Rob's Blog
I have a routine. A schedule that I like to stick to. I roll out of bed, put a pot of fresh coffee on, check my emails, read any blog updates, work on active projects for a few hours, have another coffee, work some more, watch Neighbours, work for the rest of the afternoon, go for a jog, work some more.
It's a routine that I've got used to, and one that works. It all flows together like a well oiled machine. The caffeine wakes me up, neighbours clears my mind, and the jog gives me time to contemplate problems away from the constraints of my computer screens.
If anything prevents that routine I get fairly discombobulated. For example, if there's no coffee. That sucks, but at least it's just a case of running down to the shops to buy some. Sometimes a client phones up with something urgent and my active projects get put on hold for a few hours, but that's okay - it's just a case of reshuffling the workload. These are all problems with my routine that are navigable.
But... Neighbours has been cancelled for Wimbledon. My mind just doesn't function in the afternoon without those 20 minutes of Australian mindlessness. Don't the BBC understand that my entire working live revolves around their programming?!
My only glimmer of hope is that when the BBC loses Neighbours this will cease to be a problem, my biggest fear is that we don't get Channel 5 here if it's too windy. There's also been some fairly worrying speculation that there may be a gap in transmission following the end of its broadcast on BBC One and its start on Five.
I'm currently in the process of writing a 5-year business plan; I think I seriously need to factor in the potential implications of the RTL Media buy-out! ;)
Vista
Jun 25th 2007 10:06
So, I've been rather bold and replaced the main Fuelled on Coffee office machine. For a few moments I considered replacing it with a very large coffee machine and a pad of paper, but common sense prevailed so I had the chaps over at Overclockers put together a nice AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600 2.80GHz Dual Core CPU system centred around an NVIDIA 8800 GTS DirectX 10 Graphics Card. He's called Vince, and he's hard as nails.Vista Premium is pretty sweet. Good points:
- It looks gorgeous. XP on my laptop just looks so 'flat' now.
- It runs my standard suite of applications with no problems at all (Notepad++, Firefox, F-Secure 2007, StrokeIt, OpenOffice, PhotoshopCS3 and the BrowserPool VNC client, WinSCP, Putty, Paegent...).
- The whole permissions system is very much more Linux orientated and I like it!
- It has a lot of 'little things' which make it a lot nicer to use, for example; pressing F2 to rename a file in explorer it doesn't highlight the file extension. Running 2 monitors you can have your wallpaper stretch the full width. You can change a username after creating it. The search bar in the start menu is unbelievably usable. They're all tiny little things, but they add up.
- The sidebar gadgets are nice. Did I mention it looks gorgeous?
- I stuck my Firewire card in and it had no problems detecting it. Setting up file sharing on the network was really easy.
At the end of the day, its not really very different to XP. It's certainly not as different as I expected it to be.
So – so far. Vista gets a very surprising thumbs up.
It's the Sampford Brett village fete tomorrow. The current view out of my window doesn't necessarily bode very well!
Exciting photos of the fete will no doubt follow tomorrow.
In other exciting news I've just ordered a new computer for the office. It's an AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600 2.80GHz Dual Core, 2GB of PC2-6400 CAS5 RAM, and a very meaty NVIDIA 8800 GTS 320MB graphics card. Hmmmm... tasty!
... I've named her Gabz. She's a 1983 Kawasaki GPZ-550.
Ain't she a thing of beauty?! Delivered, insured, and now she has an MOT. As soon as the registration documents turn up I can get her taxed and take her for a 'proper' test ride (although I did naturally ride the long way back from the test center). Okay, so the front forks really need new seals, she's missing a side panel, and she needs a bit of a polish... but she seems to run beautifully so far. Not bad for a first bike!
Thank you Aunty Dave!! :D
