How was 2009? Well it was absolutely crap! It seems the closing months of 2008 were a teaser of what was to come…

I think the blog has probably suffered in 2009, not just because of Twitter but as it became a bit [more] of a receptacle for my ramblings about life, [...]]]>

How was 2009? Well it was absolutely crap! It seems the closing months of 2008 were a teaser of what was to come…

I think the blog has probably suffered in 2009, not just because of Twitter but as it became a bit [more] of a receptacle for my ramblings about life, so what better way of starting 2010 than to ramble on about my life in 2009. Cheaper than a psychologist I suppose!

Work was a bit slow in 2009, the recession has had an effect on the company and we’ve had a couple of rounds of redundancies which doesn’t do much for morale. Plus our three year server replacement schedule which should have seen me rushed off my feet was postponed. In April our IT department grew to three people which made it a lot easier to focus on work without the constant interruptions of having to deal with support calls. The new person? She was a bit talkative but got us all chatting and joking around a lot more, but unfortunately due to job insecurity and a better job offer she decided to move on and left in October. The lack of major work probably been for the best as I’ve had a few months of being too pre-occupied with other things and unable to concentrate, I shudder to think what I’d have broken if I had been going round our offices replacing servers!

Fortunately there was plenty of escapism from the ‘real world’ at the Cinema. Star Trek was much better than I’d hoped and while Transformers 2 wasn’t great, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince was brilliant and really looking forward to the last two, even if that means it’s the end. I have to say seeing them at the IMAX with a theatre full of fans really adds something to the experience. In December went to see “2012″ at the Bedford Cinema, seriously awful place now, completely run down, it ruined an already weak film. It says a lot when I’d rather spend nearly £60 and a 4hour round trip going to London BFI IMAX than pay £5 to see films in my home town! Have yet to see Avatar, wanted to see that at the IMAX in 3D but don’t think I’m going to get around to it.

Gaming in 2009 was pretty slow, almost no games I was interested in for most of the year. Fortunately the later half of 2009 saw Uncharted 2, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, and Left4Dead 2 released, all excellent games, L4D2 especially nearly caused me a heart attack a few weeks ago with the stress of one of the campaigns final missions! Plus thanks to some super Steam sales I’ve grabbed Red Faction: Guerilla, Batman Arkham Asylum, The Crysis Pack, and Mass Effect 1. Hopefully 2010 will bring a few more new games. Looking forward to Mass Effect 2, and Natural Selection 2 the sequel to one of my all time favourite multiplayer games.

Beginning of August Kainz got me looking at Apple Macs again, my previous experience hadn’t been that great, but I decided to go for it anyway. I’ve already written a blog entry for my new Mac experience but as something of an update I’m still very happy with my purchase, I’ve been using it over Christmas and hardly turned my PC on except to play a few games. It does annoy me that while all the Apple stuff “just works” it can’t be bent or twisted to work the way I want it to work! Hopefully the new Apple iTablet/iSlate device coming out will either not interest me or be way too expensive, otherwise I’ll end up getting that to.

Been a bit annoyed with myself regarding my photography, missed a couple of decent opportunities to go out and take some nice pictures. I have been out a few times this year and most recently went to Rutland Waters and the surrounding area, was a bit rainy but got some good pictures. Still not getting the quality I’d hoped for when I got the D450, I think I said it last year but I blame myself! Really need to read and practice more and spend time getting the shot right. Can’t really afford any nice new lenses but hope to get the so called ‘nifty fifty’ as apparently that is good value for money. Hoping to get a printer in 2010 so I can print a few out and put them up, need to perfect my post processing first though.

Ever since I was a kid, home was my haven, no matter what crap was going on outside of those 4 walls I’d could always go home and get away from it all, relax, and be myself. In 2009 that ended. I’d always thought my parents were chalk and cheese together but Christmas 2008 had been worse than normal, and in late February my dad walked out. Since then it’s been a case of keeping my head down, getting on with things, and trying not to upset anyone. Although I’m saving money it seems unlikely I’ll have enough to buy a place of my own any time soon, especially now house prices are back on the rise. Difficult to see how I should move on, but hopefully something shall reveal itself, I already won £6.10p on EuroMillions so the only way is up!!

