Safari, So Good

I’ve spent this past week getting this PC up to scratch.

It’s been lying dormant under my bed for months, and now - thanks to a little time, effort and bedroom rearranging - it’s up and running. I bought a 1gb stick of RAM and now it runs a hell of a lot faster than it did before, fast enough for me to go out and get Football Manager 2008 and run about ten leagues.

For some reason, Firefox and IE were still jerky and slow no matter how much more RAM had been added. Putting this into google didn’t seem to help at all, so I made the switch to the Apple produced Safari browser. Straight away it worked as it should, smooth scrolling and no messing about when it came to viewing web pages. It’s a little basic, with nothing like the customisation you get on Firefox, but it runs a lot better.

I’ve also come to the conclusion that this PC isn’t really worth my time and effort upgrading it. It’s a bargain basement PC, with bargain basement components. It’d be more wise to save up the cash and go out and get a PC specifically for gaming. But seeing as those PC’s are about four hundred quid, I don’t think i’ll be doing that anytime soon!

I’m being given £200 next week as part of some deal Royal Mail and the union have struck (I’m not sure what about), so with that wad of cash and the money I’ll be getting from the overtime I’m going to do, I’ll be able to pay for my holiday in Malta and pay off various bills in no time.

Eye Wheely Liked It

I went on the Nottingham Eye yesterday!

It was well worth the fiver that they charge. We (me and my parents) went on around lunchtime and had about fifteen minutes on it. That meant we went round about four times. Aside from it being biting cold when you reach the top, it gives unrivaled views across Nottingham. A Jo & Twiggy voiceover gives you an idea of what you’ll see when you reach the top - and thankfully for us it was a bright, clear day and we saw as far out as Ratcliffe Power Station - almost 8 miles away from where we were!!

The Council House looks less impressive when you’re looking straight down at it, and there are one or two buildings that look even more terrible when you’re up high (the Primark building!). The City Ground, or rather the imposing Brian Clough Stand, is clearly visible up there too.

It’s in the square until April 6th, obviously doing a good trade considering it should have been taken down earlier this month. It’s highly recommended from me.

Low-spec

As well as two digital cameras, i now have two computers…!

Luckily for me though, i haven’t had to pay for this ‘new’ computer. It’s been under my bed ever since my brother Iain left for China last year. And now it’s spare, i take ownership of it!

At the moment, I access the Internet through my laptop which I’ve had for about two years. I’ve not looked after it that well and it now shows, viruses all over the shop and parts of the Laptop itself are physically worn. It’s also woefully under-specced.

About a year or so before I got my laptop, my Dad bought a PC from Woolworths. It was decent spec PC, with an 80gig harddrive and an Intel Celeron 2.4ghz processor. A marked improvement on my machine. He had this PC until he went out to buy a laptop as well, so the PC was given to my brother who was living in Sherwood at the time and wanted to keep in touch with his China-based girlfriend.

In October, with Iain now with his girlfriend in China and my ‘moving out’ experiment finished, the PC went under my bed which is where it’s remained. Asking my bro what his plans were once he moved out this summer, he said he’d most likely use his girlfriends laptop, leaving a spare PC free!

So, I’m now currently in the process of sorting the whole mess out. For a start, the memory is stupidly low for a desktop PC, only 256MB! I think adding 1gig will restore things. And it also has not had Service Pack 2 installed on it, something which I’m in the long, drawn out process of fixing.

One other big problem is the lack of a desk in my room. So until I get to Ikea, the PC will reside on the floor.

Say Cheese

I bought a new camera the other day, to add to the ever growing list of them that I have (which adds up to three!).

I have my Nikon D50, the 5MP camera on my N95 and now I have a Fujifilm Finepix A920. It’s a compact camera, fits neatly into my pocket and is for the times when it’s just not possible to be carrying my big chunky DSLR around. It’s 9 Megapixel, which is the biggest amount I have in any of my cameras, though the quality of pictures from my DSLR is still excellent despite only being 6 Megapixels, it was also the bargain price of £70 at Tesco. That’s thirty pounds below the asking price in Argos.

I’ve had a Fujifilm camera before, so I had no problems going with them. The quality of the pictures has been impressive too. A rare bargain to be found on the high street this was, and with it being on sale at Tesco I managed to get a shedload of Clubcard points.

Which is all that matters, really.

Needless to say…

…I didn’t get any of the duties going. Maybe I should have applied for more than the six I went for (I could’ve gone for 12), but as it turns out there are more vacant duties going up in the first week of April.

I seriously doubt I’ll get Saturdays off any time soon, so I’m going to apply for anything and everything. Although I draw the line at some duties in there! I also got word yesterday that some agreement on flexible working hours means I’ll be pocketing £200! This unexpected chunk of cash will come in handy for my Malta holiday.

Things are getting depressing regarding Forest. Last years fall from automatic promotion spots to the play-offs is happening again, and pretty soon we’ll get sound bites from players and the manager telling us how “this time, we won’t make mistakes”.

Forest’s continuous failure to get promoted is proof that the staff of NFFC can talk the talk, but stumble when they try to walk the walk. I don’t expect us to get promoted this year, and have started to stop listening to games due to them being predictable (dull draws, 1-0 losses).

We’re due a bit of good fortune at Forest, but we’ve been waiting for it since we got relegated in 1999.