June 26, 2008
Strange News From Bree
Well the lack of posts isn't because I've been lazy, or haven't been doing anything. It's just I haven't been doing anything particularly interesting. I've been working a lot prior to my holiday next week, up to 14 hours per day.
However, I have been to up a couple of things outside of work, my morning coffees and visiting the supermarket. The supermarket in itself having been interesting, learning to battle the self-checkout machines that really don't like reusable shopping bags. However I've since decided the last machine on the left has dodgy scales and is best to be avoided. These machines if you've never used them weigh your groceries as you bag them and compare it to the barcode you just scanned, if the two don't match it gets rather shitty. The problem is the shopping bag weights just a faction more than plastic ones. Anyway, they have two areas you put your stuff on left, scan it in the middle and bag on the right (the bottom of bagging area is a scale) once you're bagged all your stuff you put your money in the machine and go, when it works it saves you heaps of time, when it doesn't, well it's still faster than going in the normal checkout!
The other night about week or so ago I went out for drinks with my flatmates, Marco (Italian) and Andrew (Australian). Now drinking out around here is expensive, it only other time I drank out (at an actual bar that is, since you can drink whatever you like in the street and most people do) it worked out at about $14 kiwi for bottle of Becks beer. Since then I haven't drank out for obviously reasons! However this time we went where the Italians go, to this little deli on the other side of town. We were able to sit at a table and have nice bottle of wine each, cheeses and bread. Sum total for the evening, $7 kiwi!! Try getting a cheese platter and 3 bottles of good wine at a pub in New Zealand for 20 bucks. So yeah, moral of the story avoid the places with tourist prices, which are usually 5-6x what the same item would be at the supermarket.
I also watched the first game of the 2008 historic soccer the weekend before last, the Calcio Storico Fiorentino. The game is more like a cross between rugby, wrestling and bare-knuckle boxing than soccer in reality though. There are very few rules, and as long as the refs aren't watching beating the living crap out of your opponent is perfectly ok. You score a goal by throwing the ball into the long net at the end, however if you miss it's ½ a point against your team. The game I watched was our team Santa Croce (azzurri / blue) vs. Santo Spirito (bianchi / white) which we won 5 to 3½. The final yesterday was between Santa Croce and Santa Maria Novella (rossi / red), and unfortunately we lost 8 to 5½ I believe. There are actually four teams, with the fourth being San Giovanni (verdi / green) who played Santa Maria Novella the day after the game I attended, these being the four ancient city quarters.
Yesterday was also a public holiday over here, the Feast Day of San Giovanni (St. John the Baptist), so pretty much everything was closed so I found out after work (after walking 20 minutes to the supermarket in 35° heat, ug!). I didn't go to the final because I needed to finish as much work as possible this before my break. Though in retrospect, I probably should of, nothing was open and it was noisy as hell, with half of Florence outside my window, helicopters swirling low overhead and all the drums and church bells ringing—made concentrating a bit difficult!
Last night for the public holiday there was also the most impressive fireworks I have seen in my life. Much better than even the Easter ones at the Duomo last year. We were standing on Ponte Grazie (the bridge closest to home, with most of the rest of the city as you can see in the photo below! lol) and the fireworks were going off out of over the water in front of us. However the best part was as they were expanding out, they were coming towards you. It was like you could almost reach out a touch them, they looked that close. There were several that exploded with one colour, then flew out further and exploded again, and then did this again. And also ones that made shapes like the outlines of crosses and so forth. Pretty damn impressive, the display went on continuously for 40 minutes as well.
Great hall locations: Italy , Travel | Talked about by: 0 Fraggles
June 21, 2008
High Quality Album Art
I'm really loving this site that I found today, it's high resolution art album for really picky people like myself. Beautiful high quality scans, carefully retouched and colour corrected. So far it's the best album art I've found, and I've been looking for a while. My FLAC's and MP3's are now looking better than ever.
Great hall locations: Music , iPod | Talked about by: 0 Fraggles
June 15, 2008
MP3 Repacker
I've been working with MP3 stuff for over 10 years now, so it's not often you come across a new program or utility you hadn't heard of before. However I found something new today, possibly because I hadn't thought to look for something like this before. It's a program that processes 320 CBR files and makes them smaller VBR files losslessly by reducing the frame-sizes where they have just padding (the data doesn't fill the whole 320). Visit this Hydrogenaudio Thread for more.
Great hall locations: Music , iPod | Talked about by: 0 Fraggles
June 10, 2008
iPhone 3G
After the initial oul, I want, it's more of a nice but not really. 3G and GPS are cool, as is the geotagging of photos taken on the phone, however the camera still isn't of high enough resolution to be useful and I'm somewhat doubtful of how good the GPS will be. The GPS on my friends' Nokia N95 is a bit bollocks, and I doubt either would compare the external datalogger I've bought, since it costs half the price of an iPhone. Like most things dedicated devices usually work better, even if slightly less convenient.
Great hall locations: Computing | Talked about by: 0 Fraggles
Warfare
There is a battle going on here, unforeseen in planning and blood is being split on both sides. Something I never considered, the war against the mosquitos. It appears that due to our proximity to the river, these little buggers are carrying out planned night-time rides in ours and possibility our neighbours' homes. Now these are not your normal everyday mosquitos, oh no no, theses are evil blood sucking beasties of the night. And if your hands and arms are not available will gladly bite you on the face, which is the reason for me sporting a big welt below my left eye the other day. Last night there was seven, count them seven sitting above my bed, which I squished. In the morning it looked like someone had been shot, there was blood splatters everywhere. Tonight I'm trying one of those mosquito repellents you plug into the wall, they stink but I really need a good nights sleep. Got a bit of RSI in my hands, left one had swelling yesterday, so quality sleep is now a priority.
Great hall locations: Italy | Talked about by: 0 Fraggles
June 3, 2008
Windows XP Service Pack 3
Well I finally decided to upgrade this morning, being overseas without all my software and stuff I had been deliberating for a few weeks. However, after trying the service pack in a virtual machine and hearing about speed improvements, I took the plunge.
The update went smoothly, and the only problem so far is the virtual pc's networking has lost the plot again, but that's not too difficult to fix. The speed improvement is definitely real though, during Windows boot the loading progressbar doesn't even get across once now and the desktop is fully loaded in about 5 seconds after logon, which is a noticeable improvement over SP2.
Now with Firefox 3 only a few weeks away, much better productivity appears to be on the the horizon :-)
UPDATE: There appears to be an updated version of Virtual PC 2007 for XP SP3, read about it here.
Great hall locations: Computing | Talked about by: 0 Fraggles