So that’s my crap year. I’m not expecting much from 2010 either but hope that it will at least get back in to some kind of order that I can move on with in 2011!

Back in the old days I felt that having two PCs was the best way to go. A high-spec PC for my gaming habit and a low spec machine for general day to day web browsing, email, and general apps. That was in 2003 and by 2005 the [...]]]> Mini review/observations of my MacBook Pro

Back in the old days I felt that having two PCs was the best way to go. A high-spec PC for my gaming habit and a low spec machine for general day to day web browsing, email, and general apps. That was in 2003 and by 2005 the low spec machine was becoming a painfully slow machine. By December 2005 I’d had 4 years of Windows XP and while it wasn’t unreliable or slow, I was bored of it! It’d still be another 2 years before Vista made an appearance.

I’d seen Macs before and had dismissed them as over expensive, but now there was the MacMini on the market, it was exactly what I wanted, a small low spec machine for general day to day work, this is what it was being marketed as! So after a 30min play around with one in the local PC World I hit the Apple website and plonked down £565 on a 1.42Ghz PowerPC MacMini with 1Gb of RAM and an 80Gb HDD. I was pretty impressed with the hardware, however as it was an alien OS  to me (OS X Tiger at the time) I think I struggled to get on with it. This was in the dark days, before FireFox had really caught on and a lot of websites still used WMV and IE6 compatibility. This caused the little MacMini a lot of problems, any time some intensive Flash kicked in or I wanted to play a WMV file the fans would crank up to maximum and it would grind to a halt. After about 18 months I got sick of it and went back to a single Windows PC just in time for Vista, vowing never to return to a Mac…

Apple didn’t do too badly out of me though, since getting the MacMini I’d dumped my iRiver H320 MP3 player and got an iPod. Then upgraded to an iPod Touch, and bought another iPod for my dad as a Christmas present. I was also recommending the ease of use of the iPod and iTunes to anyone who asked. Eventually the company I work for gave me an iPhone for work purposes and in my opinion it’s one of the best gadgets I’ve ever owned and it never leaves my side.

In August 2009 my mate Kainz started babbling about Macs, he’d never used them and despite hating the iPod and loathing Apples control of the iPhone he went and bought a MacBook from Apples refurb store. That then got me looking at them, I’d already got a little Advent Netbook but the screen resolution was just too low at 1024×600 which caused too much scrolling. So after a 20minute play with a MacBook Pro in the Milton Keynes Apple Store I popped to the Apple website again and plonked down £749 on a refurbished MacBook Pro, a 13.3″ screen with a 2.26Ghz Intel CPU, 2Gb of RAM (since upgraded to 4Gb), and 160Gb HDD.

It’s typical Apple design, looks amazing, and the chassis feels very solid. The keyboard is great to use and the backlit keys make it easy to see in low light. The glossy screen looks good (I rarely use it in direct sunlight) and the auto brightness works perfectly. The trackpad is the stand out feature for me, it’s massive and the gestures make it so easy to use especially in programs like FireFox that make use of swipe scrolling and swipe to go forward & back. For a laptop the sound quality of the built in speakers is very good. Heat generation is typically low unless under heavy load and fan noise is almost silent all of the time, certainly an improvement on the Netbook and my old Toshiba M400 Tablet which both got hot and noisy even at idle.

The MacBook Pro I received came with OS X Leopard, which I’ve since upgraded to Snow Leopard. I can’t say there are many visual differences between the old Tiger release and Snow Leopard, I’m sure there are lots of under the bonnet changes, visually the most obvious change is the 3D dock, the MBP also supports all of the OS X eye candy where my old MacMini didn’t. All of the old niggles I had with the MacMini seem to have been fixed, I can now copy to two network locations at the same time, and while they are copying I can empty the ‘Trash’ previously on my MacMini it was only one at a time! Also now with Flash and WMV playback is as good as it is on a normal laptop, though I put this down to the increase in horse power. A thing I do like is the integrated Cisco VPN client, no need to install Ciscos dodgy software and I can dial in to the work network quickly and easily.

