Recently I have been listening to electronic music with some kind of beat, and came across Vector Lovers by accident. Been listening to their debut album and I love it! Its electronic music but quite accessible if blips and beeps aren’t your thing.
My favorite tracks are ‘Girl + Robot’, ‘Yamanote Sundown’ and ‘Lake Nocturne’. Brilliant stuff.
Edit:
This post is related to the ‘vector lovers’ album, not the more techno influenced ‘capsule for one’ or ‘microtron’!
Aye, so I have my new gear.
model name : AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2800+
cpu MHz : 2138.587
cache size : 512 KB
bogomips : 4283.09
When I had everything put together and working … my graphics card died 
Due to the onset of christmas im totally skint, but also I cannot bear to be without computer games over this period, so I bought the same graphics card as I had before (well, same chip, from a different manufacturer). When I bought my old graphics card it cost about £180, this replacement from ebay has set me back £25 - pretty scary how quickly hardware gets out of date!
At the moment I have my computer running with a Diamond Viper 770 (circa. 1999), but it does the 2D resolution that I want fine, and its nice to have music again (all my music is on the computer so I had to go 2 weeks without - which was surprisingly painful!). Note that I do not have christmas music on my computer - its getting to me already due to the gym playing the radio over the stereo system - bah humbug! 
So, what else has been happening? I went down to a LAN party at a friends house - without my computer?! Yes, he is stockpiling faulty laptops from ebay, trying to fix their (mostly) minor faults and then sell them on, which meant there was spare hardware kicking around to play on.
Anything else? I went to a party on friday night where I only knew one other person by name - ace.
I also went out for a 5 hour bike ride today with a few people from ERC, because it would have been rude not to. Started at Innerleithen, followed the Southern Upland Way over to the Three Bretheren. Good day for the ride, over the ridge there was no wind to start with, and as the day progressed it picked up. I had a few freeride moments involving slippy wooden bridges, but the best was yet to come.
Having climbed 5-600m it was time to go downhill, and there is the sweetest bit of natural trail that is just off the top of the hill. It starts with a very narrow smooth path, which today had a pine needle carpet that was just proper bo, and then gets twisty, rooty, steep, and generally very tricky as it enters some trees - and I rode it all! Yeah, never done that before, totally having a good day. I was totally convinced my confidence wasn’t going to last and was going to twat myself at some point, but it didn’t happen. Usually I talk myself out of going for rides in winter, but thinking about it, I haven’t had a bad winter mountain biking ride this year which is very sweet, and without a doubt not going to last.
This post, coming to you from a sub 300Mhz laptop w/ 800×600 screen and firefox 0.93. Yes, i have destroyed my computer More about that later.
So, what have I been up to? I was racing at Innerleithen on the 20th which was really really good fun. The race was organised by Edinburgh Road Club (which I have recently become a member of), and was a cross country race with a twist. Basically they had two timing stations, one at the lowest point of the course and one at the highest, and one of the prizes was ‘King of the downhill’ - who can get from top to bottom fastest - which attracted a fair few downhillers, it was nice as they are always good craic. I ended up finishing 21st after a flukey and very unlucky pinch punchure (on pumped up 2.25″ cinders!) during the last downhill adding at least 10 minutes to my time, if I hadn’t punchured I think I would have finished roughly 10-12th which would have been good considering I hadn’t had a day off the bike for 7 days prior to the race. It was a real laugh though and I spoke to some people I hadn’t seen in ages, so wasn’t particularly bothered about doing bad as it had been such a great day.
Last weekend I went out for a monster ride with the Edinburgh University Cycling Club. We met up at the Commonwealth Pool car park in Edinburgh at 7am on Sunday morning (yes, I got up at 6:15am!), chucked all the bikes in the van and drove up to Pitlochry. After the obligitary road trip requirement of getting lost on the way, we arrived and set off around 10-10:30am. Make no mistake, most of these guys are pretty hardcore and are very very fast. Everyone (including me) beasted it at the start because it was so cold, but it was such a nice day too! The route was a figure of 8, with Pitlochry in the middle. The first loop was shorter, maybe 6 miles or so but had great singletrack - some of the best of the day actually.
There were so many weird and wonderful paths and tracks that we went on, im so glad that I brought along the GPS so I can retrace the route in the future. After 3-4 hours I realised I had made a slight schoolboy error, I had only packed enough food and water to go out for that amount of time so had to grit my teeth till the end, I really wanted to do more of the great singletrack, but my body started packing in after about 6 hours in the cold - I (along with about half the group) was suffering some form of cramp due to dehydration. By the end of the ride I was entirely soaked through, couldn’t feel my feet - or recognise my bike. I was absolutely exhausted and wanted to sleep, however there was a 2 hour car journey back down to Edinburgh to sweat through so we stopped at the Perthshire Vistor Centre, where we had dinner and a go at whiskey tasting! After another dinner when I got home, got an early night. The banter on this ride was immeasurable, we discussed most issues, from MrT to Wife-Beating which was such a laugh.
So, my computer. Well to be perfectly honest, when I decided to take the step to water cool my PC, I acknowleged it was a risk and that I had to be prepared to lose everything - similar to investing in equities. In short my CPU is fried, and my motherboard is as well, I think. To clear a few things up this mess was due to me being a bit special and fiddling with fittings, not due to any problem or defect with the actual watercooling system. Monday night, after work - while helping sister with maths, cooking dinner, making inane conversation with a neighbour and dealing with a phone call, I noticed the watercooling system was not flowing properly. Call me insane, call me special, but my brain said ‘investigating why your watercooling system is not working’ is not a priority right now.
The computer had been on all day, and I assumed that the flow had been off all day. wrong.
If something was really wrong, the temperature fail-safe auto power off thing would kick in. wrong again.
Basically, when I was doing the 4 other things I went into my bedroom and must have knocked the fittings (which i had been fiddling with for no reason the previous day, and probably didn’t reattach entirely correctly). This caused the circulation of water to stop, and therefore stopped the dissapation of heat. After I had successfully multi-tasked all the other (more important) real life stuff, I went through to my bedroom and all I could smell was burning silicon - Doh