Rambling Restlessly

I think I spelt restlessly wrong. Well spellchecker isn't picking it up so I assume it's correct.

Anyway I'm really really tired. It's been a pretty shit week, started off well with a close friend's birthday bash that went down very well, then it took a nose dive into the crapper the very next morning when I had to work at eight.

Anyway that's irrelevant, this whole post (blog?) is really kind of irrelevant really.

Hmm, let's see, what can we discuss? Maybe a review of the things around me.

Ok, my yellow pencil case. Bought it two years ago and it's still holding together. There's a few holes in it now and the plastic bit that holds the letters was ripped off during a particularly boring class last year, so maybe it'll need a trade in by the end of the year. It's covered in graffiti of course, so it's managed to hold up to various bashings by bored people. The main thing is that the zip's held together, it's probably a record for one of my pencil cases, so it's a reasonably decent brand. Too bad I have no idea what that brand is, but I recommend you purchase any yellow, mid-sized pencil case that appears to be made of vinyl, they last.

My camera, a Fuji Finepix Z1. This is a brilliant little machine. It's tiny so it'll fit in my pocket and with a metal casing it's a tough unit. The screen's nice and large, particularly for a camera of its vintage, and it takes decent photos to boot. It could be a little quicker on boot up and between shots, but the auto-focus is fast and grainy or blurry shots are pretty rare. As is usual for most compact cameras, the flash isn't fantastic, but it gets the job done.

On a side rant, people who complain that their camera "doesn't have enough megapixels" are talking out of their collective arses. If you're not blowing up your pictures to sizes larger than say an A3 sheet (and I'd assume that's the majority of people), you could easily get by with a 4 megapixel camera. My camera is 5.1 megapixels, and it wipes the floor in terms of picture quality when compared to some of today' s cheapy ultra-compacts that boast 8-10 megapixels. Megapixels aren't everything, folks.

Ok, that's the camera.

My speakers. They're a Logitech R-20 2.1 set. The woofer's tiny but surprisngly powerful and the satellites deliver a decent sound at medium volumes. Like all cheap sets (these set me back about 30 bucks), they tend to distort sound at higher volumes, but if you're after a cheap set of speakers you can't go passed these. Hopefully I'll be replacing these soon with some Logitech Z-2300s or the equivalent Altech Lansings, but maybe not for a while since I'm supposed to be saving for a car.

Computer. It's a decent setup, I'm not going to bore you with specs. It's been a project for a while, initially it started as a pretty rubbishy workstation, and slowly it's been built into something a little more beastly. It's bloody loud sometimes though, likely due to poor airflow. My favourite aspect of it are the dual screens. I have a 22 inch widescreen LCD as my primary monitor, and a 19 inch 4:3 LCD as my secondary. It's handy to have MSN, Winamp and other programs I might look at from time to time set up on that screen while I have the browser on the primary.

Alarm clock. I received that for my Confirmation back in 2002. It sat beside my bed for several years until it was eventually replaced by a clock radio. Now it sits on my desk. It used to tell the time but the batteries died and I can't be bothered replacing them. I would rate it as decent, it has a little sticker that lets you work out what time it is in London, New York and things. Useful if you like to know those things before going to bed.

That's about it, I could talk about my lamp, but it's rather unremarkable (even more so than the alarm clock), so I won't bore you with it.

Over and out.

Bass, beats, bus?

I bought new headphones the other day off Ebay. They're a pair those fancy Sennheiser CX500 in-ear headphones. You know the sort that drill all the way down into your earhole, essentially doubling as earplugs. It was interesting catching the train that first morning after a year of using the old ear-buds that came with my Creative Zen.

First there was the weird sensation of having tiny pieces of silicon squelching into your ears and forming a seal - well, in at least one ear. It seems my right ear hole is a teensy bit bigger than my left, probably from numerous operations that went on there a couple of years ago to stop it from going deaf. Of course that means that it's slightly uncomfortable sitting in my right ear, and no matter how far I jam it in (painfully, I might add) the bloody thing won't make that satisfying seal that it does in my left. Ah well, at least the majority of sound from the outside world is blocked out, and that's a good thing, isn't it?

It is a strange sensation, walking down the street without hearing a sound from the outside world. It's a feeling I can compare to being drunk, or extremely tired, there seems to be some sort of disconnection between I can see and what I can hear. Simple things that ground you in the real world, like cars roaring passed or the rumbling of a train, are absent, replaced with the blaring soundtrack of whatever is pumping through my headphones at the time. Obviously this disconnection can be good, since you can then lose yourself in the music (well, most people would, the spasmatic audiophile in me can't help to fiddle with equaliser settings everytime a new song comes on).

On the flip side, it does make my morning treck across several busy roads a little more treacherous, not only can I not hear cars coming, but I'm also off with the fairies and not realising that the fast moving metal thing can cause hurt. It's almost as if I'm associating the sound of an approaching car with danger rather than the actual image of that same car approaching at 50 clicks.

Ah well, at least my life now has a basstastic soundtrack.