I got back from Sydney last night, I spent Wednesday through Friday down there for work. So that meant I spent most of the day of my birthday away from home. It's a first for me, and the day didn't turn out too well.

Other than not getting everything done for work that I wanted to, when I was walking to the train station from the office to go back to the airport it started bucketing down. Although I had an umbrella, that only kept my upper half dry. And carrying an overnight bag and a laptop bag didn't help.

Shoes and pants soggy, i eventually made it to the airport, and felt like getting a Maccas cheeseburger and an Oreo McFlurry to help dry off. That didn't turn out either, as despite people in the line before me getting ice-cream, the machine didn't want to pump out anymore for me. Downtrodden, went to the gate, and was informed there that the flight was running late. 45mins after the scheduled departure time we left.

So my birthday itself was pretty ordinary, but i'm going to make up for it this weekend.

I spent the better half of the last week in Melbourne for work. It was an interesting change of pace, as it's the first time i've done any significant travel for work, and made slightly more tolerable by a successful trip and awesomely cool whether down there last week.

The next few weeks will see me travelling around to all the other offices as we roll out some new software that I am doing the deployment and training for. I can't say i'm really looking forward to it, but he experience will do me good.

This past weekend has also seen me start watching The Big Bang Theory. Many people over the past year have suggested that I start watching it (i'm pretty much it's target geek audience), but I really haven't had any desire to 'get into' another show. However the incessant breaks in the US screening of new episodes of other series meant that I had some spare time to fit it in of late.

I have quite enjoyed it. I don't think it's on the same level as HIMYM, but is still mostly enjoyable nonetheless, probably because of the whole relatable-geek thing.

Of geek news of late is Apple's announcement of the iPad. I have no idea what they were thinking both with the announced device as well as the name. The marketers must have missed MadTV's skit a few years back. I don't get who they aim to target with what essentially is an oversized iPod Touch.

I don't really see a market for such a device that doesn't allow multitasking, has no native USB or flash card connectivity, nor the rather basic ability to display flash in a web browser. The comparatively short battery life also means it pales as an e-book reader when compared to other offerings such as the Kindle. I can imagine all the netbook manufactures breathing a collective sigh of relief. An internet-enabled device like this that can't even play YouTube videos does seem quite useless for the mass market. I really can't imagine many knowledgeable people recommending this device, and I fail to see any benefit at all over other products other than a very high quality screen.

Apple's proved me wrong before, but I struggle to see how they'll do it with this product.

I've been hinting in my recent facebook/Twitter updates that I was having trouble resisting buying computer parts. As it usually goes with me and this sort of thing, my resistance is typically very weak.

It's been almost three years since I put together my current desktop computer (named 'Trogdor'), and i was always planning on doing another build around my birthday this year. Considering the schedule i've got coming up with work around that time, my rationality for being a few weeks early satisfied me enough .

So over the past week I have assembled the parts and built a new computer, which I have named 'The Cannon' (the awesome top exhaist fan reminded me of a cannon's barrel). Like I did similarly with 'Trogdor', i also plan to put a cheap decal on the side of it, hopefully in the shape of Arsenal's cannon.

Here's what makes The Cannon awesome:
- Antec Nine Hundred Two case
- Antec True Power New 650W power supply
- Gigabyte EX58A-UD7 motherboard
- Intel i7 950 processor
- Zalman CNPS9900LED CPU cooler
- 12GB G.Skill DDR3-12800 RAM
- Gigabyte ATI HD5870 graphics card
- WD 1TB Black, and 1TB Green hard drives
- Pioneer Blu-ray combo drive

Pictures of the build can also been seen in the Gallery.

The build itself was a painful process, literally. The main PITA part was attempting to plug in the CPU power rail, mainly because of the Zalman CPU heatsink which is basically a shredder. I lightly sliced a layer or two of skin attaching the heatsink itself when it was out of the case, but after the motherboard was in the case, in attempting to attach the CPU power rail (which was just 10cm too short to make it easy), i cut myself multiple times on both my hands on the darn thing. Blood and band-aids ensued. But it looks cool so that makes it worth it .

Everything else pretty much went to plan, it booted correctly first time, which is nothing to complain about.

