So apparently this August has been Ireland’s wettest in 22 years. I’m not all that phased by it though, it seems roughly the same as some previous crappy summers we’ve had.

On the other hand, I find there’s something about blue skies and baking heat that entices swarms of thugs and weirdos to wander aimlessly around the city… probably the same primal calling that convinces at least three people in the neighbourhood that now, the one sunny day this week, would be the perfect time to mow the lawn for an hour or two using a petrol mower that’d wake the dead, as if nobody else wants to sit outside or open their windows.

Curiously enough, I think I enjoy the rain out of spite… or I’m just easily irritated… maybe both.

So I have to be at the dentist tomorrow morning… bright and early at 11:30am.
Sure, no problem for a person who keeps normal human hours.
But for a vampire-nerd like me, this is like trying to get up at 4am.

Of course I’ve had a whole month’s notice for this appointment, a month I could have spent trying to sort my sleeping shit out; but no, I prefer the silence of the small hours way too much… and I have a sickening lack of self discipline.

I’m already feeling physically stressed about it because I know I’ve got a rough night ahead of me.
Lying there in the sticky heat, looking at the clock, watching it get later and later… knowing I’m going to be increasingly tired for my (already stressful) dental work.
The result is usually that I keep myself awake with stress, thinking “fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, FUCK… why can’t I sleep?”
Which of course is a stupid question that answers itself… but such is life I suppose.

I got up at 4pm today, so the chances of me getting to sleep at any reasonable hour are out the fucking window… so I’m not even going to bother trying.

So instead, I’m going to get drunk and play Deus Ex 2 all night, and maybe later draw some more hilarious anime-style tentacle porn.
Hell yeah! I’m living the dream.

I love watching the parkour/free-running videos on youtube, and it often gives me the desire to try it myself. (In the same pie-in-the-sky way I consider starting my boxing career after watching Rocky or to train in Kung-Fu after watching a martial arts film.) But one youtube video has given me the inspiration I need to forget about trying parkour completely.
It’s like a preview of what my own parkour video might look like. :/

PS. The Benny Hill theme makes EVERYTHING funny.

Another ladder-assisted slam-dunk in my game of silence-the-PC.
Although still not completely silent… merely replacing one annoying noise with a much less annoying one, all things considered I think (to quote the computer from Portal) this was a triumph.

I removed the plastic housing from the gfx cards heatsink, revealing a dust-caked heatsink and fan.
I could see what they were trying to achieve in terms of air-flow, but the whole idea was scuppered by the thick layers of dust… how was this clogged, unfortunate mess was keeping my graphics card cool at all?
I cleaned the heatsink, and removed their brave, puny, whining little fan.

I also replaced the thermal paste under the heatsink for good measure.
Left with what was, at this point, a (badly) passively cooled gfx card… I began thinking about how to attach the bigger fan.
I’d settled on an old stock CPU fan from my Core2Duo and I had a few twist ties lying around… using some existing holes in the card, I managed to fix the fan in place over the heatsink.

Powering the fan became a bit of a pain in the nuts.
Initially I’d connected the larger fan to the fan power pins on the card itself, but the fan was having none of it… it just sat there twitching.
I’m actually relieved that this approach didn’t work, because I was able to just dump that whole wiring nightmare and plug the fan directly into the motherboard in tandem with a spare “fan-mate” I had.

The downside is that the card no longer controls the fan speed based on load… but I don’t think I’ll miss hearing it ramping up and down all the time anyway.
After monitoring the temperatures and generally putting the card through its paces, the manual setting I’ve chosen via the fan-mate seems to be working quite well, no crashes or artifacts yet.

The card idles at a few degrees lower now and I’ve eliminated the annoying gfx card whine… all using crap I had lying around.
/plays MacGyver music in his head

My initial excitement of Google Earth has worn a bit thin… changing from a thing of novelty to another interesting tool on my internet utility-belt.

