hope it doesn't because it causes problems where I live, but then again that is why I drive a big polluting 4x4. Also the dog loves the snow, so if it does, at least he'll enjoy it.

Urm. Possibly the most boring blog post ever, but never mind.