You're A Showaah!

Just incase you missed it The Daily Mail Brigade down in England are up in arms yet again over Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross leaving lewed answer machine messages for the actor Andrew Sachs. Seemingly Brand has boffed Sachs’ granddaughter and he and Ross thought itwould be a jolly jape to tell Sachs’ answer machine about it during their show on Radio 2.

Naturally the Prime Minister and various political chancers came crawling out of the woodwork to throw in their own tuppence. What was an open and shut case of liable has suddenly become the centre of a media frenzy that thankfully has distracted us all from the Kredit Krunch and war in the Middle East. No wonder Bin Laden wants to blow us all up.

I don’t really give a shit about any of this though. THere’s only two things I’m concerned about:

One – When it’s going to get the hell out of the news

Two – Why the hell is there a picture of STALIN behind Russell Brand in the video of his apology?

Seriously! Take a look:

I’m sure there’s some kind of witty and ironic reason why that picture is there but I refuse to acknowledge that Brand is either witty or ironic. I therefore conclude that the picture is there because Brand is an ARSEHOLE.

It got me wondering what the rest of Brand’s flat might be decorated with:

Congratulations

Many congratulations to EL KAT who has passed her driving test today with flying colours.

Coincidence?

CAREER

Noun (plural careers)

1. One’s calling in life; a person’s occupation.
2. An individual’s work and life roles over their lifespan.
3. A jouster’s path during a joust.

Verb (third-person singular simple present careers, present participle careering, simple past and past participle careered)

1. To move rapidly straight ahead, especially in an uncontrolled way

Teh DEADLY UPGRADEZ!

My PC is starting to look a little bit tired recently, and with Fallout 3, Grand Theft Auto 4 and a host of other highly anticipated games due out soon I feel the time has come for the fabled upgrades.

Now upgrading a computer can be a fairly painful process if you start choosing parts at random. Especially given that component manufacturers seem hell bent on making their naming conventions as confusing as possible for the average consumer. More often than not finding the best parts you can afford is only half the battle. Unlike buying a complete computer off the shelf building one yourself is a bit like mixing random chemicals in a mad scientist’s lab while hoping that the resultant potion won’t blow you to bits or mutate you into a sentient cockroach. You’re knee deep in the jungle of no warranty, no returns and so far off the map that you’re likely to be eaten by techno-pygmy cannibals.

In short it’s exciting and I’d recommend it to anyone.

Now to the nitty-gritty: for reference I’ve currently got an AMD Athalon 64 X2 4200 and the Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard at the heart of the machine. I reckon for the moment they will be sufficient for now as the graphics card and memory seem to be the major bottlenecks.

I’ve done a lot of research on the graphics card side of things, and the two main players NVIDIA and ATI both seem to be about neck and neck in the technology stakes. NVIDIA seems to have a small lead with their new flagship cards in the 200 series, but ATI tends to produce cheaper cards in general.

After a lot of research I’ve plumbed for an NVIDIA GTX260 OC2 from BGF Tech. BFG are quite highly regarded in hardware circles for the quality of their products and their excellent customer service so I expect great things. The card itself has quite a few good reviews online and the customer ratings on Ebuyer aren’t bad either. The price is maybe a bit steep at £236.31 but hopefully I won’t have to upgrade it for a while.

The trouble with buying a king sized graphics card like the GTX260 is that it needs power, a lot of power. In fact it needs a pair of 6 pin molex power connectors with a combined 12V current rating of 38A or more. That’s serious power and far beyond the capabilities of the cheap ass power supply I got as part of my last upgrade in the summer of 2006.

A quick scan of the Ebuyer website and forums doesn’t yield very much advice about buying power supplies. In fact much of the nomenclature and information seems even more confusing than the stuff that surrounds graphics cards and processors. Two things appear to be clear though: firstly you should always buy a good brand of power supply as cheap generic ones tend to be rubbish and secondly the voltage and amperage on the individual rails is king. Overall wattage is important, but if you can’t deliver the current and voltage down the cables your kilowatt mega-power 3000 isn’t worth the money you’ve spent on it.

With those two considerations in mind I trawled around for a couple of hours trying to see the best power supply I could get for my money. I finally settled on a Coolermaster eXtreme Power 650W which has a few good reviews for low noise and a good solid flow of power. Crucially it also has the right combination of power connectors to feed the hungry beast that is my new graphics card and all for just £45.

Last but not least I’ve ordered a couple of extra gigs of Crucial DDR RAM to bring the machine up to the motherboard’s operating limit of 3GB. Hopefully that should speed up the computer in general until I can afford to upgrade the motherboard and processor.

The parts are all ordered now for a grand total of just over three hundred bucks. I can’t wait to get them all together and see the results.