I’ve tried to keep it as a companion to my main desktop PC (running Windows 7) but I have moved my iTunes library over to the MBP, iTunes is considerably smoother on OS X and makes up for the lost screen space (going from an iTunes running at 1600×1200 to 1280×800 has been hard). I’ve also moved all of my digital photos on to the Mac, initially I wasn’t going to but the screen on the MBP makes the images much more vibrant and colourful, either my ageing Dell 2001FP screens are poor at colour reproduction or I don’t have them calibrated properly…

Annoyances? Not many, it is irritating that my lovely home built Windows Home Server can’t be used to backup the MacBook Pro as the built in Time Machine won’t use Windows shares. HP do a new Windows Home Server with extra software that allows Time Machine backups but that’s a five hundred quid investment to replace something I already have. Other annoyances are network related, OS X doesn’t really like networks, most of it’s apps don’t like or point blank refuse to work over a network share and unlike Windows XP, Vista, or 7 there is no offline files for me to sync network shares so they are always available away from the network.

Overall I’m pleased with the purchase, it’s made me more mobile around the house and I don’t feel I have to sit in front of the PC any more. I do want to upgrade the HDD as I’m running out of space and really wanted to dual boot with Windows 7, should the need arise. On the wish list is an Apple Cinema display to hook it up to but considering current circumstances I’m having to hold off. Also hoping that Apple don’t release some beautiful new model that makes the old one look rubbish!

Life:

Not much going on at all to be honest. Trying to save money, though I do have a little holiday booked in the next few weeks. Works been a bit depressing lately, had two rounds of redundancies cost cutting measures which has killed [...]]]> Haven’t updates here for ages, getting a very bad habit!

Life:

Not much going on at all to be honest. Trying to save money, though I do have a little holiday booked in the next few weeks. Works been a bit depressing lately, had two rounds of redundancies cost cutting measures which has killed morale. Plus the woman who came to work in IT with me and boss six months ago has had a better/more secure offer and left us last week, I think she’d been a pretty positive influence on us both so it’s a real shame that she’s left. House prices are going up again, so the house hunt continues to be something of a long running unfunny joke.

Winter setting in now, temperatures dropping and we are still holding out on putting the heating on, got a hoody I now wear at home with the hood up, but haven’t had to resort to the two pairs of socks… yet!

Photography:

Not had much chance to take pictures, camera bag has been sitting in the corner of my room looking dusty and unloved. Did manage to go out to Whipsnade zoo a few weeks ago, haven’t been to a zoo in years so was pretty interesting, went during the week so very few people around which was even better! Took about 140 photos and whittled them down to about 20 which I tweaked a little. Photos are here, as well as Picasa and Flickr (I’ve not decided which service I prefer yet!), still not entirely happy with all my shots, really need to practice more and pay attention to the settings when taking the photos.

Films:

After seeing Star Trek at the IMAX earlier in the year, I went back again with my dad to see it. Since then I’ve returned to the IMAX to see Transformers 2 and Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.

Transformers 2; wasn’t as good as the first, impressive effects, but I wasn’t a fan of the in-the-action camera work, even on the IMAX screen!

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, probably the best Harry Potter film so far, the opening 10 minutes were in 3D so we all sat with stupid glasses on. I was surprised how good the 3D looked but was disappointed it only lasted the first 10mins. Wished they had shown Dumbledores funeral but beyond that was impressed and look forward to seeing The Deathly Hallows part 1 next year!

Now waiting for all of the above to come out on BluRay.

Other films I’ve seen in the last few months: Terminator Salvation = meh, nothing special at all. How to Lose Friends & Alienate people = It has Simon Pegg and Megan Fox in it, what could go wrong?! Very funny, loved it. Knowing = really enjoyed this to, bit weird but good mystery film. Seven Pounds = didn’t like it, thought the ‘twist’ was pretty obvious from the very beginning. The International = enjoyable action/thriller. X-Men origins: Wolverine = meh, same as Terminator Salvation, no surprise Star Trek beat both of these at the box office.

