• Thursday, August 24th, 2006
I think I need to get back to smaller but more regular posts here. I end up having heaps I want to write but I don’t really want to write big sagas. So, right now anyway I’ll do a hit and run barely touching on a number of topics…
My car sucks, apparently the brake light switch was jamming causing the lights to stay on even with the ignition off. This was draining my battery. I haven’t fixed it yet but at the very least it is good to know what’s wrong and if I check the brake lights before I walk away from the car I can be somewhat sure it will start again later.
I’m trying to avoid spending money at the moment, I need to save for the Armageddon expo coming up in October (It’ll be my first time actually helping out in some form it seems) and I also plan to pick up a Singlepower Supra headphone amplifier, most likely with some of the optional upgrades. I’m not planning to buy lots of amps by any means, just got a taste of what I’ve been missing so I’m jumping straight into what’s generally regarded to be a great amp with characteristics that would seem to match my listening preferences.
Had a very hard time tracking down spare Shuguang 6Z4 rectifier valves, virtually no one on the internet seems to sell these things despite the fact they’re supposed to be very cheap and common in China. After much searching I managed to track down two suppliers, hopefully one of them will be able to send a few my way. At US$3 a tube the price is right which is something at least. This tube has no direct equivalent hence my concern for spares. The 6X4 is close but the pin-out is different and it’s physically to large for my amp. @_@
My Shure E500 IEM headphones are great, the improvement over my previous Shure E5c pair is immense right across the board. A very good buy I feel.
I finally got a chance to dig into the Xbox 360 game demos I’d been downloading off Xbox Live for a while and hadn’t had time to play. Here’s a few quick opinions on them:
- Ninety-Nine Nights: It’s a lets-see-how-many-people-we-can-fit-on-screen game. Mindless, simple and repetitive but fun, very pretty and somehow satisfying. I’m going to get it sometime once it’s available. Currently they’re saying December which is totally obscene, hopefully it’ll be out well before then.
- Prey: A fun first person shooter running on the Doom 3 engine (Yes, someone finally wrote a game using it). IMHO the most promising FPS since F.E.A.R., it actually has substance. Ultimately it’s not really my kind of game, I don’t like FPSes at the best of times and aliens don’t do it for me either. Certainly quite impressive though.
- Dead Rising: Wow, I didn’t see this coming. Zombies, zombies and more zombies and more ways to dispatch them than you could imagine. Guns, sure. Knifes, of course. Sledgehammers, frying pans, pot plants, coat hangers, cash registers and shopping trolleys? I kid you not. A must buy I feel, it’s due next month.
- Hitman Blood Money: Third person spy-style stealth game, latest in the Hitman series. It seems okay but the event scripting is too heavily used while the AI is too weak to handle script deviations, there really only seems to be one way to do things that really works. Definitely not up to my standards.
I also have to hack the Livejournal crossposter for Wordpress I am using sometime. I miss my music tags.
• Wednesday, August 16th, 2006
Something I forgot to mention in my last post. With everything I was hosting on my main site (probably more than most people), I was running into problems with the default RAM allocation. On 2-3 occasions I found out of memory errors had stopped MySQL or some other processes that had been running. My hosting provider, Rimuhosting, had offered a good deal on memory upgrades for my host server not long ago as they didn’t want to add any more users. I was a well late asking about it but they let me upgrade at the same cheap rate that had been originally offered so now I have almost three times the default RAM allocation. All done in minutes around 10:30pm too. Not only has it sorted the issues I was seeing but everything is running a bit faster now too. I can’t really recommend Rimuhosting enough, they are definitely the best hosting provider I’ve ever had.
• Wednesday, August 16th, 2006
Had another three day weekend last weekend but like the one before, it ended up getting absored by other crap I could have done without. Problems with my car battery and other similar time wasters. I also went to put in a new pair of contact lenses on Tuesday only to find they were the wrong prescription. At first I had thought they were just a little cloudy but on my way to work it was clear they weren’t improving. Thankfully I’d brought a storage case and my glasses just in case but it’s a pain none-the-less.
On the plus side, it looks like Segate is starting to churn out 1.8″ hard drives with a 120GB capacity suitable for use in iPods. I often see people make the comment that 60GB is a huge amount and how could anyone possibly fill that space. One possible answer is that if you store your music in lossless formats, 60GB is not that much. Not that Apple would care about those picky about their audio quality, but thankfully storing video requires a massive amount of disc space too so there’s an extra reason to throw a big drive in these things now.