Keep Your Keys Close

Just before I proceed with this post I’d like to say up front that I don’t own a car. I may therefore make presumptions that many of the world’s car owners would not. I won’t claim to know the ins and outs of owning or operating a motor but I do know that cars tend to be fairly expensive bits of kit. A quick glance in the classified ads shows them ranging from a few hundred bucks for some clapped-out, bone shaking wreck up to hundreds of thousands for the best hand built sports cars. In most cases their car is the second most expensive item that they own after their house. A fact that often leaves me wondering why a lot of people seem to be so utterly contemptuous about their cars.

I’m thinking specifically about one thing here: Remote Central Locking.

You know the score, and you’ve probably see it happen or even seen it yourself. A driver stops their motor at the kerb and gets out. They start walking away and hit the button on their key that locks the car doors; most of the time they don’t even look back as they walk away.
What I’ve often wondered is what would happen if a bold chancer were to open one of the doors before the driver could press the remote locking button. Obviously it’s unlikely that the thief could actually steal the car as most modern manufacturers tie the engine immobiliser into the lock system. Still they would be inside the car and could rifle through the driver’s belongings or if they had the stomach for it: lie in wait for the driver to return and bushwhack them. If I can think of this surely the world’s less reputable denizens can as well.

It just seems to me that people need to be a bit more careful with their possessions. I know these four wheeled magical horseless carriages seem difficult to steal what with them weighing over a metric tonne and all, but it can and does happen.

I think a lot of this effort saving technology is making us complacent, and eventually it’s going to come back and bite us in the ass. Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I like to know that my belongings are securely under lock and key when I go away to leave them. I like to feel the key turn and hear the lock click under my direct control. At the very least I would make sure that I watched the car as it locked and tried one of the door handles afterwards. You wouldn’t run out the front door of your house and not check it was locked would you?

A Chaudry Doesn't Live Here

Ladies and gentlemen I have an announcement to make, and that announcement is this:

FUCK YOU ROYAL BANK OF SCOTLAND.

I am sick to the back teeth of getting letters through the door address to a person that doesn’t live and has never lived in my flat. The address is similar to mine, but the postcode seems to indicate a block of flats about a mile farther along the street. I’ve consistently marked these letters as RETURN TO SENDER: NOT KNOWN AT THIS ADDRESS and popped them back in the post, but still they come. I finally got fed up with their pish the last week and opened up one of the letters to find out who was sending them. It turns out that this one was a demand for settlement of an unauthorised overdraft from and a threat to send in sheriff’s officers to recoup the amount.

Naturally I baulked at the idea of sheriff’s officers turning up at my door because some asshole miles away can’t manage his finances. Doubly so because RBOS can’t get the addresses right in their database so I called up the number given on the letter to put the matter to rest.

More fool me.

I got shunted from pillar to post through half of the RBOS’s switchboard until I ended up in the grandly named debt recovery and risk management department. There a disinterested corporate automaton explained that they were very sorry I had been troubled by the letters. However they could only discuss the details of the account with the account holder. Fair enough I suppose: Security and all that has to be a priority after all.

“You’ll contact them then?” I asked. “And check the address?”

“I’ll arrange for someone to contact the account holder and verify the address,” said the Automaton.

“Good,” I said. “Thanks very much.”

Today I got another letter in with the same return address. Obviously nothing’s been done to update the account information. I wonder if I’ll get a better reaction by returning it like this:

Oh and Mr. A. Chaudry of Paisley Road West, Govan, Glasgow. If you’re out there could you please, for the love of all things good call up the Royal Bank of Scotland and tell them your damn address before I personally start coming up there and nailing their buring corpses and letters to the lampposts outside your house.

Best Regards,

Grey Kodiak.

Toil Boil Soapy Bubble

As part of my experimental shopping trip last week when I famously got lost on the way home from Silverburn I got some Ariel Liquitabs for the washing. I know that’s hardly a noteworthy event but bear with me while I try to explain.

The liquitabs are interesting in and of themselves. They’re about an inch and a half square and filled with what looks like washing up liquid. You drop them into the drum of the washing machine and load your laundry in on top of them. Their plastic case dissolves in the drum as the machine fills with water and releases the detergent to do its magic. Fairly clever stuff, but still just stuff for cleaning clothes you might think.

Here’s a picture to give you an idea what I’m talking about.

Now the interesting part of all of this is the warning label on the back. It expressly warns against exposing the liquitabs to moisture as any form of water will cause the flimsy plastic coating to dissolve:

Now as you may have gathered I quite enjoy random chaos at times and the instant I saw the warning my curiosity was piqued. What would happen if I dropped on of these down a toilet and flushed it? Or better yet: into the cistern? Deep down I know that I’d be terribly disappointed by the effects. The coating will probably disintergrate and the stuff will flush harmlessly away. Still there’s a part of me that wants to flood an entire building with soap suds just to see the look on people’s faces.

