So it begins. The house is starting to take shape. In another 2 weeks time or so, there will be some form of structure taking shape in an upwardly fashion. See the photo’s below.
The Slab has been poured
Another shot of the Slab
Final Shot of the Slab
Saturday couldn’t have come any quicker for me this week. It has been a funny old week and I don’t mean Funny ha ha either. Not so much work, but travelling to and from work, mainly getting home (eventually). For the most part, Monday and Tuesday were OK, from then on in it went to shit. God only knows why the traffic was absolute chaos, but no matter what it was, it has taken me over 45 minutes to get home, as opposed to the usual 30 minutes. Not much of a difference some would say, however, by the time i would have got home, i would be out through the door again to pick Sam up from the station. So I would go straight to the station and wait fro Sam to arrive off of her earlier train. Thursday was even worse. 1hour and 50 minutes before we actually got home. Police had blocked off the junction at Warwick farm going onto the Hume hwy. The journey was a pain in the arse. I was already close to being late picking Sam up anyway and then the traffic was not moving.
Friday afternoon, the Case for the Media PC arrived. Fortunately the drive home was good, if not perfect. I was home before 5.30pm, which is good going. The case is by SilverStone and I have to say that, even though I had never heard of them, the quality of the case is really good. One or two things I may have done differently if it was me, but marks out of 10, gets it a really sweet 9.8 in my book. The look and feel of the case is solid and as its sole purpose is for media PC housing, it sits quite nicely in the new TV cabinet. Understated blue lights for the power on and HD light, two nice sized buttons, for switching on and resetting, not like the usual tooth pick sized reset you find on some cases. There is a flip down panel which hides 4 usb and 1 firewire, plus mic and ear phone. Sadly due to the shitty design of the Intel MOBO and the shear size of the 2 bay Gigabyte nvidia Graphics card, I cannot use the audio connectors.
The only problem we had was getting the cables from the original machines power supply to reach across the case. Bugger! I even tried an older PSU, but due to the ‘standards’ being changed the 24 pin MOBO connection was missing all but 4 connectors. With that in mind, we looked on eBay and some local sites for a pickup of a new PSU.
So today we set out to buy a new PSU and succeded with an extremely quiet 550watt beastie with more cables and connectors you can shake a stick at, sadly though, there are too many for the tight neatly fitted out Media PC case, I will have to look at investing in yet another PSU with quick fit connections so I can attach only the cables I need. The new one can be fitted into my New PC when I get round to building it (so much for moving over to MAC’s).
My fears were quelled once I had attached all the cables and fired up the machine. First time and without issue, save for a quick swap round of an IDE cable to get the Dual Layer burner working.
Before this we went into Parramatta, the Westfield Shopping centre to spend my gift vouchers I won from work. Sam suggested I get a decent pair of sunglasses. Imediately over to the RayBan section then over to the Oakleys. I could not bring myself to spending 300 dollars on a pair of glasses that ‘will’ end up getting scratched or damaged, no matter how well you look after them. Or some Bastard will steal them.
We decided on breakfast first and merrily made our way to another servery of pleasant food scraps. No not macca’s or some other shite. Big breaky for me complete with ‘small’ coffee and Sam had some toast with peanut butter. Food demolsihed and bill payed, we set out on the quest for goodies.
We first went into the Build-a-bear workshop as they were doing a charity feature for sick kids, all we had to do was build a dog and hand it over. Job well done. Next onto the Sunglasses, but as i mentioned earlier, the price was putting me off. How about some aftershave. Oh yes, into Myer (one of the better quality stores here in Oz). However after choosing my Polo Black, they didn’t accept the gift cards there. Not a good start. So of to David Jones….Who DID! accept the card and got a better free Ralph Lauren -Polo Carry bag, good enough and big enough to be used as an overnight bag, for when we goto Melbs for the weekend or away here in Sydney for the night. Price was the same too. Job done, back home.
Well not quite, we drove to the Computer shop to get the new PSU, just a little over $120 I think. So we made our way home while Sam was playing with her new Blackberry with GPS. Thing works better than the Nokia N95. Which while I still have, still not happy with. May consider buying one outright later on. The GPS on the Blackberry works like a dream, we took different routes on our travels today and each time was good and spot on. I havent bothered with mine, apart from tonight.
If I ever give any advice to anyone, now is my time. The Nokia N95 is probably the worst phone you can ever buy. What happened to a nice menu? What happened to the phone actually doing what it is supposed to? I had to download a 111Mb update to sort my phone out. The software updater is not yet compatable with Vista, so had to use my old IBM to carry out the update. (traffic thursday night has forced me to keep the damn fone). So anyone looking at buying/going on a contract with Vodafone or whoever.DONT GET THE NOKIA N95 it is SHIT. Crap. Poop. It No Good, Das ich Nein Gut. Kaput! Dont do it, you WILL regret getting the fone. Did I say don’t get the NOKIA N95?