Gaming:

It’s been a very quiet summer for gaming this year. I got Killzone 2 for the PS3, hated that, really should have cancelled my pre-order when I didn’t like the demo. Played Prototype for the PC, was enjoyable enough but pretty much a throwaway once it’s done. Played through the DLC for Fallout 3, that was fun but I’d agree with the developers that the DLC has reached it’s natural conclusion. Looking forward to Fallout 4 whenever that turns up. Ghostbusters, great game really sticks to the films spirit (pardon the pun). Also ran through Half Life 2, and Episode 1 & 2 again, as good as always. Even played through Call of Duty 4 again.

Needed the distraction this weekend so plonked down £39 for Uncharted 2 for the PS3, a truly excellent game which shows other PS3 developers programming on the PS3 can be done properly. No 15 minute game cache installation, no load times between levels. Beautiful graphics and level architecture, excellent 5.1 sound, an awesome soundtrack, and great story & voice acting. I think I’d definitely put it up there in my top 10 single player experiences.

Games to look forward to in the next few months. Got Left4Dead 2 for PC pre-ordered, Modern Warfare 2 for PC. Assassins Creed 2 and Mass Effect 2 coming along later. Will probably wait for the reviews of BioShock 2 as it’s not being made entirely by the same team. Jury is still out on Max Payne 3, could go either way at the moment.

Not much else to report really, feeling miserable at the moment so hope that hasn’t reflected in my writing, that and the fact I typed it all up at 2:30am of a Monday morning!

Star Trek @ IMAX

Well my predictions for 2009 were accurate, it’s only March and things have already gone to shit. Dads moved out. Probably going to have to sell the house and find somewhere of my own, not enough savings, and as I’ve already found out before I can’t really afford to [...]]]>

Well my predictions for 2009 were accurate, it’s only March and things have already gone to shit. Dads moved out. Probably going to have to sell the house and find somewhere of my own, not enough savings, and as I’ve already found out before I can’t really afford to live on my own with my wage anyway. That’s not to mention the first sweep of redundances at work last week, so will I even have a job in 6-12 months? Just great, still there is that new Star Trek film to look forward to, right?!

I like to think of myself as a trailblazer, setting trends around the net on a near daily basis! Last week was no different as I decided to start using Twitter a micro-blogging site. Twitter lets you type what you’re doing or thinking, as long as it’s 140 characters or less, then people [...]]]>

I like to think of myself as a trailblazer, setting trends around the net on a near daily basis! Last week was no different as I decided to start using Twitter a micro-blogging site. Twitter lets you type what you’re doing or thinking, as long as it’s 140 characters or less, then people who follow you can read it and typically disregard it.

I wasn’t sure what I was going to use it for as I can usually type what I’m doing in 7 letters “nothing” but I’ve found it quite addictive so far, not so much on posting but just following people. The great thing is how accessible it is, because it’s just text and you can’t type massive essays so you can just dip in and out without wasting massive amounts of time.

I’ve mostly been twittering from the iPhone, there’s several decent twittering apps for the iPhone if you manage to wade through the utter shite that is overflowing from the App Store, the one I decided to go with was TwitterFon, I tried Twinkle but found that too complicated and decided against Tweetie as TwitterFon offered everything I wanted for free! The iPhone 3G was almost made for this job, tap one button to create a twitter post, another to post your current location and another to upload a picture from the camera roll, tap send and it’s up there for everyone to ignore. You can search for popular subjects (trends) like the last week it’s been the snow or on twitter “#uksnow“. You can even search based on location so people nearby are shown.

Now since I’ve started using it all I keep hearing is Twitter, Twitter, Twitter! Radio1 have been talking about it, Kainz has got on there, the BBC keep going on about it, even Charlie Brooker is on there! I’m addicted! Anyway that’s it, feels weird typing more than 140 characters! Plus I’ve got to check my Twitter!!

Funny reading back that 2008 was the year of the MCSE, well I’ve still not done anything about it yet, keep putting it off and [...]]]> Well Christmas is over, and it’s the start of another year, I’m not a big fan of new years, something I believe I mentioned just over 12 months ago.

