I’ve started to write a new post here a number of times in recent weeks but every time I was interrupted by something before I really got anywhere. Hopefully this time will be different.

I’ve been lucky with my music choices recently and have found some interesting stuff from the likes of Joanna Newsom, Johann Johansson, Cansei de Ser Sexy, Prototypes and Visa Röster (a game music “a cappella” band of all things) and somehow I’ve only just discovered Portishead. Unfortunately some others haven’t been quite so good. I picked up Nerina Pallot’s album Fires based on good reviews and the “If you like, [blah] you’ll like this” kind of recommendations. Most reviews used the term “original” heavily and name dropped artists I enjoy. I wouldn’t claim it’s a bad album by any means but it feels very much like Nerina is staying well inside her comfort zone and not stretching at all to reach the potential that appears to be there instead producing a good but somewhat bland entry into the singer/songwriter market. She is also borrowing quite heavily from other artists but I’m not quite sure why the other reviewers don’t seem to be picking up that. *shrug* So far I’m also a little lukewarm on Yo La Tengo’s “I am Not Afraid of You and I will Beat Your Ass” (That’s album name of the year material right there) but I think I’ll need a few more listens to really know what I think of that one. I signed up with LastFM now that they seem to support iPods although their stats seem a bit inaccurate. Hopefully I might get some useful recommendations out of this given some time.

Gaming-wise, things are somewhat quiet and I haven’t really been playing much (not that I’ve really had the time). I have managed to finally get onto “Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney” on Nintendo DS which I had sitting around for ages. It’s a lot of fun if a game about lawyers can be considered fun. It has flaws, mostly related to it’s somewhat dated style of gameplay but all in all those are minor complaints.

I’ve also had few interesting arrivals. First, the Tachibana Ichika “Holy Spirit of Wind” figure arrived a few days ago. I’ve had this on order for almost a year now so it’s nice for it to finally arrive. Also, earlier today my Stax SR-007 (Omega 2) electrostatic headphones arrived. As expected they sound very, very nice and I think my headphone buying days are at an end for the relatively long term. Unfortunately they make it clear that I really do need a better electrostatic amp than the one I have. ^_^; My alternative driver for electrostatic headphones, a SRD-6 transformer box running off a power amp can’t summon up enough voltage to drive them. Ah well, need to start saving again. Oh, and yes, these headphones do come with their own little suitcase.

Had a busy few days (I always seem to be saying that lately). My nephew was staying over recently and as usual we talked music and got in some gaming. Multiplayer Civilization IV to be precise. It’s really the first time we’ve given it a proper go multiplayer and it works reasonably well. There’s still a few timing issues fighting wars against human opponents but it’s nowhere near the mess that Civ 3 was. It also settled a question that I’d been pondering for a while related to the in-game “Powergraph” used to compare your military strength vs your opponents. I had suspected for a while that it was more about raw unit numbers than technological superiority and if true, that it really didn’t tell you anything particularly useful regarding whether or not you could beat an opponent in a fight. As it turns out, my thoughts appear to be correct after managing to win a war despite having a much lower power rating purely by being a generation ahead in military tech.

I’ve also finished the “F.E.A.R Extraction Point” expansion pack. It was surprisingly long for an expansion. Overall it was a fun ride although the ending was a little anti-climatic.

My Powermac G5 had been crashing a little lately. It would just freeze within 30 seconds of being started and nothing would fix it short of a reboot. My intuition told me it was RAM (Some of which was cheap “Legend” brand RAM) but considering it’s been running fine for over two years it seemed unlikely. Anyway I pulled the two high spec 1GB Corsair sticks out of my Windows box and swapped them into the Mac removing all the old RAM. Problem gone completely. For now I’ve swapped the other stuff into my Windows box and downclocked it to ensure stability but with only two slots in the PC and a desire for speed/stability, I really need to buy some more RAM. That’s twice now buying poor RAM has caused me problems, this’ll teach me to stick to RAM I know to be bulletproof like Corsar, OCZ, etc.

I’ve been very slack on updates recently. No, I’m not disillusioned with blogging or anything, there’s mostly just been too much going on. Work and life in general.

Been playing some “Enchanted Arms” on the Xbox 360 at times. It’s interesting that many professional reviewers have trashed this game and the target market has loved it. Seems to me the games media is now busy jumping on the “We want more original games” bandwagon to appear “cool”. Of course they’re entirely missing the point that a well implemented game that fixes problems with it’s predecessors can be good too. Ninety Nine Nights (N3) which I’ve also been playing recently has also received some bad press. In this case it’s for being a brainless button masher with a linear story. It is, but that doesn’t make it not fun. In fact it’s been great to have something like that around to come home and relax with. Nothing much else to play right now anyway, seems to be the lull before the Christmas rush.

I’m really losing faith in local CD stores. I’ve been hunting around for various unrelated discs for a few weeks and haven’t managed to find any of them. I am used to this kind of thing but in the past it’s occurred when I’ve been looking for something obscure. This time I’m mostly looking for some mainstream CDs released prior to 2006. I’m really starting to wonder why I even bother to walk into these places.

Planning for Armageddon seems to be going reasonably well as are my plans to get some STAX Omega II headphones. I did pick up a STAX SRS-005A system as something to keep me happy in the meantime. It includes some very small in-ear electrostatic headphones and an amp (Different to a normal amp). These things sound gorgeous considering their cheap price (in relative terms) and size. In fact at work I miss them a lot (it’s a pain to pack them up and take them in). Probably the most “fun” headphones I’ve ever heard. They’re not perfect, there’s only so much you can get out of something this size with cheaper components but very impressive indeed. Definitely need to pick up another amp somewhere so I can use these more at work.

I’m off to bed. Need sleep… -_-

I tried out the latest Firefox 2 beta 2 today and honestly I’m shocked. The tab behaviour I disliked in the Internet Explorer 7 beta has now been mostly copied to Firefox. I say copied because it’s almost entirely the same. Also, on Windows at least, unless you are running the XP Luna theme, the tabs are all white and telling the difference between the active tab and the inactive tabs is very difficult. It also doesn’t try to fit all the tabs, it has IE7’s annoying scroll buttons. On top of that the navigation buttons are bland and don’t stand out at all. It includes some of the most ugly button borders and UI design I’ve seen since X-Windows window managers in the 90’s. I’m almost lost for words, I really don’t know how they could have done this any worse. The only good thing I can say is the options dialog is much more sensibly laid out. It’s a damn shame, the previous beta was so nice. What were they thinking?