It’s now 2012 and has been for a few days.
Christmas has been brilliant, i’ve been playing with my Apple TV lots and generally taking time to be a geek with my own gadgets.
New Years eve was fantastic, we spent it in Newquay with a couple of good friends.
See Below for our cool outfits!
“If you’ve got nothing good to say then say nothing at all” Well I’ve thought of something, so I’ll say it.
This year has flown by.
For example, it’s almost 2 weeks since we went to London and it feels like yesterday. I can’t believe it’s 1 year since we were dancing to Black Eyed Peas – The Time/ Dirty Bit, for the last works do. This weekend it’s the Custard Christmas Do and we are getting some VIP treatment at NEC.
It’s about time I reflect back on the year and see what gadgets I’ve had (and usually blogged about)
Just read back through my Blog and you’ll see the erratic gadget peaks and troughs for me over the past few years. Things are back on track now though and I feel much less ridiculous as I’m no longer pulling an Acer Laptop out of my Laptop bag and a Non-iPhone out of my Pocket. And now i’m writing notes on and iPad 2 and not a piece of paper. (As an IT Professional, it’s equivalent to my ‘mate-in-the-trade’ using a Manual Hand Drill, Christmas Cracker Screw Drivers and a hacksaw from the Pound Shop) as he pointed out.
I’ve noticed I’ve failed to blog about the fact I now have a MacBook Pro 13″ 2.8GHz i7 with 128GB SSD. An optical bay drive converter is on it’s way. This will allow me to fit a 2nd Hard Drive so I can drop all of my Music Samples for Ableton and Virtual Machines for Work on it. Bye-Bye Battery Life!
On a side note… The other week I bought a 4x Pack of Crabbies Alcoholic Ginger Beer and they where the 500ml(ish) real ale size bottles for £5.50. Yesterday I was in Tesco and I bought these 4 for £5.50, as it was 50p cheaper than buying them as 4 500ml singles. I got them home and found they had been downsized to little 330ml bottles which were supped up in 1 ginger fuelled sneeze.
I could of bought 4x Ginger Joes for the same price!! Now there are TV adverts for the stuff, it would be unfortunate if you where Ginger and called Joe.
Digression Adjourned
There is a Christmas tree at St Pancras station in London, which is so tall it breaches the upper floor.
Well i’ve scrapped the notion of a paid hosted virtual server and now my blog is hosted in-house, the way it should be – on a glorified PC plugged into a fat internet connection.
Along the way I’ve discovered some pretty cool things I didn’t realise (yet) for example, all the new Microsoft Web Platform stuff. I’ve been using Control Panel based software for the past couple of years, so the last time I setup a server from scratch I had to manually install PHP, MySQL, etc and link it all together.
With Web Platform, I just ticked to install IIS on my windows install then installed my desired apps from the Web Platform. It felt a bit like installing Apps from the App Store on my Mac, iPad or iPhone. It wasn’t quite a slick though.
The App Store feel goes away once it’s setup and you have to start getting your hands dirty with editing the php.ini file, hardening your security, importing your databases, etc. I administer IIS on a day-to-day basis so it’s no biggie but you it certainly isn’t as click-n-go as if Apple offered something similar (which they may do on xserve but I haven’t got to play with one)
So the media server is hopped up and the next project is home automation… Next year though
On a side note, My Steve Jobs book makes me want to go and solder some circuit boards in the garage, however two factors stopping me are:
a) It’s too cold in the garage now
b) I have many pre-soldered and very much working gadgets to play with in the house
Well, winter is coming and the garage is very cold, even with it’s insulation. It’s a little anti-social going in there every evening as well, so I’ve put up some work tops and moved “enough” gear into it. There is a cast iron radiator next to me and a mac in front of me.
The Rokits are too big for in this pokey room so I’ve just got the little M-AUDIO BX5a on Mopads and they are just fine. I’m mainly just browsing the web, working with photos, making slideshows. But I’ve had a bit of a play with Ableton Live this weekend, too keep in practice.
I’ve just installed a new theme on the site and finally got round to activating some of the new features i’ve installed.
You will notice a list of my 10 most recent tweets on the right hand side.
I plan to add more features over time, without slowing the site down.
Keep coming back and checking out what’s new.