"Nothing but the rain"
I am really looking forward to watching the following things with my children when they are old enough.
I hope they get the same enjoyment out of them that I have done for ages. The biggest problem is knowing when to introduce them to these wonders!
Many many thanks to Jase for this most excellent 40th birthday present for me. I got him a megalodon tooth!
Congratulations to Jase on becoming a trainee firefighter. Even better is his diary and blogosphere contribution [edit – no longer active].
Welcome, another member of the Fulham Five to the world of websites and blogging.
This is what happens when you give a camera to a three year old. Eldest son took these while we were visiting family. I’m not going to give a commentary this is just what he finds interesting.
I still really like watching Hawaii 5-O, see my previous post. The scenery is great, the colour filters used show Hawaii off to the best and the camaraderie between the characters is good. The tech is over the top, but I can actually live with that. There’s a problem now though.
I think they jumped the shark!
The latest episode that I watched had 5-O invade North Korea to rescue their leader. He’d been lured there by a double agent of Wo Fat who is the series’ lead baddy.
Seriously?
A group of rogue coppers and hang-ins fly a Huey (wrong war for that helo) into North Korea across the DMZ (the most heavily armed 100 miles in the world) and not only get there alive but successfully capture their top man and make it back!
For some reason I can cope with them hacking into any database or CCTV stream in the world but invading North Korea really launched them over the cartilaginous hunter with supreme success.
Going to keep watching for the next little while to see if they improve. If not then I have some episodes of Alcatraz recorded and ready to watch. Perhaps that will be better?
For my birthday I bought a 2TB NAS unit. I spent ages looking at different types and was going to get a LG NAS until I saw an Iomega unit in PC World in BlueWater Shopping centre with quite a good price reduction. I did some internet searching that evening and went back the next day to buy the Iomega unit.
I got the Iomega StorCentre ix200 Cloud Edition there are some good things about it and some things that to be honest I don’t understand and can’t be bothered to invest the time to understand.
I use the NAS to store movies, iTunes libraries and eventually I will categorise all our photos on it. I can stream content to the PS3 and iPhones and laptop which is useful. I can also access it via the web should I feel like it! Here’s a list of functions I won’t be using:
I have the two 1TB drives configured as RAID0 at the moment which, as far as I understand it, means they copy each other for data redundancy. If I ever need the extra space I’ll turn that off as I also back up photos and video files to DVD. Can you have too much redundancy?
My lovely router (a D-Link) started to drop connections and act a little bit funny. I put this down to overheating as I had lost the little rubber feet upon which it was meant to stand. This may or may not have been the cause for its miss-behaviour but that was my diagnosis. So I needed another router and reluctantly I went to the back cupboard and got the free router I received from Talk Talk when I signed up with them. It looks pretty grotty and has a huge Talk Talk logo on the front panel.
So I un-plugged the old lovely router and held my breath. Would the new one work? I plugged it in and turned it on, an on-switch is a luxury. Lights flashed and there wasn’t a whirring sound, the connection light blinked and flashed and went green.
I plugged in, logged in to the router and had a look at the settings. It didn’t look like I could change the SSID! Arrghhh. I don’t want my wireless network to be called Talk-Talk8654. I left it.
Later I loaded the router admin page on the iPhone and suddenly there was a settings page for me to play with. I think there was a refresh issue with the PC browser that meant the settings didn’t show. I have now changed the SSID and am a happy bunny.
I know Talk Talk are slammed in public relations but I have to say I have had an excellent service from them! Please remember that anecdote isn’t evidence!
It was my 40th birthday a few days ago and as Jase likes to tell me I am now in my 5th decade on this glorious Earth! So here’s a list of things I got, just because I can:
The recent seasonal events on Gran Turismo 5 have made me need a selection of good cars at different PP (performance points). Gran Turismo applies Performance Points to each car so that you can race cars of similar performance and know that you are evenly matched. I have selected, not very carefully, the following cars for the indicated PP. I have learned that it is best to have as much power as possible and to increase the ballast to counteract the power increase.
For the 400PP races my car of choice is a BMW Mini of all things! But it works well and thrashes the opponents.
A 500PP race gets me heading to my Lancia Delta HF Integrale Evoluzione ’91 for a non-race car. If I need a race car then I seek out my RE Amemiya AsparaDrink RX7 ’06.
A 600PP race and it’s the McClaren F1 ’94. Soemtimes I might use the Ford GT LM Race Car SPec II, you know, just for kicks!
For a 700PP race I turn to my beloved Mazda 787B. It’s a gorgeous car and was one of my favourites in a previous incarnation of Gran Turismo.