This had me scratching my head (nothing new) wondering what safari setting I’d mistakenly flipped.

Until I read the footnote, turns out the UK version of google have turned their lights out to promote Earth Hour, they want everyone to turn their lights off for an hour between 8 and 9pm, guess I’ll have to line up a load of candles?

On this page they stress that silly notion that a lot ppl still bring up saying that setting google to black will conserve energy, and you have to be pretty dumb not to realise that that would only have been true during the CRT era. Hmm, although I wonder if it would also be true of LED backlit screens?

Please Steve Bellend aka Monkey Dancer, keep your grubby mits off our Flickr.

The moment I have to log in with a Passport/Windows Live password is the moment I jump ship to zoomr.  Is it zoomr?

Wonder if you can delete flickr accounts and get some money back from the pro membership?  Doubt it.

Fancy learning the guitar so got my folks to get me one for Christmas.

It’s a Squier Bullet Strat (Squier is Fenders budget brand), guitar snobs would laugh at it but heck, Guitars are so expensive, the cheapest actual Fender Strat is about 400 quid. If you’re only beginning to learn it and don’t even know if anything will come of it you really don’t want to shell that much out.

I’m using my mac as my amp, already got lots of nice guitar amp modeling plug in so all I needed was an adapter. Got the M-Audio Jamlab, I trust M-Audio, they always have good driver support and all that and the Jamlab is their cheapest box with a 1/4″ jack input. For some reason it has what I presume to be a crappy soundcard built in but you can safely ignore it. For some reason you don’t seem to be able to get USB guitar inputs that don’t have a soundcard in there, bit annoying that you’re paying for that element when you don’t need it but hey ho.

Anypoop, playing it is so much fun! I’ve already learnt quite a few chords and it’s going better than I expected considering my itty bitty fingers.

Do you like how my titles never make any sense?

Received an invite to Hulu the other day. Hulu is NBC/Universals answer to iTunes TV Shows service, which brings obvious questions such as did NBC pull out of iTunes because of a pricing dispute with Apple or because they already had their own service planned (because you sure as hell don’t code up a video platform this quick.)

Any poop, there were hints abound that this service wasn’t going to be US only, but hey guess what? It IS!

Which is an absolute insult and I’ll tell you why. Apple offered NBC and the like a way to get a global distribution. A little while before they pulled out, Apple had gotten TV Shows into Europe, so shows like Heroes and The Office could be downloaded in the UK. But now they can’t in any way shape or form because NBC want to go it alone but can’t be arsed to negotiate distribution and rights in Europe.

So due to greed the world (except US… the world is always except US) misses out.

Also, good luck finding a legal way to watch the office on a portable device now.

The other day gaygamer received a video in which gay xbox live had compiled footage of homophobic abuse they had endured over a 24 hour period.

There isn’t really much I can add that hasn’t already been said, but I’ve just now been reminded of it whilst playing WoW. This has literally just been uttered in the guild chat…

[Zugaluga]: i was pissed of in bg
[Ellebasi]: ?
[Zugaluga]: and called them gay
[Ellebasi]: -.-
[Zugaluga]: lots of times xD
[Ellebasi]: -.-
[Zugaluga]: like; “Are your mains allys? Cuz you guys plays like fags”
[Zugaluga]: xD

Unfortutely this is pretty typical in Wow “gay” is probably the most frequently used derogatary term used in the game and you generally can’t escape a session without seeing or hearing it at least a dozon of times.

It can be quite depressing depending on whether or not I’m feeling thick-skinned at that moment.

Far be it from me to write something but.

When I said that my XBox 360 has recovered from its bout of ring of deathiness I spoke too soon. The next day the 3 red flashing lights re-appeared and this time it was permanent.

Thankfully the XBox repair site worked this time and it was pretty easy to instigate a repair. Thing is, you get sod all instructions. They send you an email with one of those address labels with bar codes and what not all over it (no idea what you do if you haven’t a printer) and information on finding a UPS depot (or the number to arrange a pick up). They give no information at all regarding packaging.