Funny reading back that 2008 was the year of the MCSE, well I’ve still not done anything about it yet, keep putting it off and work is too busy to make any proper plans. I am a bit more in to taking my pictures of stuff so I guess I can at least say I did something I planned to do!

Overall I’d say 2008 has been a bit shit, and not just because of this self-fulfilling credit crunch crap. I suppose it’s had its ups, but its downs have been more… down than I’d expected or prepared for and have left me kind of low for the last couple of months. Over Christmas I haven’t been able to stop myself imaging how things may have played out had the last couple of months turned out different.

2009 doesn’t look too promising so far. I’ll keep taking photos, and try and save some money for a rainy day or maybe that light at the end of tunnel. But as that famous philosopher John Lennon said (according to Google):

“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

Still, there are new Star Trek and Harry Potter films this year, and Windows 7… what?!

Happy New Year everyone! \o/

Well it’s nearly Christmas, don’t have to go back to work until Jan 2nd. Done the Christmas shopping, everything has arrived some of it’s wrapped. I put the tree up a couple of weeks ago, so now it’s just a case of relaxing, playing some games, catching up on the Sky+.

Have a [...]]]>

Well it’s nearly Christmas, don’t have to go back to work until Jan 2nd. Done the Christmas shopping, everything has arrived some of it’s wrapped. I put the tree up a couple of weeks ago, so now it’s just a case of relaxing, playing some games, catching up on the Sky+.

Have a good Christmas, and a new year that doesn’t involve you being made redundant! \o/

*tries not to eat too much*

Last week I was off work so had a chance to update the blog to WordPress 2.7 and add some of the photos I’ve taken over the last few months to my gallery and my Picasa [...]]]> Not much going on in the run up to Christmas.

Last week I was off work so had a chance to update the blog to WordPress 2.7 and add some of the photos I’ve taken over the last few months to my gallery and my Picasa page.

Tomorrow, apart from bringing me another year closer to death, marks the release of a game that has had my attention for the last couple of weeks since I started playing the demo, that game is (obviously) Left4Dead, despite my initial reservations that the game would get old and stale within [...]]]>

Tomorrow, apart from bringing me another year closer to death, marks the release of a game that has had my attention for the last couple of weeks since I started playing the demo, that game is (obviously) Left4Dead, despite my initial reservations that the game would get old and stale within a couple of plays I’ve so far, according to Steam, spent 10.5 hours in the last two weeks mercilessly slaughtering the living dead, and it has been immense fun! The real ‘fun’ is in the Expert difficulty mode, and until last night survival had alluded us, however after a tactical rethink we got through both demo levels just, although the team has yet to make it to the end without at least one sacrifice.

Going to be an unusually ‘busy’ week. Today at 5pm sees the release of the official HD trailer of the new Star Trek movie, a little nervous of what I’ve seen so far, but I’m getting the feeling it’s going to be a reimagining of the franchise, which will probably upset a lot of fans but bring in a lot more, which is probably what it needs, after all it’s not like the Star Trek movie franchise is a particularly stand out collection!

Tuesday is my birthday, the release of the aforementioned Left4Dead, and I should see the arrival of the components for my new Windows Home Server, my current server is stuffed to the brim with videos, music, photos, and backups. Hopefully with nearly 3TB of disk space it should make live easier storing my data and keeping up to date backups of the family PCs.

Then on Friday we have the release of Need for Speed: Undercover, a guilty pleasure of a game, I really enjoyed Need for Speed: Most Wanted and this game seems to be more of the same, which for me is no bad thing. I just really like the cop chases, no matter how much the AI cheats.

I suppose I should post a follow up to my last post “The Gamble”; well, my hand was forced as I’d suspected it might, as the person announced she was leaving! Took the ‘easy’ route and sent an email, got the nicest let down email I could have hoped for and after a couple of weeks of awkwardness things seem to be settling down.

Christmas leave is booked so it’s now just a case of powering through to mid December. Only 18 working days remain for 2008!