What is starting to bother me is my gradually increasing intolerance.

This weekend for example, it’s air fresheners, god help me, but I’m not good with air fresheners anyway, a fair number of them hurt my nose, seriously, and not in a “I press the button with my nose”  kinda way, especially those “neutralisers” that you can’t smell but make your nose want to bleed!

To be honest, half the time I’d rather smell boiled cabbage than some marketing persons idea of what the country should smell of. I live in the country. It sometimes smells of cow and pig shit, sometimes of rain on dry soil (a beautific smell), and usually of nothing in particular. It doesn’t smell like those wierd yellow cubes you pee on in urinals, it doesn’t smell of roses or pine either. Even pine forests don’t smell of pine!

Anyway, the latest thing in shoving unwanted smells up your nose are automatic air fresheners that you can leave on all the time and every five minutes they will willingly add some more unwanted stink into your living area. MMMmmm!

But better even than this – Motion sensors! Fuck me! The marketing people are saying that People smell! Well yeah, but they think we smell bad enough to want to cover it up! If I smell bad then that’s a personal issue that I’d really like to be told about. Really. I know that on occasion I’ve been known to wear clothing that is, shall we say, a little contaminated. Horse piss is not a smell even I’m good with. But tell me please and I’ll fix it! FFS!

Anyway, so motion sensors on air fresheners, sole purpose: to make your house smell “nicer” everytime someone moves.

Hah, not so benevolent. Recently I went to a house with one of these sat on the landing window sill. I didn’t know it was there and fallumped my way up the stairs to, you know, visit the bathroom when I heard a little mechanical rrrpffrp. I turned my head towards the strange noise just in time for the shitty little thing to go squirt! Right in my fucking eye!

So that’s an air freshener, an automatic air freshener, an automatic air freshener with motion senser placed just so it can spray the ear of anyone who goes upstairs. Except for me. Me – I get a special eye-squirt.

Ever since then I’ve been hypersensitive (in a mental sense) to these bloody devices, now when I hear a rrrpfft I twitch like Inspector Dreyfus.

Me + airfresheners = NO.

God knows what I’m going to do when I get old and smelly(er). Though I’m gonna be out on the street shouting at busses by then, I guess so the whole problem will be moot.

I somehow doubt the actors are turning down jobs outside the genre. And I’ve been checking up on imdb, it is NOT just because I only watch this shit.

Mind you it’s not just the application of money. In my humble and humongously ignorant opinion what these landscape architects did was done in two parts.

First off they re-arranged the landscape, moving drives, paths, adding ponds and lakes, even moving rivers if they felt like it. The end result is a view that is generally pleasing and in effect making the landscape match a pre-concieved mental, or possibly, physical image. Very impressive and all achieved in a relatively short time.

But for me this dwarfs in comprehension to what they did with the trees. After the landscape is arranged they decide where to plant trees, and what species should be grown. It doesn’t sound very impressive, a bit like arranging your flowerbed. But for me the impressive bit is that the outcome of this kind of work is long-term. It’s unlikely that any of the patrons that commisioned these works lived to see the grandeur of their plans come to realization. I’ve been to parks where the form, shape and arrangement of hundred year old trees is so much an intergral part of the scene that it’s hard to imagine how it looked when these were all just saplings.

It takes not just incredible sums of money but also an almost arrogant confidence in your family’s continued possesion of the property to commision this work.

It gives me a strange conflict of feelings, on the one hand I can see and almost phyically feel the natural/artifical beauty resonating with my (for want of a better word) soul. On the other hand I can’t forget it was all created by degrees of social inequality on a scale almost too large to notice.

It makes me think.

–

Country parks… I love country parks, I hardly ever visit them. I love them because they give the opportunity for townsfolk of almost all capabilites to experience something of the country. I also love them because they act as magnets for the majority of townies that want to “get away” to the country, and (here’s the massively selfish bit) it keeps them out of the real country! There! I’ve said it! I’m not proud, just selfish.

