Today I’ve moved my blog.
The new address is http://trinity6thformer.blogspot.com/ and is hosted by Blogger. It also has an ATOM feed which will allow you to subscribe and get all my most resent post through IE7, Windows live mail, or any other client capable of retrieving feeds.
See you there!
EDIT 15/03/2011 : I moved again, I’m now on LJ: http://the-code-monkey.livejournal.com/
A lot of my posts have recently been about my long awaited computer upgrade. Well the £100 EMA bonus helped it along, the only pieces I’m missing are the Graphics card, and the optional USB expansion and blu-ray drive. I ordered the rest on Friday night.
I would have had the USB expansion had it not been for inflation. On Thursday night I worked out that I would have just enough to buy everything (except the Blu-ray and graphics card) if I put another £1.20 into my bank account, leaving me with a penny change. I got a shock when I discover that the price of a component has gone up by 2p overnight, meaning that I am 1p short of buying the lot. So in order to order the lot, I temporarily dispense with the USB expansion and vow to buy it when I buy the graphics card; which will be at the beginning of march.
The Blu-ray is still classed as a luxury, so it will be bought after the main system is assembled and working.
Some time ago, my dad remarked that my monitor was very small, as he’d got used to looking at a 17”-19” monitor. As I have nearly finished buying the main system, I’ve decided to look at some new 19” ones. This has lead me to a decent one, with a price tag of about £170. It has integrated speakers, a contrast ratio of 2000:1, and supports DVI-D input, which will allow me to get the most out of my graphics card when I get it, rather than sticking with analogue VGA (or D-Sub as it is also known).
Money is going to be coming a bit quicker soon as my birthday is coming up, which will give me a boost for getting the rest of the computer.
Only one more exam to go, core 1, physics and core 2 are out the way, so now there’s only mechanics to go.
I’m going to be honest. I left the revision for Mechanics even later than the core, I started the core a few days before school started again, but I’ve left the Mechanics until after the core exam on Tuesday, in order to reduce the workload. I don’t fancy my chances for this exam now.
There is a load of topics within mechanics that i have a few problems with, and I haven’t got to them yet, which worries me as the exam is on Monday Afternoon.
But after 3 hours of mechanics revision on Friday, I’m a bit more confident as I’ve covered problem topics such as projectiles. All I need to do is learn those damn SUVAT equations and a bit more on a few other bits.
On Wednesday it was my brothers birthday, and he got guitar hero on tour for the DS. A few of the tracks on there have added to my taste in music, adding to the mash-up that it already is!
One was “Spiderwebs” by No Doubt, I never knew that Gwen Stefani was in a band before her solo career, but now I do.
[Video has since been removed from youtube]
Before I watched this video, I imagined a kind of Gothic setting, in a creepy forest with tarantulas crawling everywhere; but then again that would just be predictable, a Japanese wedding with telephone handsets is much more random!
The other track was “We’re Not Gonna Take it” by Twisted Sister, I’m not usually into Metal, but this song appealed to me though the fact it got stuck in my head and the more it played over in my head the more I liked it, Unfortunately I couldn’t find any YouTube Videos of it to put on here (Actually, I gave up after the second page of search results, to be truthful). But this isn’t the first Metal song that I have grown fond for, “Hard Rock Hallelujah” by Lordi appealed to my Eurovision side.
For those who don’t know, I am an avid watcher and supporter of the Eurovision Song Contest. I am so enthusiastic about it that i go hoarse from shouting at the TV all night, mostly along the lines of “Why the hell did they/we give 12 to that pile of shit!?”, but there is the occasional shout of “YES! THEY GAVE US 12 POINTS!” like there was after Malta gave 12 to “Flaying the Flag (for you)” by Scooch in 2007. The only thing that annoys me is the political voting; why can’t they vote for us, instead of thinking ‘We’re giving our points to the motherland!’ IT’S RIDICULOUS! At least it’ll be a bit better this year as a panel of judges will be giving half of the marks, we also have the advantage of Andrew Lloyd Webber (and other big music names) writing our song this year. There has only been one year where I have lost faith enough not to watch it, that was last year, I was not impressed that we voted in a no-talent hack from X-Factor, my pre-emption was correct, we had a Gemini re-run from what I heard.
Another great bit of stupidity I just found on the web:
I’m too excited to go to sleep tonight, so while browsing the web and pestering a few people with a choice e-card I found this amongst other comics like it:
Merry Christmas!