I’m also somewhat more optimistic about Mac OS X 10.5 (aka Leopard) after finding out it makes great strides in the area of resolution independance. I’ve been wanting this feature for over a decade now. 10.4 had some good steps in the direction but it was little more than a developer’s toy. For those wondering what resolution independance means, the idea is that your whole display can be scaled irrespective of your monitor’s resolution. This is ideal for LCDs with fixed native resolution and poor built in scalers. i.e. Your LCD runs at 1280×1024, but if you set your display to that resolution the text is too small to read. If you set it to 1024×768 the text is big enough but the monitor looks blurry. Resolution independance would let you run your monitor at 1280×1024 so it is not blurry but scale up the size of the user interface so it’s perfectly readable. There’s other nice things that come for free with resolution independance but this is the gist of it.
• Tuesday, August 08th, 2006
It seems Apple’s professional towers have made the move to Intel. I feel this is by far the most impressive of the Intel based Macs so far, not because it’s more powerful, but because it actually feels like they’re adding serious functionality beyond the original without forgetting the essentials. A second optical bay and room for more hard drives was seriously lacking in the PowerPC G5 towers. The “double wide” PCI express slot is interesting, I assume it’s SLI by another name but most likely will require special cards. It’s good to see Apple is finally classifying this line as Workstation class too, Woodcrest Xeons, ECC RAM and the high clock speeds by Intel’s Core family standards all make this clear. All in all, a very nice machine. My Powermac G5 is 2 years old at this point but still doesn’t feel remotely lacking, I expect I’ll get another 2-3 years out of it yet but it’s nice to know there’ll be something good to upgrade to once the time comes.
I can’t say I’m quite so impressed by the MacOS 10.5 (Leopard) preview. Spaces is just X11-style virtual desktops by another name. I’ve never found them particularly useful personally but perhaps it will encourage people to migrate. Time machine looks really cool but how often do people actually need to undelete things? It’s certainly not something I’ve ever needed to do that often. At least Leopard will do it in style. The new iChat does rock, I’m impressed at the places they’re taking this program? The idea of merging additional functionality into an instant messenger was kind of spoilt for me by the teenaged fumblings of ICQ and the like but this stuff iChat is doing looks almost useful. 64-bit is good and Core Animation also looks kind of cool too. There’s only so much excitement you can get out of iCal and Mail though, in fact the changes to Mail with the HTML messages look incredibly lame to me. I suspect Apple is holding back, it seems virtually nothing of Finder was shown, perhaps this dinosaur is finally getting a deserved rewrite? It would appear Apple is wary to show too much of Leopard before Vista ships, too much of a window for Microsoft to copy? (that pun was accidental but hey)
I wasn’t really planning to but I ended up ordering some new valves for my Xiang Sheng amp. I managed to track down some quality replacements for the gain tubes. Should be good to hear when they arrive. Even some New Old Stock (NOS) tubes in there. I’m back to playing Disgaea again too, I’d like to get through it before Disgaea 2 ships next month. It’s doable, but I might have to resist my urge to powerlevel. I’ve already got half my party over 10 levels higher than the enemies I’m fighting and some are vergeing on 20 levels higher. 
• Friday, August 04th, 2006
There’s a LJ post a friend just deleted talking about all sorts of stuff from the past. I’m not going to go into detail, the post was deleted for a reason, but there are a few vague things I’d like to say about it and those involved will know what I’m talking about.
Just because other people believe things happened a certain way doesn’t make it true and you don’t have to second guess yourself or think you did anything wrong. Many will invent drama that never occurred and be unaware of that which did. I feel I know much better than most what happened on both “sides” (If they can even be considered sides) and I believe I did a good job of being neutral and did not exacerbate the issues. Anyone who believes the problems were due to any one person causing trouble is just plain wrong, end of story. In my opinion those fueling the fire were far more to blame than “the usual suspects”. To those who think there are still deep grudges being held, that is also just plain wrong. If anything the purportation of these myths (I’m being generous in my choice of words) is far likely to be a problem than anything since who the hell wants to hang around with people who will spread bogus rumors without the faintest idea of what actually happened.
Friends drift apart for many reasons, the main ones being changes in our lives. As we get older we have more to do, more responsibility and less time. Our lives will often push us in with other groups of people too. Looking for other more sinister reasons behind it is a pointless waste of time. It is unrealistic to expect things to continue forever in a relaxed student lifestyle, change is inevitable. I am not sure if certain people are consciously aware of it but certainly as they get older they will be starting to see the effects of this and no doubt accepting it is the natural course of things. If you don’t agree, I suggest you take a few years to ponder on it.