I mean, we (my closest family) have a saying about people “picnicing in the car-park”. Haven’t you ever noticed that the farther away from the car-park you get the fewer people there are? I mean, fifteen minutes walk and you’re damn near on your own! Let them have their BBQ’s in the car-park and give me leave to go for a 2 hour walk.

It has taken me a good inattentive couple of months, though really that was just the first third of the book. I finished the rest off in a couple of train days and it’s much more fun when read at the intended speed.

It’s a good book, a fantasy romance with an arse kicking heroine who doesn’t really like kicking arses. Though that’s really badly oversimplifying it. Kristen has a slightly unusual writing style but it is very readable.  I recommend it. Definitely not trash. I’ll be reading her next one.

Rating B+ to A.

I tried to upgrade to 64 bit Windows 7 (taking a backup using the bundled Samsung Recovery Solution first). It didn’t go so bad, there was a difficult period getting the network reconnected because I hadn’t already downloaded the appropriate driver, and couldn’t download it because….. I didn’t have the network drivers! Doh! Anyway, once I had the network drivers I tried to get a 64 bit driver for the video card, and that’s where it all went wrong. The 64bit driver package on the Samsung site refused to install because it said I wasn’t using the right Operating system, the bitmap also said something about “32 bit”. Samsung’s bundled update manager also failed and locked trying to install this driver. Bad Samsung! (I think they ahve since fixed this problem) 

So I called it and restored the old 32 bit Windows 7 using the provided Recovery solution available from the boot menu. Much to my amazement, 30 minutes later I was right back where I started, no problems at all! Kudos to Samsung for making a potential nightmare scenario painless. Kudos away from Samsung though for putting a duff driver up on their site in the first place! 

I will be keeping an eye on their site and probably trying again when they update this driver. [edit: they have put up a new driver now] 

Stepping into the 3rd dimension….

Cool, or what? (image from the Guardian online)

 So once I was back in the normal world I thought I would install a free 3D “anaglyph” driver. Installation was easy peasy and I donned my red/cyan cardboard glasses and braced myself for the ultimate in home 3D gaming. My girlfriend laughed at me for looking like a total whacked out geek. I need to get some steampunk 3D glasses, then at least I’d feel cool while she laughed at me. 

Is Steampunk Cooler?

How did it go? 

• It ran fine.
• It was indeed 3D.
• It wasn’t even a little bit like “being there”.
• I got a headache!

I shan’t be doing that again for a while!

My very first impression was that it’s big, it’s literally twice the size of Sue’s netbook, a Samsung N140, as you can see in this photo:

More than twice the size of a netbook

 The second impression was surprise at how light it is, despite being a 17.3 inch screen it’s still lighter than my old Dell 15.6 incher.

Battery life.

I’ve gotten used to keeping my dell tethered to the mains socket and this one is going to be no different, the small battery means I’ll not get too much more than 2 hours of web browsing and, I imagine, barely any gaming before it’s time to recharge, still it’s enough for a bit of browsing in bed morning and evening.

The keyboard.

This is probably my least favourite bit. It’s a “scrabble tile” style of keyboard with a numeric keypad. The key caps are flat and the home keys aren’t marked very well. The numeric keypad means the actual typing zone is pushed off to the left. The very light-touch keys don’t give a lot of tactile feedback and occasionally seem to “bounce” giving me doubled up keypresses. I think I’ll have to go into the accessibility section of the control panel to see if there’s anything I can fix in software to reduce the bouncing.

More significantly for some users is the lack of “media” buttons, there are no mute/volume up&down/pause/next track/prev track buttons. The volume can be adjusted using FN+cursor keys and Mute is miles away. But this is an odd lack on a machine of this spec.

Weight.

As I mentioned, it’s quite lightweight for its size, it isn’t any trouble at all resting it on my laptop for extended playing.

Screen.

