Happy Eid, was hoping it would happen on Monday, but Hajj took place yesterday so it is today. Though different parts of country/world are celebrating on different days. We are off to East London to Khizer’s place for a family get together. Should be fun.
Monthly Archive for December, 2006
Watched Denzel’s latest film Deja Vu, which I quite liked. An intelligent thriller with an interesting take on time travel. Some of the aspects were dead obvious however it is still a great film. Denzel plays the lead well as expected and the supporting cast is made up from credible actors including Adam Goldberg and Val Kilmer, however they don’t really do anything challenging. The female lead is played by Paula Pattton who I hope we will be seeing more of in future.
Hit the post-christmas sales today, didn’t buy all that much. A couple of shirts, didn’t find any cool shoes. Regent Street and Oxford Street were busy as expected, however it was not crazy like before christmas, guess people were still away for the holidays. Which is good because I hate it when it is mental.
There is a great chinese buffet resturant off Tottenenham Court Road which I used to go to a lot. I don’t think I have mentioned it much. What sets it apart is that they are totally veggie, and all the meat dishes actually use soya. For a £5 a head is really good value. I can’t remember the name which is not helpul. Will post about it again at some point.
Managed to get another stick of slower memory and a new hard disk for the new computer. Haven’t tried it yet though I have a bad feeling that the board or CPU is at fault. The power supply seems okay since everything powers up ok. Should really get another supply and eliminate that. However that would mean taking the Mediacenter apart, which I’m not about to do.
What is it with PCs, why can’t they just work after putting them together. There is always some niggle. Why haven’t the PC Standards people made the pinouts for the switches and LEDs standard, and combined into a single connector. If you open up a Mac Tower they have molex connectors for the LEDs and Power Button, they can only go on one way!
I went to the Computer Fair today with Mati, since he was building a new gaming rig for himself. He went a bit crazy, my budget was a little lower so I just went for an Asus board and a Core Duo 2 6400 and 1GB of DDR2 RAM. We got a good price because we were buying quite a few bits and pieces. Mati went for a totally new system including case. Were as my silent case which I bought years will do the job just fine.
It looks like I might have a bad board or memory, so I will go get some different memory on tuesday now, since everything is closed over christmas.
Have been engrossed in Zelda : The Twilight Princess for the last couple of days. Nintendo have been getting a lot of slack for the fact that this game was clearly developed for the GameCube, and then moved to the Wii. However ardent Zelda fans will not be bothered by this. The game still looks amazing, though I should point out that I have not seen the GameCube version running.
I love the control mechanism with the Wii-mote, so far I have only got a couple of weapons about 10 hours into the game. The introductory part is over and I’m in the first temple. Been looking at getting other games and I can’t see any other decent games in the Wii launch line up. The next batch of release are happing mid-Jan and of that bunch on WarioWare looks any good. I hope Nintendo gets behind 3rd party developers, because waiting for just Nintendo titles could get a little annoying. I still need to get another nunchuck and perhaps have a look at the Virtual Console.
Was heading into London with Waj this afternoon to pick up a USB hard drive and get my PS2 Laser fixed when I got another call from HMV. Telling me that I can collect my unit today at any time. Yipee, the news made my weekend. So I picked up my console and Zelda only to find that they are totally out of accessories. So I tripped all over London looking for another Wii-mote and Nunchuck, fortuntely Game in High Street Kensington had 23 controllers and 20 copies of WiiPlay left so I got Wii-play since it comes bundled with a controller. Nun-chucks were not available. Apparently they never got any. They also had classic controllers, however I opted to leave those for the time being.
The minute I got home we hooked up the unit and started on Wii-Play. As for the Wii first impressions are that it rocks, the controll system works pretty well, though I can see how people are breaking their flat panel tvs. Wii sports is great, will have people over the next couple of weeks giving it a go. The Wii personality features is pretty cool. Not sure if these are able to go online in some fashion. No talk client or comms of any sort in the system panel. Also the Weather and News apps are not active yet. As for Zelda that is going to be a seperate post.
Got a call from HMV not so long ago telling me that I won’t be getting my Wii unit tomorrow. Was hoping that I would make the initial allocation, but looks like I have to wait till next week. People have already started queing for the 200 un-allocated units being kept for the launch event tonight at HMV. Was planning on picking my unit uo today as well since the Troc branch is open till midnight anyway.
Got back a couple of hours ago from visiting Bournemouth, which is where Julian was having his stag weekend. Had a great time and met some cool people. The main activites for the weekend were Karting and Quad Biking. Did ok at the Karting, my team managed to come third. As for the Quad biking I’m still in pain. Managed to fly of my bike, and bang up my left arm pretty badly. Just typing this post is killing me, have taken loads of pain killers.
