Random Characters…

For a grown man to be so damn excited about going to a weekend long LAN party?

I’ve gone to a few of the Multiplay i-Series LAN’s over the last year or so, but this is probably the most excited I’ve been about one so far, which is further compounded by the promise of a North vs. South drinking session for Robbo’s birthday against the guys from Scan.

Team Woob has got a team of 10 in attendance and it’s going to be great. We’ll invariably get beaten in the group stages of any tournaments we enter, but I cannot believe how much fun the whole thing will be.

Exciting Times.

In a poll by UK Science Fiction magazine SFX, Serenity, the spin-off movie from my favourite short lived TV show Firefly, won the title of Favourite Science Fiction Film, beating the likes of Star Wars and Alien.

I have to say that Serenity is an absolute blinder of a film, and, in my list, it’s certainly near the top, but still behind Star Wars. Clearly this SFX poll is somewhat off the wall, but it may be just what is needed to convince network executives that a new series of Firefly is a viable product to grace our screens once again. We can but hope.

Some yummy screengrabs:

Update: The really great thing about the new task switcher, is that when the windows are layered, like in the second image above, they’re not just a static image grab of the window - they’re the actual window, so if you’ve got a video playing, it carries on playing, your IRC text keeps flowing, and you just keep drooling about how pretty it all is.

The bloody file copy thing still can’t estimate transfer times. Wget can do it in a UNIX shell environment so it can’t be that hard.

So I went and did a silly thing yesterday. I dug out a spare SATA drive and I’ve installed Vista on it. Something I thought I wouldn’t do till Crysis came out. The thing is, I really quite like it. I’ve staunchly refused to upgrade to the latest version of any Microsoft OS for the last few releases, until all the bugs feel ironed out, and most of my colleagues in IT are normally in agreement with me on this, but one by one, we’ve all installed it, and, so far, not found it wanting. The driver support is there, which was a big surprise, and certainly wasn’t the case with the jump from ‘98 > 2000, or even 2000 > XP. A nice touch was the fact that it was able to identify any devices that didn’t have correct drivers, rather than just labeling them as ‘Unidentified PCI device’ or something similar.

The actual install was a cakewalk, and so much faster than installing XP, this more than likely being down to the fact that it’s installed from images, rather than tediously copying over thousands of individual files. On first boot, it found drivers for almost all of my hardware, with the only exceptions being the Abit uGuru chip, the 8800GTS, and my Audigy 4, meaning that I could get on with using things right away, and didn’t have to worry about network drivers before I could even think about other drivers.

The interface has the standard fare you’d expect from Windows, with all the usual widgets, but this feels far more polished than previous outings, and far more responsive. Load times are snappy, multiple applications switch smoothly, and it all looks so damn good. The Aero interface is a big step up, and Microsoft have clearly learnt from past mistakes and MacOS X. Comparisons to OSX are inevitable, but from having used both, I prefer Vista. From a typographical point of view, the fonts are far nicer, and from an interface usability perspective, everything works how you’d want/expect it to.

It’s once you start poking around under the hood that you notice changes…little things like per speaker/application volume settings, application switching with win+tab (OMG SEXY++), and the security principals - this being perhaps the largest change.

Although you have an administrator account, everything runs with standard user privileges, and nothing can escalate to administrator level privs without first prompting you. Initially the pop-ups are annoying, but I think the benefits of having this level of privilege separation by default far outweigh any annoyances.

I’ve yet to have a proper play with the Media Center side of things, and I’ve not tried to game on the system yet either, but I have high hopes - 5.3 performance index baby!

I’ll update here as I explore this new world a little more.

Like many wise souls, I have my uTorrent RSS feed set to pick up pilot episodes, and it found a bit of a gem in Andy Barker PI.

The premise for the show centers around the lead character, Andy Barker, a middle-aged chartered accountant, who takes up a new office, formal inhabited by a Private Investigator. A mysterious woman shows up looking for someone to find her dead husband and Barker is reticent to pursue the investigation but given her $4,000 retainer, the offer is too good to refuse, and when the issue of the husband’s tax returns arises, Andy is hooked.
What ensues is mistaken identity and similar shenanigans, and it’s not half bad. A highlight for me is a high speed car chase with Andy at the wheel whilst discussing tax law with a client.

An added bonus is that NBC are putting the first 6 episodes freely available on the web here.

Three out of the four may be true

I’ve spent a few days battling with the beast that is movable type, which powered my site for many years, but it’s just rubbish, so I’ve finally done the sensible thing, like everyone else, and installed wordpress, and I have to say my initial impressions are good. The site management system is far more straight forward than movable type  ever was, and the themes aren’t too bad either, though it does look like a lot of effort to hack a decent custom theme together.

The real question I suppose is will I actually ever use it or post anything of worth? TBH I don’t know, but I may as well give it a shot.

I’m going to see what havoc I can cause with plug ins now.

Welcome to my place in the grand scheme of the web.

I’m 26 and am married to the lovely Claire (who’s blog is somewhere over on the right-hand side). We live in a little village called Chartham, just outside Canterbury, in a house that is ruled by our cat, Oscar.

I’m currently Network Services Team Leader for Canterbury Christ Church University, where I passionately espouse the virtues of good security, Exim MTAs, high performance networks, Googling for your answers rather than asking me, and freshly brewed coffee (ideally where someone else is doing the brewing). I know what sites you’ve been looking at in your lunch break and I will take Starbucks Mince Pies as bribes for my silence.

I’m apathetically passionate about computer games, primarily on the PC - I have a rather sweet core2quad with an 8800GTS ;P.

I believe people shouldn’t watch shit telly, or reality TV, and as such I have a list (in no particular order) of shows that carry my seal of viewing approval:

• House
• Grey’s Anatomy
• Battlestar Galactica
• Entourage
• Heroes
• Scrubs
• Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (cancelled - bastards)
• Veronica Mars (cancelled - bastards)
• Bones
• Boston Legal

I also believe people shouldn’t watch Lost, because it’s rubbish.