I can't wait to actually play some decent games on this thing, i'm really looking forward to Bioshock 2 and Supreme Commander 2.

My week off was full of lazy awesomeness. I can proudly state that I truly took this week off from reality and the rest of the world.

For the most, i spent it playing games that i've been wanting to play through again for ages. These included both Call of Duty: Modern Warfare games and Bioshock.

I said back in November when MW2 came out that I wanted to play through both games back-to-back to get a more objective opinion of MW2, and now after having done that, it reinforces my original opinion. MW2 is noticeably poorer in storyline believability, gameplay, and plain fun. I'm not really sure how they could have gone so wrong, but an overreaching storyline and passing off a console port as a PC game might be good starting points. "Not balanced for lean"?, yeah right.

Following those, I replayed Bioshock, which i thought was a good idea considering its sequel is also coming out in February. It was fantastic playing it through again. It's a reasonably long game, and the experience is so immersive, and truly suspenseful even the second time around. Great plot, fantastic execution. I'll forever associate the song "Beyond the sea" with the game in a very haunting way. It, along with HL2 and MW1 would have to be among the best FPSs in the past 5 years.

Like MW, it's hard to imagine how they're going to come close to matching it with the upcoming sequel.

So it's back to reality with work tomorrow .

I've had my current laptop (named 'Phantom') since February 2004. That makes it almost 6 years old, and since i got it it's been a wonderful servant over the years. It's a HP nx7010 business-line laptop, and basically the only thing i've done to it over the years is upgrade the memory.

Although the laptop is still mostly functional, i've been thinking it's about time to let it go. It doesn't have a DVD burner (it only has a DVD combo drive) and only has 'b' wireless networking. In the past 12 months the optical drive has stopped working altogether, and the battery has also stopped working so the computer won't run without a power lead.

A combination of these things, as well as others (such as the old Pentium M processor struggling to keep up with the latest Flash versions for online video etc), meant that we finally bit the bullet and got a new laptop.

As you can imagine, i'm really quite picky with these things. There are a few deal-breakers with laptops and my personal use: my ideal screen size for the intended use is a 15.4 inch widescreen, and I hate glossy screens with a vengeance. Glossy screens are the devil as far as i'm concerned! Unfortunately that single criteria eliminates the majority of laptops.

The other thing that really annoys me with recent laptop fashion is manufactures trying to cram in a numeric keypad onto the keyboard of on 15.4 inch laptops. The problem i have with that is that it offsets the main part of the keyboard to one side of the laptop, which just seems crazy to me. So that criteria also eliminates most retail-line 15.4 inch laptops.

So my choices were rather limited, and the after some research, one of the only models that suited me within a acceptable price-range and specification was the Dell Vostro 1520: matte screen, normal keyboard, pretty good specs.

So we ordered it before Christmas and it arrived this week. It's a decent machine without being anything special. I specced it out with a Intel C2D P8600 2.4GHz processor, 4GB RAM, Nvidia 9300M graphics, and Windows 7. There's a few annoying things about it: i think they've been a bit paranoid with the cooling settings in the BIOS (the fan is on almost all the time blowing out mostly cool air), and surprisingly the USB ports on the thing are some of the tightest i've ever come across. But those are relatively minor and I can live with them.

I was wanting to name the new laptop something starting with a V (from the model name (Vostro)), and after watching Underworld again earlier this week, we settled on the name 'Viktor' after Bill Nighy's awesome character from the film series.

With the arrival of this computer, it's the first time i've had a decent play with the full release of Windows 7. It's a fairly solid OS, but i really don't like the implementation of the task bar. For me the 'pinning' is very unintuitive, I much prefer the older 'quick launch' method for really commonly used programs. I do like the features of of the 'Peek' from the window previews, the jump-lists, and being able to drag and drop to reorder program groups on the taskbar (but why they didn't echo that functionality for the windows within the program groups is beyond me). Plus it would be good if you could choose certain windows/applications to group/ungroup/degroup them on the taskbar. I might look around for an add-in similar to Taskbar Shuffle for that...

Anywho, it's going to be sad to say goodbye to the old Phantom, but it's had a long and good life.