everybody please sing up

Or sign up. Or do whatsoever you feel.

For today is Unc’s birthday*, and I know how much you all like Unc’s cutting, witty remarks.

His way with words.

His upcoming and generous pension provision.

So come on and celebrate.

*His age is a closely guarded secret, as such numbers have been banned as cruel under the Geneva convention.

stop press:

Tomorrow, in a shock move, no one in America is going to get shot in a rampage, a seige, a man-hunt, a street brawl or a neighborly dispute over some chickens.

grey’s anatomy

Just watched (the above). Never watched it before.

It features the actoring talents of Kathrine Heigl, which is a boon.

But. But!

It’s possibly the most depressing show I have ever – ever – watched.

(And yes, this does mean I’ve been watching channel Five today. In fact, I’ve watched it for about 4 hours which also means I’ve seen the delights of Everybody Hates Chris and Joey).

life can get no more exciting than this

I found out today that Arthur’s cat food is finally back on the market. So I bought some.

The cat will be happy. See how happy the cat is:

Edit: I forgot to put the picture through the debiggeriser. And it was a 3mp photo. It is now smaller. How’s your download limit?

further spectrum zx wonders

I was up all hours last night. Mainly due to two things, one being very cold feet.

In my reverie, I finally replied to a mail sent by J Nash ((Meat butcher to the gentry)(Funerals arranged on request)) and, as I’m still celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the ZX Spectrum, I did some research on emulators* which work under Vista and cheat modes for Manic Miner.

I came up trumps on both accounts and have acquired a 30 day trial of Spectaculator 6.3**, as well as the cunning secret code which allows free access to any of the 20 lethal caverns in MM.

It was during my search for the cheat code that I found out about the ZX Spectrum Orchestra. They are on a site called You Tube. Look them up. They also have an album totally created on various pieces of hardware associated with the rubber keyed wonder. Music played by the beeper of the 16/48k, or the AY chip of the 128k models, vocal talent supplied by the Currah [micro]Speech add-on.

Indeed, at 12:30 this morning it seemed to me to be a totally fabulous thing, the video for the track “$^” being online to view, so I bought it.  I’ll review it presently.

Further related You Tube watching discovered: a video of a Speccy running at 14Mhz; a walkthrough of Manic Miner; the “secret” desert island screen on Jet Set Willy 2; various videos of games loading (who is more sad? the person videoing it or me for watching it?); and more! Why not check out your favourite retro machine on Goofle’s ubiquitous billion dollar law-suit attractant?

* I also saw a picture of emulator genius Gerton Lunter. Who knew?
** I may even register the damned thing.

more sci-fi

This site has some good stuff on it, but I think its theories on who’s a Cylon are wrong.

worms

How much to worm the cat? For one small, incredibly small, maroon tablet?

£4.47.

Oh yes. But it did mean I could see the Vet Nurses. Cheap at half the price.

who watches the watchers?

Turns out – I do.

The guys who look after the security side of work’s computers, access to the internet, that sort of thing, sit just over there. And so that means that I can see what they’re doing. And mainly what they’re doing is looking through the list of sites which have been blocked by the “clever” naughtiness sensing software.

I think from the time they take over this part of their job, it must be mighty important to ensure that there aren’t any “false positives” in the list… however I’d put money on the fact that there are positively some falsies they’ve been looking at.

(D’ya see what I did there? It’s about titties… you know… implants.  Oh never mind).

sci-fi now

I bought the “Premier” issue of a new sci-fi magazine yesterday in the hope that it wasn’t some kind of love-juice covered Joss Whedon porn rag*.

It looked promising, nice stuff on Dr Who, Battlestar Galactica, the future of Futurama, etc etc. However, what did I find lurking in a section of curiously-stuck-together pages? Only an article on ten years of Buffy and how it is now considered a Whedon Classic.

Nuts.

Joss Whedon? Toss Whedon more like.

*That’ll be SFX then.

computering pow-ah!

Friend of boredofjam, Microsoft Clare, will tell you about the usual ribbing I give her when it comes to Microsoft’s latest FrankenOS of NT Technology (technology) and Fisher Price colouring-book Front End (technology).

However I’ve recently made a purchase of a new computer (figured the last one should be replaced after 3 years or so) and shoved a healthy slice of memory (just the 4gb) and a nice Nvidia 8600 GT XXX thingy into it (supposedly this thing runs fast, and it didn’t set me back the GDP of a small African country).It’s got that Vista program on it at the moment, but if the chap on eBay gets his finger out, it’ll soon have a tasty 64-bit Linux distro on it. Probably.

So this beast is sitting next to me, side off, new stuff installe, old hard-drives hanging out of the side of it as there’s not enough power/data cables for me to have all the things I want inside, inside. If you see what I mean. However it’s mostly silent. Which is ace.

Fingers crossed that I can get a more powerful PSU and some extra connections squeezed into the Dell-sized box…