This is huge at 17.3 inches and quite colourful compared the the dell. It is “proper” 16:9 widescreen, though at 1600:900 not quite full HD. The angle of view is quite tight, particularly vertically, when it’s on my lap I can see that the top and bottom are slightly brighter than the middle, this dissapears if you put the machine a little further away, say on a desktop. Sue says that it is clearer from the sides than my old lappy though. I’m sure we will be able to watch iPlayer in bed with no problems. In fact the closer screen will mean that visually it will be much bigger than our TV (which is only 20 inches and a good 3m away).

Samsung’s warranty says that you can have up to 2 “light pixels” and 4 “dark pixels” with no more than 4 dodgy pixels in total. I was a bit worried by this, but my screen has no defects (your mileage may vary of course).

Performance.

Yup it’s well nippy. Some of this will be because its a new system missing all of the Crud that 3 years continuous use will put on an older system. Some will be because it’s Windows7 and not Vista. Some will be the 4GB instead of 2GB of RAM. And finally some will simply be the faster CPU and GPU.

Gaming.

For me, one of the most desired features of this machine was its powerful (for a laptop) GPU, an NVidia 330M which knocks the spots of my old ATI X1400. I only really play one game, World of Warcraft, but I can turn everything up to “Ultra”, knock the shadows down a few notches, set the NVidia to prefer quality, set the AA to max and still get a better framerate that I used to. I do like shadows! The big screen is really big and high res! I actually feel like I can see more of the world.

Heat and noise.

I never realised that this could be an issue, my old laptop got very warm, but not too hot to touch, this one is cool. And much quieter even under load than my old one when idle. That is nice in a quiet house like ours.

Bundled software.

 It comes with a bunch of fairly useful Samsung software, a blueray  player and dvd burner, and antivirus. It also comes with some 60 day trialware that, like all trialware, should simply be uninstalled! It does unfortunately come with only 32bit version of Windows 7 so half a GB of that 4GB RAM goes missing! Also it comes with NO recovery discs whatsoever, not even a restore disk! You are left entirely at the mercy of the recovery solution!

Webcam.

This is quite grainy, and I seem quite small in the image, but it is still better than having to carry around an external one.

Build quality.

 This seems fine, it is in no-way “industrial” but then they have had to compromise between weight and size. The worst thing is the DVD drive cover which is right where you grab the machine to pick it up.

Optical drive.

Although this model was advertised on Dixons site as having a DVD drive in fact it came with a Blu-Ray/DVD burner combo drive. Its a shame our main TV is only 1024×768 and doesn’t even have HDMI or VGA in so the bluray is redundant.

Price and alternatives..

I managed to snag this machine for £680, a decent price for the spec (common pricing is £790!). Note: mine is an i5 CPU with 330M GPU and BlueRay, and not the i3 CPU, poorer graphics card and no BluRay that is more common at the same price point – DONT get BURNT, I would not pay this price for the lower spec!

When I started looking I was going to get one of the ACER 5740G variants with very similar specs, 64bit windows instead of 32bit, a slightly better GPU – the overclockable ATI 5650, and 15.6 inch screen. After discounts that one was going to cost £660. I even got as far as placing an order when suddenly the stock dissapeared and the next delivery isn’t due for at least a month (if ever), the discount code would have expired and it would have ended up costing me £30 more.

Other alternatives were a Dell Vostro (business) which for a similar spec would have cost a reasonable bit less. But I’ve had a Dell and wasn’t impressed with their non-existant post sales driver updates, the old Dell had a nice piece of software that was supposed to let me know when new drivers were in – except it never did, not even when there were updates!

It’s a minefield out there with so many different variations on a single spec many of the spec sheets are wrong! MAKE SURE YOU ARE GETTING WHAT YOU WANT. I saved the spec sheet from the shop site when I bought mine in case they sent me a lower spec and I had to return it.

