The life and times of Chris Jones

It’s February. Possibly the worst month of the year, because it doesn’t have the Christmas/Holiday stories that frequented January, or the promises of a new year, or any bank holidays. The same goes for March. April is when the shit hits the fan. Budgets renew themselves and a new Quarter begins, meaning loads of new films and games to immerse myself in.

Besides this, a few interesting things happened. Firstly, I went for a drive to the peak district, over Snake pass, however got lost, and turned up in Sheffield. I discovered there are trams there. It snowed while I was there, and all of Monday. Not as deep as other parts of the country, but enough to excite everyone.

My year of AA membership is over, and has been renewed. Hard to think that a year ago next month I drove my car into a sizeable mass of water, with no working engine or electronics, and no phone coverage, with a three mile walk back to Llangollen, or over the hill to Coedpoeth while drenched. Fortunately the nice AA man who came to fix the other car fixed mine too, prompting me to join that evening.

Thinking back, I was a complete arse at driving the Rover. Trying to look cool by speeding over blind hills on single track roads and around bends in complete darkness, cutting people off and running through amber traffic lights when they had actually gone red. Thank <your deity here> that I changed my ways, else I might be dead, or worse, without a license. It’s now been almost a year since my last incident in any way, although on Tuesday I did a rather long skid on a roundabout in the ice. Skidded at a chicane, too. Nasty stuff, ice, but still gave a cheap thrill.

However, tonight I drove my dad’s Red 2008 Mondeo. It was totally illegal, of course, having no permission from the owner (a leasing company), but I had my dad in the car, so I didn’t go joy riding or anything like that, just drove it back from town.

This weekend we go to Edinburgh for two nights, to watch the Six Nations game Wales vs Scotland. The last time I went was around the same time two years ago, I remember because the Rover was having major issues with the HT leads, halving engine power, and couldn’t drive it. We also lost spectacularly. However, after last years Six Nations win, we are going again this year, except this time I shall be driving my car up there with us all in.

It’ll snow again tonight and tomorrow, hopefully enough so work may send us home. I’ll turn up if I can, because I want to keep 100% attendance this year (I had a single day off last year, and so didn’t get the usual end of year £100 for full attendance.)

Tonight, I have been experimenting with dual booting Windows 7! I am very impressed with it initially, and believe it to be a huge improvement over Vista, but I hope the anti-trust laws against Microsoft defaulting to Internet Explorer are enforced before it’s release, so I don’t have to put up with it ever again.

The Computer score would be higher than Vista’s if it weren’t for the e-SATA drive I used to install it on giving it a 3.0. I recently bought two sticks of 1GB RAM, apparently one of the fastest DDR2 sticks available, which has greatly improved GTAIV, although for some reason, the more memory added to Vista, the worse the Memory subscore gets, where this is fixed in Windows 7.

Hopefully I can get rid of the e-SATA drive once I buy a 1TB SATA drive, my next purchase. After that, it’s another high end Graphics card, as my now 2 year old 8800GTS is chugging away on the newer games.

Until next time, Cheerio!

I was growing bored with the cluttered appearance of my old desk, so went on down to IKEA, and bought a table top and four legs, and got a new one.

Here it is.

Now, all that is required is to neaten up the rest of the room. I have too much large furniture in here, all of it is empty, really.

Just cos I can.

BEFORE

AFTER

Isn’t that tidier? It runs cooler, and is almost silent due to the speed of the large fans being lower than smaller fans, so there is less vibration.