It's been a while...

Christ it really has. Looking back I appear to have been a very angry man. I guess that's changed a bit thanks to some good people in life.

It's 03:19 at the moment and I know I will pay for this tomorrow, but I care not, for I'm pretty calm and relaxed at the moment, so it's all good.

Anyways. Recent events. I've been cackling like a Witch at Halloween while following the political upset the recent expenses issue has caused. It seems that no-one is safe from the s**tstorm. What's really silly is that this has been going on for years and it would have KEPT going on if it hadn't become a hot-button topic. So you're all sorry now are you? Well that's very well and good, but why did you do it in the first place? If you actually cared then it never would have happened, would it. That's our money you've been wasting these past years, while schools were dismissing teachers because the Conservative's budget cuts, while you continued to feed at the trough like pigs.

That's another thing that's irritated me recently. All the hype about swine flu. It's not a nice illness I know, but to the western world it's not that dangerous because of the healthcare systems in place. The only problem it will cause is if it gets into an area such as Africa and spreads, because it will kill thousands. Without being nasty thats probably a good thing, because the remaining population will have a better chance at survival and a good life. A similar thing happened because of the bubonic plague in this country. After the plague wages increased and quality of living improved because the population density was lower. It'll also be a disaster if it gets into China, for the same reasons.

Moving away from current affairs and back into the tech world: Valve have released the Spy and Sniper updates for Team Fortress 2, and the game is now rather unbalanced. They've also announced Left 4 Dead 2, which seems to be more of the same as Left 4 Dead. Yawn. Intel have released the Core i7 CPU to a waiting press-pit filled with f**k all. I haven't seen a single advert for it. This also leads nicely to another note of irritation that I have to air. Why are computer manufacturers flaunting RAM like it's the lifeblood of the computer? PC World are terrible for this. I can stick 4GB of RAM up an i486's backside and it will still crawl like a cockroach with one leg. RAM means nothing if the CPU is underpowered. *LOOKING AT YOU, CELERON* Also what's the fixation with 3GB? IIRC you can't run RAM in dual channel unless the total amount is a multiple of 2. Could be wrong on that.

Also a bit fed up of Apple claiming that Apps are only for the iPhone. Many Many others have been writing mobile apps since LONG before the iPhone was even thought of. The other platforms tend be a damn sight easier to program for as well. That said, I doubt many iPhone owners actually use the device to its potential because they have only bought it for the shiny Apple logo.

Windows Mobile 6.5 shows promise and might actually be a decent finger-based platform. I'm particularly fond of the Titanium today screen. Windows 7, on the other hand, seems to be taking a dive again. I noticed the same thing before with Vista. The early alpha builds (back when it was still called Longhorn) showed lots of promise, a worthy successor of Windows XP. Then when the betas arrived things started to go wrong, resulting in the terrible excuse for an OS that is today known as "Vista". Windows 7 appears to be doing a similar thing, just not quite as badly as Vista did. Oh well. It doesn't matter to me, as I'm now quite happy with Debian "Squid" (Squeeze/Sid), KDE4 (a very nice desktop environment, worth a look if you are into Linux) and Wine, which is now capable of running all of my Windows software with the exclusion of Source SDK, which I have to run in a small XP partition. No biggie.

I guess that sorta wraps it up for now. I shall try not to leave it this long again.

Ethan <-- Thats my proper name

PS: The recent MK/Lib Dem battle has been rather amusing.