The Wire is the most awesome and well written TV show I’ve ever seen. That sucked up at least 60 hours of my life over about 4 weeks but was so totally worth it.

This TV season I’ve picked up a few new shows that are quite good. Sons of Tucson (cancelled after 4 eps *sigh*), The Middle. Modern Family isn’t bad either. Stargate Universe is in a particularly strange place, it started off ok but a bit slow, then went downhill and just before the mid season break got better, they copped out on the resolution of the mid season cliff hanger (1 ep, come on!) and since then seems to have been ok. It has been renewed for a second season so hopefully some momentum will be kept.

I had some serious training to do for the 5 dams ride, which I did on March 14th. I think my total of 262km for a single day will stand as my PB for some time to come. The Tour de Freedom is on again, this time 1000km. Not sure where/how the route will change, but I’m going to do it again this year. Hopefully with sponsorship so it won’t cost me quite so much out of pocket like last year.

Over the past few months, storage was still a minor concern. Power usage reared its head again due to the price going up again. It wasn’t totally gone from my mind, as it’s still something I like to reduce, but quite often the up front additional cost for lower consuming devices is greater than the savings over a reasonable time frame. However even the minor power consumption of hard drives, makes fewer larger drives more cost effective than many smaller ones. Even at the 1-2tb range which is where I was looking. So the total own+run cost over 2 years is within 5%, and fewer drives are quieter and produce less heat and need less sata ports, so that’s a win there. So the result of that is I moved towards the 2tb range. Ok so I wrote that before I upgraded and just changed the tense, and since then the price dropped again, so the power usage would be a larger proportion than before.

I acquired Lego Rock Band from JB’s the other week, and promptly exported the songs for use in RB2. While I was at it I noticed the RB1 export code was finally available in the aus store, and thus I bought that and a ton of other DLC too. Pity they never bothered to release RB2 in Aus, because I really wanted to get the RB2 instruments (to compliment my RB1 ones) but as they didn’t bother my money ended up going to Logitech for their new guitars. Unfortunately branded GH and featuring the touch slider which doesn’t do anything in RB they just aren’t as good as the original RB guitars (no solo keys, the buttons pitch is the same as all GH guitars (too narrow), no effects switch etc). Hopefully when RB3 comes out this year it will come out everywhere at the same time.

I’ve managed to borrow Heavy Rain and had a play of that. It’s very well done and the story is engaging. I think to finish it I’m going to need some days off work as I just can’t find the time right now.

After all the news surrounding it, I watched MIA’s Born Free video clip. I can see why it was removed from the tooba, but I don’t think the fact the video showed a USA military force rounding up gingers was part of that. Not sure what the directors motivations were behind the clip was, could it have been politically motivated? Something related to the Red Army problems from Thailand or just USA vs The Free World. After all, the clip was titled “Born Free”. I still find it funny when someone doesn’t like something and it gets published and blown out of proportion by the media, it drives people who wouldn’t have seen it to actively seek it to see what all the fuss is about. Another recent example was Kick Ass, featuring the apparently foul mouthed 11 year old character Hit Girl. Needless to say I’m going to see that, I just haven’t yet. Prior to the news coverage I’d never even heard of it.

I bought a USB sata drive docking thing and it’s instructions had some great Engrish in them. I think the best bit was describing the Disk Management applet:

Right pop-up the additional disks menus choose “delete disk segmentation.” Click “Segmentation additional disks”, followed by a clew to operate. Then you can storage your data.

I have no idea what the clew to operate is so hopefully the manufacturer will get a clue and not auto translate instructions, they’d be better off not bothering and making it 10c cheaper.

Argh it’s nearly 6.10 AM ffs.

Ok so alot of time has elapsed since my last posting. 28 months to be accurate. So much has happened in that time.

First off the obvious

• I switched from bBlog to Wordpress. bBlog served me well for several years before becoming abandoned, I was able to migrate all my blog (shudder) posts and the few comments across.

Then the less obvious

• I moved web hosts. From a colo of my own, to a vps of my own. I’m no longer offering web hosting to others because of the problems it brought with it.
• About 19 months back, I bought a bike to commute on. Since then I’ve upgraded (Feb 09) and have covered 10,000km.
• Last weekend I was in Melbourne for the Around the bay in a day ride; I think I did ok to complete the 210km event in 7hrs 22mins (moving, 8hrs53min elapsed). I’ve uploaded the full gps data.

And fineally the practically unknown

Starting Wednesday, I’ll be riding  from Esperance to Perth to raise money for Teen Challenge WA. Sponsor me. We’ll be getting into Perth on Sunday 1st, into Parliament Place West Perth, so come along and cheer us across the finish line.