Where are you baby....

.....we used to have so much fun

Hello. Best way to start this long overdue update is by the universally known word, HELLO. Hope everyone's been ok and kicking.
I for one have been fine. My friend Ziad (who came here in September from Dubai if you remember) decided to visit Britain again on a 2 week holiday. We had a great time, went clubbing, pubbing (:p), saw Cirque Du Soleil at the Royal Albert Hall (friggin' awesome! best circus ever!), and did loads of other things too. He's gone back to UAE now.

When he was here, my mum decided to give me a heart attack and actually buy me an XBOX360 as a gift for passing MRCP 2!! I was shocked! She gave me the cash and I had to hunt all over the place to find the damn thing (they're in shortage worldwide). I managed to get the last remaining "CORE" version from Virgin. I bought 2 games with it (condemned, perfect dark) and two wireless controllers. I had to order a hard disk from ebay (necessary to save games, download stuff and connect to xbox live), and a vga HDTV cable from lik-sang (yeap! hong kong!).

Anyway, all that arrived, and before hand I had treated myself to a 27" widescreen LCD HDTV television (DiBoss from amazon, dead cheap). I connected the xbox to it via analogue VGA and set the xbox to widescreen HDTV. DAMN THE PICTURE IS AMAZING! HDTV rules! it really has to be seen to be believed!

Next, I got the Sky people to install a Sky+ receiver in my room, and now i can watch tv here and rewind/pause/record live tv (it has a built in hdd that records the stream all the time). They will start broadcasting in HDTV mid this year, so that's another use for the tv.

The TV also has a DVI input which I connected to the PC as second output. The monitor is cloned onto it, and it's used as the fullscreen overlay device for videos. I watched HDTV Shrek 2 and Kill Bill on it the other day, and believe me, once you've seen it you REALLY can't go back to crappy "DVDS". Seriously. It's that amazing. Once HD-DVD or BluRay come to the market, we're gonna start watching films the way they're meant to be :)

Another use of this TV is that now kelly (and other friends that come over) can watch me do stuff on the pc, for example the poor girl would have to endure some quake 4 deathmatching online, watching it on the tv :p



As a side effect of the above things, I had to drag Ziad to HomeBase and get some cheap shelves and a TV unit to house all this crap. We spent a whole evening DIYing and sorting things out, but now after wobbling about for a bit, everything appears to be stable (I hope.....)

So as you can see I'm happy, and still wasting a ton of cash on crap. But this crap is awesome and last for quite a while. Also, playing X3 in the middle of the night with my 5.1 headphones on, the Cyborg Evo, and on the wide screen telly is a heavenly experience.... One day i'm going to lock myself in the room for 24 hours and do a marathon X3 universe session. Someone, get me a life (and convince my girlfriend not to dump me once she's read this :p).

SoB over and out for now, and back online for a long time to come...........