trials of the green machine

A quick update on the monstrous alienware and it's rebuilds. As you may recall, I wasn't that happy with Vista- it made the machine run at least three times slower than it ought, primarily because nVidia weren't able to develop a driver for the SLI video cards. That would be hard, since the video scuttles around the bus encoded, making splitting it to two video cards a tricky proposition.

So over a weekend, and on the phone to alienware help desk, and borrowing a work licensed XP pro install disk I re partitioned the disks (keeping them as Raid 0) and put on XP and Vista. And then, a week later, I borked XP, so needed a full reinstall, so lost the dual boot. So for a month I've only had XP. And guess how much I have missed Vista.

Now, my only gripe is that the little alien eyes on the back of the lid have stopped lighting up. Totally non- critical, but significant- in that they signify 'look at me, I'm a spanky super machine' and they've gone out. Probably a loose connection or something. Which isn't a great sign either.

On the other had, everything runs like a greased weasel, including every sim and FPS i can throw at it. Only thing I want is faster network, cos that's the lag on 2nd life. Really should get back in there too- that was, after all, the main justification for the thing.

Eventually, gaping void will describe your life

And today I found it happened to me...

tv unfestival 2007

reading the wall, originally uploaded by meeware1.

My sincere thanks to the BBC backstage crew for inviting me to help out at the inaugural TV Unfestival. I know this will grow and grow over the years, and will be instrumental in the transformation of TV into whatver comes next- so big up to Ian, Matthew and Sarah for all their tremendous efforts to bring it together.

And thanks to my liver and kidneys for surviving the Edinburgh licensing hours.

Fire Poi in the wet

Fire Poi, originally uploaded by meeware1.

This is well overdue, and Rowan has a much better blog on the subject, but I am happy with the photo, so thought it fit to blog. Weekend before last Rowan double blagged us into the crew camping at the Green man festival for free- she wrote it up for an online review, so justifying the tickets, and we camped quickly in the driving rain to get a place in the crew field.
The festival was excellent and I can recommend it highly- for us it was a classic Rowan and Ant andventure and very welcome in this long wet summer. It did rain, lots, but inspite of it all we had two brilliant days of music and daze in the gorgeous Powys hills.
Highlight- My Brightest Diamond- I urge one and all to seek out these wonderful people. Also, I discovered MONSTERISM as a musical genre, and have since failed to find any trace- think bongo syncopated prog funk. YEAH BABY!