Weather Weirdness...

Part One - Familyness:

...Yep, the nights are definitely drawing again, and the weather for the start of October has been weeeirrdd. A few weeks ago, the news reported that we should be expecting snow for the end of october. Amid the general cries of "oh no, not again", were one or two "I spose it's that time of year again then?"
So far, the snow hasn't materialised, but then we are only a little way through October. What has materialised though, is a rather unexpected, rather temporary but thoroughly enjoyable (apart from the night when you can't sleep) mini heatwave. Yep, even as late as early October, we had three or four of those "don't go outside you'll get sunburned" days.

All that seems to have come to a very definite cold and wet end though, as in the past couple of days, the temperature has dropped sharply, and the lovely sun has now been replaced with rainy rain. Fair enough, it's good for the plants I suppose.

At this point it occurse to me to wonder why I always seem fixated on the weather. I don't think it's a uniquely English thing, rahter, I suspect it's my way of pointing out (to our collective subconcious (do we have a collective subconcious? are we Borg? Perhaps I meant "Collective Sub-Conciouses-plural")) without labouring the point, that my favourite time of year is beginning to approach again. Which is awesome, actually, though I do now have to start buying Xmas pressies.

I lost out to my mum this year, this time she earned the "person who bought the first Christmas present of 2011" title. My ickle nephew for his part has been pointing at every other TV ad saying "I want that" heh. I have been giving some thought to getting him some of these, however, I have disturbing visions of him either wrapping them round his head, or whacking himself in the eye with them, or going a little crazy, kinda like this, so I'll make a decision under advisement, I think.

Before any of that stuff though, we have dun dun dunnnn, Halloween. I'm trying to get my mum to make a gold-edged blue cape/cloak thingie for my ickle nephew, so he can wear it with his Armouron and his blue Lightsaber, and all-in-all look way cooler than all the other kids. It might be an idea to attach a glowstick or two to him as well, as not only does it seem to have become fashionable, but it helps make him more visible at night as well.

(Actually, my parents have just come back from Toys'r'us with big bags of sweets for the kiddehs at halloween).

Part Two - Computeryness:

Well, it seems that my computer is now finally actually finished. I had a couple of little parts to put in it,but now they've arrived and seem to be working okay, I can crack on with reinstalling all the lovely shiny software and whatnot. The GPU means I can now run all games I have on insanely maximum graphics settings (apart from Xplane, amusingly, which I've had for years. Since it was designed to run across a network with the load being spread across multiple machines, turning the settings as high as they would go still resulted in 4-6 frames a second. But then I suppose I was being slightly daft :P. Big gap here because pictures mess the formatting up!




The other clever bit that arrived seems to be working quite nicely in reducing my program load times, but cos of its capacity limitations I haven't installed a great deal to it at the minute.
I've managed to carry over some of my software from the old install, so stuff like X-plane (all 80Gb of it!) thankfully doesn't need reinstalling (I'm keeping it on an "old fashioned" drive though).
I haven't yet finished configuring all thefeatures that windows is supposed to use to support SSDs, but apparently I can expect several small performance increases as and when I figure out how to enable said features, by arsing about in registry.

I've had a few problems with the system refusing to boot at all, the drives would spin up, the fans would spin, and then noooothiiing would happen. I think I've traced the problem to a standoff post which wasn't fitted properly (because it was crossthreaded), which could apparently have resulted in the motherboard not being grounded to the case properly.


As I mentioned in my last entry, the coolit ECO cooler that I was using was diagnosed as faulty by Coolit. In the end, I sent the cooler back to them, and they sent me a shiny new Coolit Vantage, which aside from looking awesome, is also very quiet, and works very well. Major thumbs up to coolit for their awesome customer service.

Now I have another teeny problem, which is that the motherboard only gives power to the CPU cooler 3 boots out of every 5. Apparently I can get round this by connecting the cooler to the PSU instead, as it's the cooler, not the mobo, that controls the cooler fan speed. The whole issue may be something to do with a partial incompatibility rather than a hardware failure, as it's a common problem on most gigabyte boards also.
But yeah. To summarise: Computer now finished, now working, not perfect, but almost :-).

Part Three - Meal Stuffs:

A while ago I made a really crappy job of creating some pasta sauce, which for some reason my mum really loved. I suggested that I'd be happy to try again and cook some pasta for the family, and so they went and bought loads of stuff with which to make a meal.
And would you know, it actually turned out really well. The sauce was lovely, the pasta was just right, and the garlic bread was incredible. Even the table looked nice. A nice time was had by all.

I mention this fleetingly, as it looks like me cooking might become a regular thing :-). I've been asked to do the pasta again actually, so I'm pretty pleased with that.

So yeah, quite a pleasant occasion.

Here are some picatures, as is traditional. I will no doubt be on again going on about my ickle nephew's halloween experiences. I believe he's going to some halloween event or other. Looks fun!

Ciao! Better start buying those presents ;-).