I got GT4 the other day. It’s a truly fantastic game. I’ve done 10% of it, but I’ve barely touched it over the last three days or so. I bought a steering wheel and pedals for the PS2 so now I can play like I’m really driving. I’ll also be taking it out onto the landing and using the HDTV that my host family has, which should make a huge difference 😀

I’ll be able to upload pictures of my cars and stuff in the next couple of days because I’m getting a little USB thumb drive that I’ll be able to save to from GT4.

Other than playing that I’ve been watching a whole lot of TV episodes, listening to several BBC Radio 4 productions, and stuff like that. It’s been quite a lot of fun really.

Basically, I’ve done nothing productive. No code for my new site, no code for any sites in fact, probably to the annoyance of David… But I’m sure the novelty will wear off in a week or something, and then I’ll get cracking.

I know it’s been a while since I last posted, but I’ve been kinda busy most days. I’ll be even more sidetracked over the coming weeks because I pre-ordered my version of Gran Turismo 4 which should arrive over the next 2-4 days.

Anyways, I was just reading Link’s weblog when I heard about something called The Fifth Sentence which I thought was a pretty good idea. I remember David saying he missed the Friday Five, so perhaps this will work as a bit of a substitute once a week or something. Maybe less often because people don’t always have a billion different books hanging around.

Here are the rules:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t search around and look for the “coolest” book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.

So, mine would be

“In a way, it was sort of depressing, too, because you kept wondering what the hell would happen to all of them.”

and that’s from The Catcher In The Rye by J. D. Salinger.

So go ahead and give it a try, could come up with some interesting sentences.

Well, Laura needed to take some close-up pics of stuff for her Photography class, so she picked my guitar. There are also some pictures that aren’t close-ups, so you can see what it looks like all at once.

I’ve been trying to avoid updating too much because I’ve been messing around with all my posts in anticipation of my new website, but bleh, too much stuff has happened to not mention.

I sold my longboard and my bow for $50 each. I decided I didn’t really use either of them enough to consider keeping them in the long run… So I sold them both and got some money back, which I promptly spent as you will see in the following paragraph…

I bought myself a new bass guitar today! W00t! It’s all black and very cool. I’ve been sat around playing it all evening and I’m now able to play most of the stuff I used to play… Which is either very cool or extremely sad depending on how you look at it 🙂

It’s an Ibanez, so it’s a bit different to my previous guitar, but I like the differences so far. I’ll try to get some decent pictures tomorrow if Laura brings her camera over here. My camera only takes shitty pictures in my room because it has no control over the light balance, and my lights aren’t exactly the best in the world.

But yeah, maybe if I get good enough I’ll think about making some recordings, but I doubt that’ll be any time soon. A cool thing is that I can plug it directly into my computer without an amp, so I didn’t bother buying one. I can talk on Skype and also send the audio from my guitar at the same time, which is nice. Yay for “Line in.”

Now I’m going to go play Weezer – Only In Dreams until I fall asleep because it’s such a lovely song to play on the bass guitar and I missed it over the last 2 years.

So, I wanted to take a look at this Napster To Go thing that I’ve seen hyped here and there recently. It turns out that it’s total fricking bullshit and there’s no way I’d give up iTunes for that.

Check this line: “It is necessary to maintain a Napster subscription in order to continue access to songs downloaded through the Napster service.”

That means that although you originally get more songs cheaper than you would on iTunes you’ll need to pay Napster for the rest of your natural life to continue to be able to play them… And it doesn’t take a genius to work out that you’re going to run out of music to download before long… and if you don’t run out of music you’ll certainly run out of hard drive space if you try to keep the total cost less than that of iTunes over time.

Let me break this down…

There is a fee of $14.95 per month for Napster To Go.
The maximum capacity of a Napster To Go enabled portable player is 5GB (as far as I can tell).
The maximum iPod capacity was 60GB last time I checked.

I, for one, have over 1000 tracks which I intend to still listen to for the forseeable future.

I could buy 5GB of songs (very roughly 1000 tracks) from Napster and download them in 2 months, giving me a cost of $29.90, not including the amount I’d have to spend on the player. It may seem like pretty good value at the moment, but presume you wanted to keep being able to play these songs for the next 10 years. You’d need to pay Napster a grand total of $1794 just to play them, your portable player would be full and you’d either have to start removing songs from it or get another player if you wanted any new songs.

If I use iTunes to get the same 1000 tracks it’d cost me $990, that’s $804 less. My iPod would potentially still have enough space for 11 times as many tracks, and I would never have to pay another cent to Apple to continue to play these songs. I could use the $804 I’d save over the 10 years to buy another 812 tracks.

Oh yes, also, iTunes gives away 2-3 free tracks every week. Not all of them are great, but there are many that I’ve liked very much so far. That’s potentially 1560 free tracks over a decade. That’s 1.5 times the total amount tracks it takes to fill a Napster To Go portable player, for free.

Of course, neither of the options I explored take into account the ability to store songs on the hard drive, or burn the tracks to CD and rip them back to avoid the copy protection. I’ll presume you wouldn’t want to break the law, or terms of service.

Anyways, that’s why I’ll never EVER sign up for Napster To Go. I certainly don’t think anyone else should either. Not unless they intend to burn all of their tracks to CD, rip them back onto their computer, and use an iPod as their portable player of choice. Even then it would cost a lot in blank CDs, and be a very time consuming process (even if you used a virtual CD drive).

Recently I stopped being able to send email. At first I figured it was some fluke that both accounts stopped working at the same time, but after a few days I became more suspicious.

I emailed Neureal to see if the problem with their server was at their end, but they suggested that I try connecting with telnet from my home connection, which didn’t work at all. Then I tried connecting from another server and it worked perfectly.

So, it seems that my ISP is blocking SMTP on port 25, which is fucking retarded!

I sent the following email to them a couple of minutes ago.

Hi, I’m an Astound customer in Walnut Creek, CA.

I currently use Thunderbird 1.0 to handle my email, and as of recently I’m totally unable to connect to SMTP servers, even with telnet…

I’m wondering if this is a temporary problem or some kind of purposeful hugely annoying block on one of the most useful protocols I can think of. If this is the case can I look forward to POP3, HTTP, and FTP being blocked in the near future too?

Regards,

Stuart Gilbert (using webmail).

Bloody morons, they better have it working soon or I’ll be more majorly pissed off.

Today I decided I missed the ability to display my currently playing track on IRC. I started using irssi hosted remotely. This meant that I couldn’t write a script to read a file on my computer, directly…

So I wrote one script to allow me to update my home IP address within irssi, and a second script to read that setting and read a certain file at a certain location. That file is another script I wrote to take the current track information from a text file, and it’s hosted on my computer with port 80 open for HTTP. Oh yeah, and there’s an iTunes plugin needed to write out the track information too.

So it’s a highly complex procedure at the moment, but it works superbly. I love it 🙂

Happy birthday Craig!

Check your website, I fixed it for you.

Also, there’s a new Magical Trevor cartoon that everyone should watch (as long as they’ve seen the first one).

If you’re interested there are MP3s available thanks to some random person and also Sticky.

Several months ago, maybe as long as a year ago, JonP informed me that there was a dinosaur identical to Mike in Eric’s room in That 70s Show. I’ve remembered from time to time but I’ve never been able to find an episode with him in, but today I found one! It’s not extremely clear, to be honest, but I can tell it’s Mike.

He’s just at the bottom-right of the shot, and the image is crappy quality. When season 6 of That 70s Show comes out on DVD I’ll rent it and get a better shot or something.