I splurged

My brother talked me into playing GRAW. The game requires some nice hardware to play nicely, specifically a good GPU. My old one (nVidia 6600GT 128M) was lacking in memory so I wanted to upgrade. My current system only supports AGP and all the nice new cards are PCIe. This, of course, means upgrading my mobo, memory, etc. I ended up having to buy a whole new system just to upgrade my video card. Sigh.

I kind of went hog-wild hoping this new one lasts more than two years. Here's what I've got now:

• Athlon X2 3800 64-bit dualcore CPU running on an ASUS A8N32 SLI Deluxe mobo
• 2G of DDR PC3200 RAM
• Asus Geforce EN7900GTX 512MB DDR3 PCIe video card (and down the line I'll add a second)
• Creative Labs Audigy2 soundcard
• 520W power supply
• C: 36G Western Digital Raptor SATA HD (10,000RPM!)
• D: 250G WD HD (7,200 RPM)
• E: LG 16x DVD-RW (dual layer) (GSA-H10N)
• No floppy drive!

Interestingly, I'm still running Windows XP Pro 32-bit as it apparently runs faster 'cause the drivers for the 64-bit version simply aren't up to speed yet.

Who needs traffic lights?

When I saw this video my mouth was literally hanging open the entire time. This is unbelievable. Its a video of traffic in Sri Lanka:

Skype - The whole world can talk for free.

Skype is software that you can use to turn your computer into a phone. There's been a rather significant development recently:

Calling people on Skype is totally free. It's also free to call landlines and
mobiles within the US and Canada until the end of the year.

I'm signing up as soon as I get home.

Ricky Gervais on XFM

Ricky Gervais, Steve Merchant and Karl Pilkington used to host a show on XFM before their world famous podcost. Since I'm such a swell guy I downloaded a shitload of ~5 minute episodes for you, zipped them up into a single archive and uploaded to box.net.

There are 42 episodes in this 102MB file, so the download will take some time, but its worth it!

10,000th Shoplifter Gets Parade

This is priceless: a store celebrates their 10,000th shoplifter. Wish we could have seen her face.

Light's Most Exotic Trick Yet: So Fast it Goes ... Backwards?

Fascinating - a month or two ago I read an article about scientists slowing the speed of light using some wild techniques. Today comes an article about scientists at the University of Rochester speeding light up so much that it actually travels backwards!

The beginnings of time travel?

Google Maps - MOBILE!

I LOVE Google. I'm pretty sure I've mentioned that before. One of the first services they offered (other than search) that blew me away was Google Maps. I can't count the number of times that I've wished I had Google Maps with me as I'm trying to navigate Victoria with my girlfriend, or can't remember where a place is here in town.

WELL. My buddy Tim pointed me to Google Maps for Mobile! I can now use the service on my Blackberry and you can too, on your cell phone. Unbelievable.

Deep Quote

Quite often I want to direct someone to a website where I've read something and I have to hope that they find the portion of the page I'm referring to. Deep Quote makes this much easier. I enter the quote, then provide the page I found it on and the service gives me a link I can provide that dramatically highlights the quote.

See for yourself

Spinnakers

I had some extra time and $$ this weekend so I decided to upgrade my PC a little.
Click the pic below for a larger image.


So, clearly I'm kidding. But Anne-Marie and I went to Spinnakers in Victoria for a little overnight get-away. It was the best overnighter we've ever had.

They greeted us with big smiles and a free upgrade (to a garden suite), we had some fantastic beer and appies, took a nice walk around the harbor, had an unbelievable dinner at their restaurant and ended up sleeping soundly in a giant bed with big fluffy pillows. Slept in, enjoyed a "breakfast basket" in bed, had a jacuzzi with too many bubbles and left the place feeling like we'd been at a spa all weekend.
I can't recommend Spinnakers enough.

Box.net

Very cool - I just signed up for 1G (one gigabyte) of online storage for free.
Box.net allows me to easily upload files, share them, link to them, etc etc. Its a terrific service, actually, especially if I'm without my pen drive.

Click the box to sign-up

Is Lost a Repeat?

I'm a big fan of the show Lost, on ABC.
This season has been pretty disappointing, though. I haven't found the story near as compelling, but what's really ruining it for me is all of the damn re-runs!

That's why this site is helpful:
http://www.islostarepeat.com/