General

Awesome

Decided to finally sort out my media playback situation. For quite a while I've relied on lugging my heavy PC into the living room, to hook up to the big plasma for my 24, Lost, Dexter etc, fix. Which was starting to get a little tedious.

Always considered getting a dedicated media player, but there's usually always something stopping me, like no MKV support, No Blu-ray support, or no full 1080p decoding etc.. Enter the Western Digital HD TV device!



Theres quite a buzz on the web about this device, as it supports pretty much every format there is! MKV, H.264, Blu ray, all audio formats too, and its done in such a small quiet cheap box. They are actively updating the firmware and have actually fixed niggles people complained about! The only annoying single drawback is no network. It uses USB, but I plan on getting a USB supported NAS at some point.

Unfortunately, just as I sat down on Saturday for a marathon of 24 episodes, the remote died! Gah, I was gutted! Tried 3 sets of batteries, fiddled with it for ages, looked at the IR LED in a variety of cameras. Nothing. Dead as a doornail.

Fortunately the good people of Western Digital are dispatching me a new one in the post, so hopefully I should have that soon. Quite pleased they were soo nice on the phone.

Was in London the other night. Was Nikki's birthday, so we had a trip up there to buy her a birthday present, and have a change of scenery. Went to the Vodka Ice Bar, just off Regent Street. For those that dont know what this is, its a Vodka bar, with one room at sub 0 temperatures. The Bar, walls, chairs, and glasses are all made of solid ice. You have to don a shiny hooded poncho when you go in, as its soo cold. I decided to see just how cold the ice was, and tested by licking one of the 6 foot high ice chairs!



Luckily I didn't freeze to it!

Yeah I'm probably about 3 years out of date with that comment, but I've only just got around to trying Gmail.

After changing OS at home to Windows 7 on a new PC, I wanted to get rid of having to use horrible Outlook. Cos Its Shit! (tm) basically. Also I was getting massive amounts of spam on my webhost email server. Now thanks to Gmail, it filters all my spam out, I have access to all my personal email wherever there is internet. It even links up to my own web domain and is transparent to all my email receipients. Also I have it tied to my work Outlook system via IMAP.

It even looks ace, with funky hi-res solar system picies on my theme! As soon as I get my old PST imported in, which admittedly is quite tricky, I'll be dumping all things .PST and Outlook'y for good! Yay!

Heyup all! Its snowing outside at the moment. Fingers crossed it may actually stay on the ground and buildup.

Haven't updated this in ages, hopefully I'll try and remember all thats gone on. Had a fabulous 2 weeks off at Christmas. Was looking forward to it for absolutely yonks! For New Years, and my birthday, Nikki and I went to Godskitchen in Birminham. Tall Paul and John 00 Flemming were playing, tho John not on until 5am, or somat daft like that, and I was too tired to stay that late. Awesome hotel though, and spent New Years morning recovering in a jacuzzi and steam room!

Nikki's parents won a Canon SLR in a raffle, and as I'd been toying with the idea of getting one for a while, they let me buy it off them really cheap! Well chuffed about that.


Got a remote cable and a polarizing filter for it now, next on my shopping list will probably be a zoom lens. Have spent the last month mainly just familiarizing myself with all the options and what they do.

My web host migrated servers the other day, and it was supposed to be "transparent". Transparent it was not. 1st they forgot to copy over the SQL databases, 2ndly they broke my picture site. For some reason its incapable of reading all the picture directories now. Then they broke my blog by not copying over the config file properly! Took ages to get them to fix it.. tsk. Ended up doing an update on this site anyway, so moved up 2 minor versions, so not all bad

More later, hopefully.

Went to the Devizes Beer Festival on Saturday with Niknak and some friends. Was really cool, soo many barrels of beer lined up in a tent to sample. Had some rather delicious cherry beer which tasted alot like cherry cola and apple beer and various ciders too. Unfortunately the rain was a bit rubbish, so we ended up hot footing it to a local pub for food n more drinks.

Heres a pic of me standing next to a very tall Matt in the rain holding my Devizes Beer Festival half pint tankard.


On the way back we stopped off to take a pic of Stonehenge.