Today I find myself blown away all over again with Microsoft’s Live Search Maps, something I’d originally cast aside as a predictable “me too” effort.
On the surface, it pales in comparison to the slick interface and well established community surrounding Google Earth, but the killer feature with Live Maps is the Bird’s Eye view.

Zooming down over a major city, the Bird’s Eye menu option becomes available, presenting you with some nicely detailed aerial photography.
What I love about this is the isometric-style angle, which gives you a much richer sense of the area than the usual overhead view… you can also switch the viewing angle from north, south, east or west, allowing you to explore the otherwise hidden details.
It reminds me a lot of Sim City actually.

Of course the coverage is (as expected) fairly spotty and the lack of pre-caching serves as a constant distraction when ever you scroll through the area, as blank areas of pure-black give way to photographic tiles right before your eyes.
Maybe this is a problem they need a fully fledged client app to solve, or they’re just conserving bandwidth, I don’t know.

It’s not perfect yet, but like Google Street-view, it’s interesting to see where this sort of thing is going and having these new toys to play with.
As accustomed to this stuff as we get, it’s still pretty cool to reflect on how these things that were once the domain of James Bond movies are now available to any Joe Soap with an internet connection.

After spending an hour stripping coax, installing my TV tuner card and tuning in all the channels, I recall why I removed it in the first place.
It runs hot even when I’m not using it, raises the temperature inside my PC tower and makes my other fans have to work harder (and louder) as a result… gah.
I don’t use any case fans, and keep what fans I do have at a low RPM, so adding new hot-running components can really screw with the delicate balance I’ve got going here.

In hindsight, I’d probably have been better off buying an external USB TV tuner.
It wouldn’t heat the tower (apart from indirectly taxing the CPU during use) and I wouldn’t have to go through quite as much crap installing/removing it.

The other reason is that the picture looks rubbish, thanks mostly to my noisy analogue cable feed and the lack of any noise reduction before it hits my 20″ LCD monitor.

Pants to that anyway.

I happened upon this kitten-related masterpiece a few days ago while browsing ytmnd.
Naturally enough, in the fallout of lolcats mania, there are bound to be enough cute kitten pics left over to make an uplifting musical slideshow.
I didn’t get to enjoy it much the first time around because I was bracing myself for a ’screamer’ or some other horrible twist… but no nasty surprises were forthcoming… what you see is what you get (unless they’ve mischievously edited it between now and when ever you read this post.)

Here ’tis…
http://kittensaresocute.ytmnd.com

As I sat at my desk this morning, the sun was busy casting a brilliant beam of light through a crack in my window-blinds… I watched for a few seconds, my disgusting cigarette smoke swirling and dancing vividly in the beam.
Being bored shitless and generally restless, I decided to get up and take some photos.

What I discovered was shocking mildly interesting.
(Continue…)

I’ve just finished my first few hours of gameplay.
All the things I liked about previous GTAs are there, and then some.
What impressed me most was the richness of the environment, with so much attention to detail and cool little touches.
The new car physics/handling feels strange so far, but it gives GTA a nice realism kick.
The pedestrians are also much improved… I’m not seeing the same pedestrians saying the same thing over and over (yet)… definitely a plus for immersion.
I spent the first 20 minutes or so wandering around in a daze with Niko trying to take it all in. (Like in Back To The Future where Marty first arrives in 1955… Niko got knocked down and everything!)
(Continue…)

I was just thinking about the first time I really felt amazed with the internet.
It was early 1998 and I was in an internet cafe.
I ran Quake 2 and managed to get into an online game.

As noobs do, I’d joined a server a few thousand miles away, not for a moment considering ping.
And as noobs also do, I started asking other players where they were from.
The one or two answers I received blew my mind… Brazil… WOW!
I wasn’t sure if he was joking, that’s how incredible it sounded to me at the time.

Nowadays the internet is no more amazing to me than running water or television, but every once in a while I encounter a genuinely startled and disoriented internet noob and it reminds me of my own initial amazement.
I suppose it’s what previous generations might have experienced with the aforementioned television, to a greater or lesser extent.

Here’s to novelty