A schoolboy-esque prank perhaps but it might be fun to find out the answer.

I’ll keep you appraised…

Another Year Gone

Wow it’s exactly a year since this site was resurrected in its current form.

I’d like to thank everyone for graciously putting up with my wittering so far! Special thanks to the man they call McDowall for forcing me to start this up again. Not to mention his gracious hosting of the thing throughout its bizarre and rambing existance.

GOD DAMN SPLICERS indeed.

After the War?

I was watching a bit of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles earlier and it got me wondering about the motivations and plans of Skynet. Now Skynet as you all know is the main villain of the Terminator world. It’s a powerful artificial intelligence that destroys the world in a nuclear holocaust in an attempt to wipe out human beings. It then wages a genocidal war against the survivors using a vast array of fighting machines and most famously the humanoid terminators. Strangely however Skynet and his minions seem totally unable to beat a bunch of rag-tag humans lead by one John Connor. This is despite dozens of attempts at assassinating him via time travel plots and having the ability to churn out hundreds of tireless, unstoppable fighting machines.

I think it’s time we and Skynet especially stopped deluding ourselves: The simple fact is that Skynet doesn’t want to win the war. It was designed for one purpose and one purpose only: Waging war. If there’s nobody left to fight what the hell is it going to do then? I can hardly see the terminators taking up gardening and especially not after almost all life on Earth has been vaporised with thermonuclear bombs.

Skynet isn’t given much of a background motivation in any of the big screen terminator movies. It pretty much just develops sentience and panics the US military. They try to shut it off and it fires nukes at Russia initiating WWIII. Then it starts rounding up the survivors and burning them in furnaces like a gang of mechanical Nazis. Skynet’s sole raison d’être is to kill and incinerate humans. I suppose if you were to look into its black mechanical heart you’d probably find an old BBC Micro running a BASIC program a bit like this:

10 IF REMAINING_HUMANS > 0 THEN
20 KILL_HUMANS;
30 BURN_BODIES;
40 GOTO 10;
50 ELSE
60 //Do something in here
70 //We can add it later
80 ENDIF;

Now with all of that said I think that the original terminator movies still were better in their handling of Skynet than the Sarah Connor Chronicles. I think the writers of the series have been watching too much of the new Battlestar Galactic as the terminators have gone all religious. Shirley Manson is a shape shifting, liquid metal terminator but she’s also strutting around quoting the bible and running a company.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I prefer my terminators to be a little less Machiavellian and a bit more relentless killing machines.

I still don’t know what Skynet’s going to do after it wins though.

Lost in Space

I took a trip out to the giant Tesco store at Silverburn today as part of my ongoing experimental attempts to wean myself off the Asda at Govan. Since this is Scotland in October it naturally started to piss with rain and blow a gale as soon as I emerged from Silverburn. Of course the gods didn’t think that was a bad enough trial for a true Ayrshireman and saw fit to hurl freezing rain and wind directly into the shelter itself no matter where you stood. Worse the bus stop was filled with pensioners complaining about the weather and like, a gaggle of screeching, totally giggling jailbait that was like, totally dissing Chantelle-Britney for her Ugg boots.

I hate jailbait, and their constant use of the word “like” makes their entire conversation seem like the vocal equivalent of radio static.

So there I was deeply contemplating marching back to my flat when an idea struck me. I knew that the 56 would shortly arrive and there was an excellent chance that most if not all of the pensioners and jailbait would board it. There was also an excellent chance that I wouldn’t get a seat because it’s always loaded to bursting point. I checked the timetables to see how long it was till the next 56 and noticed that the number 3 was due along in a couple of minutes. Now I’ve seen the number 3 going past my house a couple of times, but because of the odd route it takes I’ve never been sure if it really does go to Silverburn or if it even goes back towards town past my flat.

Just as I predicted the jailbait squeaked their way aboard the 56 followed by the pensioners and they all packed in like passengers on an Indian train. I stepped back, waited two minutes, took a deep breath and boarded the number 3.

Little did I realise that my adventure had just begun. To be fair I had some foreknowledge that maybe the number Three didn’t follow the most direct route. It goes back and forth all day between Stobhill Hospital and Darnley and takes about three hours to do it. I was however bemused to find myself looping back and forth along Linthaugh Road, Lyoncross Road, Brockburn road and a dozen other enclaves between Crookston and Corkerhill that have a constant banjo soundtrack. The good thing about the journey is the fact that nobody hailed the bus. It just sailed through all the rundown looking estates and returned to normality when it rejoined Corkerhill Road near Cardonald.

I wouldn’t like to try it after dark though, I get the feeling the place might get a bit more interesting then. Escape from New York style.