Turns out that unlike in the USA microsoft don’t provide a shipping parcel for fucked XBoxes in the UK. I had to trowl the XBox forums to work out what I was supposed to do. It’s ridiculous, there are tons of people on there confused about whether or not to wait for a box to put it in, including some who had waited weeks for nothing.

Microsoft also don’t tell you whether or not you’re supposed to send the whole kit or just the main unit, the forum people’s consensus is that you should send just the unit and even keep the hard drive. So that’s what I’ve done.

Dropped the package at the UPS depot rather than be stuck listening for the door for a pick up dude.  Took an age to figure out how to get into the business park.  Crazy place.

Anyway, does anyone read this blog?

Everything is breaking, now my trusty midi keyboard.

This was like a member of family I’ve had it so long, since around 1993, the infamous “yobcuts” was the first composition made on it.

In 1999 a speaker fell on one of the keys and broke a chunk off it, but that injury only added character.

It died peacefully last week, simply plugged it in to find no sign of life. Opened it up to have a butches inside and it was full of all sorts of dusty crap, and i think it had at one stage have been host to a colony of something insect like.

Anyway, ordered an M-Audio Axiom 49 to replace it. Lord knows when it will arrive, still hasn’t come into stock.

RIP Roland PC-200 MK2 1993-2007

Today I came back from walking eddie, all in a mood for a bit of forza when I had a nasty surprise.

Hey, it’s everyone’s favorite console friend, the ring of death. I was fuming! I really was cursing microsoft for being such a bunch of engineering cowboys.

Went to the xbox site to request a repair, had to register my xbox first (you’d think using it on xbox live would give them a clue), entering serial numbers is always fun, sigh. Anyway, got to the repair part and was given an almighty agreement to, well, agree to. Well I agreed as best I could but the xbox site was having none of it, threw an error in my face and told me to sod off to a phone.

At this stage I was ready to launch a boycott microsoft site, just ‘cos they are so shite at everything they do. Took a photo of the rings to email everyone I play with on there.

After all that, I tried the console once more just in case. Hey it worked! Soooo relieved, I had the impression that the moment you get the 3 red rings your xbox was toast. I guess it’s not quite so straight forward.

They can’t even get the 3 red rings right.

The other day, whilst packing for Somerset I discovered that my iMac’s Superdrive was about to give up the ghost just as it did previously.

So instead of purchasing AppleCare and going through the same rigmarole as last time I’ve bought an external affair.  Who knew that already externalised dvd +- writers were so cheap? (can’t be bothered to work out how you do that plus/minus symbol)  Just 30 quid for a LiteOn 20x affair.

Sure it’s not exactly a looker, just a black dvd writer in a black enclosure but stick it out of sight (I’ve stuck it on top of my equally unsightly amp) and all’s fine.

It’s refreshing also to have a burner that burners at least close to its advertised speed.  The superdrive in my iMac, being a slimline affair is slower than a very slow thing (mollasis or something?), it’s supposed to be 8x but it only actually reaches 8x at the final few seconds.  This new drive, with the same media blasted through a burn.

It seems quiet too.  Woo.  I knew I could trust LineOn, I had one of their drives on the last custom built PC I had a few years ago and it was solid as a rock.

People keep moaning that us Brits are being ripped off with the iPhone but I don’t think they have been doing their sums.

A lot of companies use the classic Clinton Era exchange rate of 1.6 dollars to the pound when pricing goods for the UK market.  Probably because you can’t keep changing the RRP month by month as the US market fluctuates like a mad thing.   So I worked out what Apple used and it seems close to a quite generous 1.74 dollars to the pound. See…

399USD * (1/1.74) = 229.43 + (VAT) = 269.58GBP

Actual Price: 269GBP

For fun, lets have a look what Adobe Creative Suite Web Premium Full would cost if Adobe used the same sums as Apple.

1599USD * (1/1.74) = 919.425 + (VAT) = 1080.32GBP

Actual Price: 1404.12GBP

So knock at Adobes door, not Apples.  (Yes I’m still obsessed with Adobes pricing)