And finally I was looking at the Alienware M11x (again cheaper buying as “business” with the £90 discount voucher). I was seriously tempted, 6 hours of browsing-battery was very tempting, but a slower CPU, and very shiny screen were definite downsides, no built in DVD drive was also a minus. What finally soured it for me was the screen size, I cut a sheet of A4 down to the 11.6 screen size and looked at it – and NO, just NO! I didn’t even get as far as printing a snapshot.

Overall.

I got almost exactly what I was expecting from the review on notebookcheck, I am happy with it, and I’m still a Samsung fanboy.

Windows Experience Index

Click through for a huge snapshot.

So since then I’ve improved my diet to cut out the saturated fats – I’ve stoped eating my mars bar a day, I’ve cut back dramatically on biscuits and marshmallows, and I’ve pretty much said goodbye to chocolate! Sob! And with Sue’s help the rest of my diet is significantly better.

The result? I’ve been losing weight at the rate of about a pound a week. It got to the point where I don’t really want to lose much more weight, I’ve been below 10 stone now for two weeks and it’s still coming off! Sue has valiantly tried giving me more and more food to stuff in my face during the day, and it’s nice grazing away all the time. But it doesn’t seem to be stopping the weight loss!

Eeek! Your humble blogger is worried he’ll dissapear!

P.S.  9 st 12.5 lbs @ 5ft 7in

P.P.S. I bet you wish you had this problem!

So far I’ve reported two of the worst holes and both times a new patch has appeared within a day or two, pretty good huh?

The last hole I reported was quite a big “dip” in the road at a junction that has caused me some problems. The coucil duly came out and chucked some tarmac at it. This is what the hole looks like now, 4 days after it has been “repaired”…

Impressive isn’t it?

The question that came into my mind this morning is why do the French get upset when their language is abused, but the English aren’t anything like as bothered. My first thought was colonialism, having a large number of “occupied” territories means that the “natives” are almost certainly not going to do a good job of “speaking the lingo”, but that falls down when you think that the french owned a considerable part of Africa and (I’m sure) several other countries including large swathes of Canada. So the “Pidgeon” explanation doesn’t seem to hold water.

Maybe it’s being conquered. We in England have been conquered a number of times, the last being the occupation that around a 1000 years ago. But to counter this, France on the mainland Europe have surely been conquered a few times, certainly within the last 10 centuries.

Maybe it was this, maybe it was because they’ve been occupied considerably more recently than us that makes them value their language so much more.

Maybe we British don’t care because we’ve got the USA talking our language with their diversity, or maybe we don’t care because that’s just the sort of culture we have.

Woke up this morning knowing that there might be some snow, and looking out the window, yes, there it was. A thin coating on the ground outside the house. Nothing too serious, the main road is certain to be clear. Descision made: Go in by bike and avoid the train.

By the time I left the house there was a little snow falling but not much and I made it to the end of the drive and onto the main road. By the way, it’s a shared drive, we’re not that rich! So, the  main road had a very light dusting, but nothing important. I turned to go up the hill behind out house to see to the horses. Here it started being not so good, the light dusting on the main road was a light layer on this untreated road. I crawled up the steep hill in first gear without any problems though.

Horses done and the snow is now falling “properly” which is not a good thing when you’re riding a motorbike. Now I’ve got to go down the hill; put the bike in first so I can use engine breaking to control my speed while leaving my feet to skid along the road for extra support.

Going down the hill was the scariest thing I’ve done in ages! About half way down the hill the back wheel starts to slip occasionally and I want to put on the front brakes to slow down. But you really can’t do that on snow! So I’m stuck with going down the hill, no brakes and barely able to control my speed even using engine breaking.

I was scared and my heart was starting to race! The only consolation I had was that if I went over it would be quite slow. Though lets not forget that I broke my ankle last year going “quite slow”.

Anyway, long story short, I made it to the main road, now covered in snow, and crawled home in first. Grabbed the van and made a rush for the train station in time to catch the train in.

Now that I’m here the weather’s fine and I feel somehow cheated that everyone else had a fine journey in!

Sigh.