My computer upgrade budget has now jumped ship, as I have had it with trying to keep this under the £250 mark.
My motherboard cost me £55, which I have bought and am now in possession of
The RAM is going to be £50, that’s fixed, I know what ram I’m getting
My PSU also needed replacing and will cost £60 for a 520W one
I also need a SATA DVD-RW drive which will cost £25 minimum
The processor is going to be £71, and it was going to be the most expensive part of my computer, That’s not true any more.
The problem is my graphics card, as I have been told by a PC gaming friend that my original card wasn’t very good, and I could see that myself as it was only £30, I wasn’t expecting to play the most high spec game at blistering pace, just something that will play The Sims and SPORE and not break the bank, I then increased it to £60 in order to keep ahead of the general spec required of games at the moment and have less to upgrade in the future, and he said it’d be better but still not very good. The proposed graphics card is now £105 and it is not going any higher.
The grand total is now just short of £375, which is good as most computers off-the-shelf for that price won’t match the spec I’ll have
But it still leaves £320 remaining to buy. *Groan*
That’s not including a proposed extra HDD, second DVD drive and extra front panel (supplying an eSATA port and memory card slots) which would put it about the £450 mark
I’m also planning on getting Windows 7 when it comes out December ’09 and dual booting it with XP. The OS is going to cost another £100 minimum but it won’t be as bad if I get a job between now and then.
It’s contagious. The optimism of Christmas is starting to get to me, but not enough so that I don’t moan about my life in general at the moment.
I may have been blasting out the Xmas Songs from my laptop for the past fortnight, but that didn’t mean I was up-beat then.
I’m a little more exited than I have been, as it’s less than a week away and tonight me and Dale exchanged gifts and of course I did the ritual of trying to guess the presents under the tree. But I’m not as high as I am usually around this time, as I am suffering from something that some would call man-flu.
I just call it the full-works cold: chesty cough, blocked nose, occasional headaches, tiredness and reduced apatite. I’m having potent cough medicine poured down my neck every 4 hours, my mum is complaining that the cough is annoying and is telling me to suck something. I try to refuse this as I detest sucking anything other than sweets, as cough lozenges make my mouth go funny (and I can’t eat boiled sweets anyway due to the orthodontists orders), mum wins sometimes and forces me to shove a foul, aniseed flavoured, cough sweet in my gob to suck, the packet of which says that they are “delicious and mouth-watering”, my reaction to this was to say “The guy who designed this packet has got a grim sense of humour!”
And also due to this cold, I’m too ill to canoe on the river tomorrow.
I’m writing this now as I can’t sleep, due to having a nap earlier because I was practically dead on my feet (even more tired than the tired that sends me to sleep in school), so am now wide awake.
This week I have had two mock exams, one was a maths core 2 exam and one was a physics exam. I did really badly at the Physics exam, only getting 30%, which averaged at a grade ‘U’, the maths one’s results are due tomorrow, but I’m not optimistic about that either, as I ran out of time before I had time to answer some of the questions and I drew a blank on quite a few others.
I was not really impresses with Mrs Ball’s revision timetable, as it scheduled my entire life up until the exams, instead of that idea I’m making a calendar which has a to-do list to be done by the end of that day, I’ll also break Maths and Physics into separate subjects within them.
This holiday is going to be murder, I’ll have all these new things, and I won’t be able to use them as much as I’ll be revising.
On Monday I ordered my first piece that I need for my computer re-build, the motherboard, and I received it today. It wasn’t in stock on the site where I usually buy my components (www.scan.co.uk) so I was forced to shop elsewhere, I found it on www.aria.co.uk but it was a little more expensive, but I don’t really care as this motherboard is a lot better than the one I was looking at originally.
It’s better then the other one as it’s loaded with better connections and features, such as better on-board sound, a HDMI socket (so that I can plug it into a HD ready TV if I wanted), TV out (for HD and analogue) and it has 4 USB 2.0 sockets and a firewire port. The better, newer sockets are what clinched it for me, as I am able to plug faster equipment through the firewire port, and I’ll be able to connect it to the vast majority of TVs, and it has more USB sockets so I can dispense with one of the USB hubs in my Daisy chain.
Just 4 sticks of RAM, a Processor and a Graphics card left to buy, totalling somewhere around the £120 mark.
