Let's all rasterbate

Having a quick look around my flat (read dump), noticed that I'm missing a printer. Last one I owned (was also the first one I owned) was a cheapo canon that sucked big time. It broke and I just threw it away a long time ago. As it was the wireless age, I thought I'd get a network enabled printer. Went on froogle and typed "network printer". Alot of responses came back, but the HP deskjet 6840 from ebuyer caught my eye. Ordered that, and also 512meg of RAM for good old powerbook.. The printer is a good inkjet that has a few tricks up it's sleeve. It can autodetect paper quality (very useful), it can print borderless (even more useful if you're rasterbating. See later), can print double sided automatically, and finally is wireless 802.11g enabled, and it connected to sobnet in no time at all. I can now print from PC or MAC from anywhere within my HUGE flat ;)
Then it dawned upon me.... How about printing labels for all the *cough* backup *cough* CDs I have, especially DivX, XviD, (S)VCD, DVD-R etc. So off I go to PC world and get an Afterburner. Essentially, printer prints on special labels and the afterburner applies them flawlessly to the CD. After a few hiccups calibrating the printer to the labels, everything is now fine and the majority of my backups look nearly original. Funny that, as I've lost most of the originals I backed them up from... Those of you that backup like me and have yet to witness the wonders of self-labelling, do give it a spin, you'll be amazed at how fun it all is, and looking at the cds with labels is quite satisfying.
Not been doing much gaming lately... I've got SO MANY games I really have to do that I've just given up. Till now I've only clocked Doom III Resurrection of Evil, and that's it! I am though having a good time playing a great PSP game called Mercury. Created by the ever-amazing Archer Maclean (old timers, remember things like dropzone, IK+ etc), the game follows the Super Monkey Ball formula of tilting the world to move a blob of mercury, around a series of difficult mazes/tasks/etc. It's a great great game, with lots of clever gameplay. Some levels involve races against the clock, others involve strategic puzzle solving, while others require you to finish the level with a minimum percentage of mercury left (it falls off the level you see, if you're not careful), and combo levels are the most devilish, combining all the above. The gfx are great and the physics are as true as you'd imagine a blob of mercury would do. Great stuff and well worth everyone's pennies.
As I said before, watch SIN CITY. Also, while I'm on that note, do yourselves a favour and instead of reading this boring blog, get a copy of Kung Fu Hustle (thanks INDIA for the tip!). A great Chinese comedy about some very unlikely kung fu masters. Nothing special here in terms of direction etc, but a great movie with slapstick comedy and great fights to boot. Don't expect another Crouching Tiger, but more of a better Jackie Chan. Definitely worth the watch!
The Rasterbator is most probably the coolest website to grace the net in a long while. I'm surprised I haven't mentioned this before, as I've known about it before G-D was even born! In essence, pick a cool picture you have, upload it to the rasterbator and watch it turn into a work of art! The image is converted into custom-sized posters (printed on A4 pages) while being stylised into large dots. It's a bit difficult to explain without seeing examples, and there are some great ones on the page. The possibilities with it are endless. After getting deskjet (remember? from this same blog a long time ago.... it's amazing you're still around!) I decided to revisit the rasterbator and create my own piece of art. I found a cool picture of superman and rasterbated it on to 16 pages of photo paper (from the era of crappy canon). The result was so good I actually went and bought 2 frames and framed it all lovingly. It's now hanging proudly on my living room wall.

Go visit the site and come up with your own funky ideas. It'd be cool to see what you guys come up with.
Finally, decided to get a new set of headphones yet again. Remember a while back I mentioned the Seinnheiser PX100. A great piece of kit that lacks one thing: sound isolation. Now to achieve that publicly means either wearing some big-ass motha fucka headphones that only people with large 'fros or shaggy hear wear, or getting some in-ear phones. Looking already like a retired pimp, I went for the latter. Shure e2c is what I decided to go for, after researching the massive head-fi.org. Looking more like hearing-aids than anything fun, I bought mine from the apple shop in London. As it was a weekend Oxford Street was perhaps the busiest place in Europe. With cars, people and other wonderful noises around, I unpacked my e2c nervously and wore them as the manual explained (yes you do need to read the manual about how to put them in, and with 6 sizes of pads to choose from, it's not an easy task at first!). Lucky for me I've been taught how to stick things into people's ears succesfully, so I gave myself a taste of my own medicine (terrible cliché!).

Withouth the ipod on, it felt exactly like sticking your little finger in your ears. I turned on the pod and shuffled the tracks to see what would randomly come out. As the first mysterious song loaded, I walked out of the shop into the raging street. The sound of life around me was loud enough to reach me even with these foreign bodies in my ears. And then she sang! Alanis Morissette was singing JUST FOR ME. In a private session, complete with band and all, but me and only me there. Her voice more beautiful than I'd ever heard it before! She was telling about all she really wants, and I could hear every darn syllable, every breath of emotion, every little noise coming from her band! I was literally walking down the street dumbstruck. I couldn't hear a single thing from the monster outside, and it was only me and Alanis. A quick hit of next-track and along came Jarre, with his Bells. Not a favourite track but one that greatly showed me that even after all these years of Jarre fandom, I haven't really heard his music as he made it in the studio! The details in his music were amazing, and I'm sure I heard at least 2 new instruments I hadn't heard before in the same track!
And thus my journey to audio nirvana was getting shorter. If you like music, and if you really want to hear your tracks properly, get shure e2c. Even better, if you like to listen on the move then these babies are ESSENTIAL. problem is, they'll set you back around £70 = €105 = $133. Well worth it if you ask me, but I'd say that cos I just blew so much dosh on such a small thing!

Time to sleep now I guess. It's 01:35 now, meaning it took me 40 minutes to type all this crap. Amazing really, I'm sure a monkey with a typewriter could've come up with better stuff alot quicker.
SoB from Good-delicious HQ2