It’s currently snowing here in Hastings, and what I’ve been looking forward to most about the snow is seeing my Puppy Benny’s first encounter with the white stuff. In the last half an hour we put him out for his late night pee. At first he was reluctant to go out, possibly because he wasn’t sure what the hell was laying on the ground. His first reaction – like any other dog – was to start eating all he could get hold of, but he still wouldn’t go out in it fully. We cleared a path for him and he soon got his bravery back as he went to the top of the garden and within seconds was charging back and forth sending the snow flying.

By the time he came back in so much snow had got caught in his long fur he was practically a snow dog!

The open swim was drawing to a close. With about 10 minutes left to run, the girls who were doing Aquafit afterwards started to walk into the area. Amongst these I spotted two girls I went to school with, girls that I didn’t really like and I’m pretty sure weren’t too keen on me. Anyway, because we’re all grown up now and supposedly ‘mature’, I find that you end up speaking to people from school even if you didn’t really know them. The socially awkward me wanted to avoid this at all costs. But oh no, I was at the far end of the pool and needed to get back.

The options available to me were thus:

1. Get out of the pool and walk back, bumping straight into them.
2. Swim back slowly (note: I HATE people watching me swim, I’m the guy that starts swimming when the lifeguard’s heads are turned… yes, it’s that bad!)
3. SWIM LIKE HELL!

Can you guess which option I picked? Yup, you’re correct, it was the latter. I swam back in a quasi-Olympic Swimmer manner, I got almost half way down the pool and was thinking to myself ‘hey, this is going pretty well, my asthma hasn’t kicked in, I haven’t swallowed and chocked on water and I’m maintaining a good speed’. Meanwhile my left leg was like LEG CRAMP MOTHER FUCKER!!! I came to a standstill as my muscle continued to pull… right in front of them, I didn’t look up. I continued to walk the rest of the way with my head down while in complete agony.

The moral of this story? It pays to be nice and just say a quick hello and get the hell out of there.

Ok, ok, the placeholder entry is gone. The reason why this wasn’t posted on the day was because of a late night online Mario Kart 7 session with the good folks on GRCade! Anyway, here’s what I got for Christmas.

Nikon D5100 Digital SLR Camera (from Moi!)
Mario Kart 7 (3DS)
Tetris (3DS)
American Dad – Season 5
Family Guy – Season 11
Robot Chicken – Season 4
Robot Chicken – Star Wars Episode 3
The Walking Dead Graphic Novel – Vol. 1 – 5
Family Guy slippers
Pack of white T-Shirts
Gloves
Bucket of Malteasers
70cl bottle of Jack Daniels

Not a bad haul this year, yes, I said haul. I will sleep soundly tonight knowing I’ve made someone rage for calling it that!

Sam and the twenty, what could possibly go wrong?

Two and a half hours later, the driver is still sorting through change – doesn’t have any notes. Oh nooooooooo! I end up buying Sam’s ticket (got paid back later, cheers!)

Still has the twenty AND a bus ticket, well done!

SHAKE HARDER BOOOOOY!!!

What the image fails to show is I’m pending downloads of trials for Burnout Crash and Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike Online Edition. BT are going to love me tonight!

Bonus Step: Try not to trip over the craters.

… well, kinda.

After a bit of indecision last week week, I have now bought myself a Mac Mini. It’s a very basic Mac Desktop that comes without the mouse/keyboard/mirror… I mean, monitor. It’s still pretty pricey, but then that’s Apple for you.

The unit is a very small unibody device, that is just a little bit bigger than a router. It has a Super Drive around the front and a variety of connectors around the back. I have already opened up the Mac Mini to take a look at its innards, if I do need to upgrade the RAM, it will be an incredibly easy process. Which is more than can be said for other Macs (from what I’ve read).

So far I am pretty impressed, while the machine is not overly fast in the CPU department (2.4GHZ Intel Core2Duo) it does the job nicely. So far I’ve only been looking through the various bits of software and familiarising myself with Snow Leopard. Eventually I will be playing with Boot Camp and Parallels for virtualisation of Windows, the latter will be useful for work, and it will also be nice to have an additional Operating System that is NOT Windows on my CV!

I currently have my Mac Mini connected to an old 19 inch monitor through a DVI-D connection and that’s it. The Mini is wirelessly connected to my network and can access everything on my PC (which excuses the small 320GB HDD for me), there is no keyboard and mouse as I’m currently sharing my PC’s Keyboard and Mouse through a piece of software called Synergy.

With this software installed and my PC set up as the server, it means I can move my mouse cursor seamlessly between the two, and the keyboard switches to the machine that is being used at the time. It also allows me to copy the contents of my clipboard between both machines, which is pretty nifty.

So far I’m a happy bunny, considering an upgrade to Lion (lamest OS name ever?) next month.

Here’s the demo video I made while searching for gold.

Sure it’s cheating, but less time digging, more time building cool stuff!

A few weeks ago at work I got to play with a Mac for the first time and was pretty impressed with it. This has given me a bit of motivation to get a Mac of my own to play with so I can familarise myself with the set up and also hopefully provide better support for the system in future. I’ve been looking at the Apple store quite a bit since then and the first conclusion I came to is naturally it’s all a bit expensive… I mean great value of money, as corrected by the Mac Fanboy I met the other day.

The entry level Mac is £999 (21.5 inch screen) and a Macbook with a decent sized screen is £1500. This is a bit much for me, the lowest Mac is a fairly good price but I really don’t want the additional screen on my desk as I’d have to keep moving things around each time I wanted to print something, which will get annoying really quickly. And NO, I’m not getting rid of my PC as I actually want to play games at maxed out settings!

After much looking around I’ve started to look into the Mac Mini – this is basically a stripped down standard Mac but with no screen, keyboard or mouse. I believe it will suit my needs nicely as I can connect it to the second port on my monitor and let Synergy do the rest. I don’t need a hugely powerful processor, graphics, or a hard drive. The only thing that has got me torn is do I settle for 2GB RAM or pump it up to 4GB?  If I increase the RAM, it’ll set me back £650 and that’s with staff discount deducted. What do you guys think?