Well, as I said before, don’t get the Nokia N95, because you will have issues, you will like some features, but the downside is its annoying little quirks and it likes to go Landscape mode for no apparant reason as opposed to Portrait mode…and thats just when you goto answer a call. I hate the fone, I really do. I wish I had have gone for a Blackberry, not that I would use all of the features, but then I may not use all the features on the Nokia N95 – which you shouldn’t get! EVER! The feel of the phone is awkward and the dual slide is a gimmick, not sure if Samsung do a similar thing. Maybe you should go for a Samsung, the new one of them looks nice and has a 5 Mp camera with optical zoom if memory serves me right. DAMN, WHY DID I GET THE FEKKING NOKIA N95!?!?!?!?!?!?!
Moving on and well away from the Nokia bloody usless too many gimicks and dodgy software reinstalling devices every fekking time you connect it to a pc N95. The Laptop has been updated tonight, graphics and audio software updates. so far so good <<<<<unlike the Nokia N95>>>> Music software has been installed and currently cruching my way through the new software. Hopefully I will get chance to do something with it soon. Video Software runs really well on this beauty. Vegas Pro 8. Pretty much like the last 3 versions, just a few more options and a better rendering engine. I downloaded Adobe Lightroom the other day and I like it. whey hey…he has stopped bitchin about that damn fone! Some of the features are really handy, plus the bulk editing of a set of imported pictures. File size is about 47Mb or there abouts, well worthy of a trial if you like playing around with images. The layout of the software is good too, plus you get to create web albums in html and flash. My advice though, make sure you resize the images before you export to a flash album! Depending on your machine, it may take awhile.
Getting fit. Whilst we were out later on this afternnon. I had a look round a Sports shop. I was looking for a Multigym. Yep those numbers were quite high, however, ebay gave us the option to save a few thousand dollars and at a grand total of $51.00 I now have a multigym to pick up next weekend. Nothing too fancy and flashy, it has all I need to work on my arms, shoulders etc etc. If I get into it and require something more substantial, then I will spend the money, not before. So with the Ab King Pro (stop laughing) and the Cardio Cruiser (I said stop laughing), the Push bike and now the Gym thing, I can now seriously look at getting fit once and for all. Just have to stop smoking Again!
Once upon a time, a mobile phone was simply just that. The manual was more like a leaflet and the charger required two people to move it. Sadly those days are gone. The years of technological advancements have stripped away the character and the manner in which we now use the humble mobile phone. How often is it when your contract expires or you just simply want a ‘new’ phone that you utter these immortal words ‘does it have bluetooth, gps,memory cards, can it play mp3 and video and what games and apps does it have?’ Can you ever hear yourself say, ‘whats the talktime and standby mode time???? No, well like me I fall into the former and not the latter. Sadly the ease of use has gone right out of the window. Chaos theory reigns in the form of Nokia Menu’s and Software updates! Yes, software/OS updates/firmware updates.
The nice shiny and yet sometimes awkward to use Nokia N95 is no stranger to all i have mentioned. Talk time is, well, I don’t know, but it does play mp3′s and have bluetooth and all kinds of gadgets and gismo’s. Oh Shit! I forgot the camera…!!! Hmmm, more pixels is good right? Yes it is, but its a phone for christs sake. You want to take decent snaps then buy a digital camera! No! i want my entire life on a 24 month plan and the phone is for free!
Whilst this is true, it aint for free. How much time do you spend messing around on your phone, getting it to look and sound the way you want it? How much time do you spend adding birthdays/deaths and marriages into the nice shiny ‘oh thats useful’ calender? How much time do you spend faffing around backing up your contacts/video/photos/etc? If you were to add up all the times that you spend doing this, you would see that it is not free. Your free time is taken up with a cute, but yet not as small as that previous phone you had.
My nagging doubt about these new phones is that they are getting like PC’s. The more crap you add to a PC, the slower the thing gets, i don’t care if its quad core and has eight of the bloody things, how long does it take to actually get into windows? Same with the phones. Sure it has a 1 gig memory card in there, but before the ‘update’ it was running like a Dell P100 with 8 mb of RAM, compaired to a P4 with a bit more after I had managed to get the update done.
The menu’s have changed and adding a sound file to a ringtone for your chosen victim has changed also. The update took 15 minutes to complete, it wiped everything and I had to start again. I am glad it removed all the contacts from the phone and saved them on the SIM card. For some reason I had all my e-mail addresses sync’d from the other machine and the numbers I had entered. The phone was causing me a headache. I would assign a ringtone to a persons number and when they called…I got the standard tone set to the phone. No matter what i did, it would not use the tone I had chosen. Oh for a right click/properties/tools/format c:/s/u…ahh them were the days. FDISK the shit out of it.
So now the phone is updated, I have now got to go through all my contacts and add them to the Phone contact manager and change their default tone for something I want. I will see how the thing performs since the update, over the next few days, should give me an idea if its going to be a wall feature or remain in one piece. If only the iPhones were here now!
