Saturday 9 July 2011

No more exams!

Better late than never, eh!

As of the 17th of June, I no longer have any GCSE exams to attend! And, even better than that, no more school to attend for another few weeks.

Admittedly, I haven't done muuuch with myself in the past few weeks. Done the basics, beaches and parties, seen friends etc, but I wanna go out some more.

I as *supposed* to go into Milford today, but it turns out I'm shit at reading bus timetables. For one, I looked at the times for the wrong bus, so I was waiting around like a chump for 20 minutes.
Then, when the correct bus arrived, he decided he didn't go to Milford. I double checked the timetables, then did another check when I got back home, and he should have gone to Milford. Maybe he misheard me, but still. Complete wanker aswell.

Some good news though!

A few years back, when we bought our car, we were mis sold PPI. This is, I think, payment protection insurance. So, if you take out a loan, if you lose your job, your insurance company pay it for you for a year or so. My parents, when buying the car, were led to believe they *had* to buy PPI, when they didn't. So, they applied for compensation, and we got £12.000! No more debt for us :3

Anywho, it's been nice blogging again. Maybe i'll find something else to blog about in the near future!

Tuesday 31 May 2011

Oh yeah, I have a blog!

Hewwo my very few readers.

It has been three months since I last blogged, and that was on a rather awesome headset. Many a thing has happened since those that headset was purchased, and, in related events, I've purchased the model up from that particular headset.

Hopefully it'll be here in a few days. The X41's are £90, have 7.1 surround sound and many other useful features.

My exams began a week or two ago, and, so far, I've done English paper one & two, Religious philosophy, Catering, English Literature and Italian Listening, none of which went particularly badly. I still have yet to do my sciences, maths exams, religious ethics and italian reading & writing.

I also have a job! Finally! After many failed attempts, I managed to land a job as a KP (Kitchen Porter) in The Walkford. At £5, and I'm doing around 10 hours a week, £50 a week is very good. The work is pretty good, it could be a lot worse anyway. It mainly consists of doing desserts, washing up, preparing basic foods and microwaving stuff. Everyone there is pretty cool, really nice and accommodating.

With summer peeking it's (hopefully) sunny head 'round the corner, I will be having many a good time with the people I think highly of :D Oh, and working. That should be fun, right?

Thursday 10 February 2011

Turtle Beach X31

For all you non-gamers that read this, Turtle Beach X31 (I'll refer to them as TB's from now on) are a gaming headset, produced by Turtle Beach, a headset/sound card manufacturer.

I do quite a lot of online gaming, call of duty, FEAR and all that sort of thing. I really enjoy doing it, and before my TB's, I have an old pair of Sony headphones that were alright, they weren't especially good, but they got the job done. Since I enjoyed gaming so much, I thought I'd treat myself and buy a pair of TB's. So here I am, wearing them right now, listening to music.

That's the great thing about these TB's. They're a gaming headset primarily, but they're great for listening to music on. With music, they produce a really deep and rich sound with a great bass.

But as aa gaming headset, they surpassed my expectations by lightyears. I expected these to be a high quality headset, they were £60 so they ought to be, but when I started playing...words do not describe. I could hear footsteps from 20ft away sa if they were right next to me, pinpoint gunfire location, the works. These things are excellent.

They come with an RF transmitter, so they headset is mainly wireless, unless you want to speak to friends in your party at the same time. You plug the transmitter into any usb port on the gaming console of your choice (Xbox 360, PS3 or PC), and plug the red & white cables where they would normally be put into the TV. The RF transmitter can give the TB's a good sound from about 6ft away, which is quite impressive.

I rate these as high as it is possible to rate. I plan on buying a DSS to improve them further, so watch out for another post about that!

Monday 10 January 2011

Creative T10's Review

Hey guys.

I'm going to give you some context before I launch into the review. For Christmas, my mum and dad got my big brother a set of Creative T10 speakers. At the time, I thought not much of it. They were nice looking speakers, but I was perfectly fine with my current pair of Logitech X-14-0's (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Logitech-X-140-Multimedia-Speakers-2-0/dp/B000JCDRTU/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1294696270&sr=8-3). My brother, post Christmas day, decided to give his speakers a run while I was in the room, and I was (pardon the cliche) blown away.

Now, my X-140's weren't bad at all. In fact, in comparison with the TV's sound output without speakers, they sounded like my T10's sound like to the X-140's. For only £15, the X-140's served their purpose very well. But, like I said, the T10's were excellent. They seemed to have this depth that the X-140's didn't have, I think they can go louder and they look a lot cooler, and go with my TV a lot better too. So, I went on to ye olde Amazon and looked at a pair, they were £30, which was brilliant because I got a £25 Amazon voucher for Christmas too. So I got Dad to order them, and then I only had to wait 2-3 days before they arrived.

That was a truly joyous day, I must say. Especially since I do a lot of online gaming, the better quality speakers really have helped. But, alas, it was only a day before a truly bizarre thing happened. I went to listen to my iPod, so I hooked it up, went to turn the speakers on and they just wouldn't. The green LED didn't turn up, and the familiar *click* wasn't there. As irritated as I was, dad managed to keep a lot cooler than I did, and he was e-mailing Amazon within the hour. And I got a new set 2 days later. I was very impressed.

Overall, I would highly recommend these speakers. The sound quality is excellent, they have a rich, deep sound to them, and the base great. They were really easy to set up, they look stylish, and they're quite cheap for how good they are. I believe they've been discontinued, so in the rare occasion that you do want to buy a pair, go here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Logitech-X-140-Multimedia-Speakers-2-0/dp/B000JCDRTU/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1294696270&sr=8-3

That's me done!

Saturday 1 January 2011

2010 thoughts.

As we're putting 2010 away in a cupboard, we're brining out a shiny new replacement year that does all the things 2010 couldn't, the model being 2011.

It's easy, when thinking about the years actions, to only pay attention to the bad things that happen. For example, I could focus on my grandfather's death, or my dog's death. Death being the prominent theme. But this is a bad thing to do, there are so many good things that happen that it becomes almost commonplace, and that's why the bad things 'stick out'.

When thinking about 2010 last night, I completely forgot about my mini-holiday to Wales. It was excellent, with great views and I generally had a great time with my family. I'd forgotten about other things too.I've met some great people this year, like Zak, Alex, Holly and others, and I've had great outings with them. Seeing Inception with Zak and Jewis. All the private jokes that no one really understands, (SKA!) and others I really shouldn't mention that Holly said! :P

I've made mistakes, but no worse than people of my age have, and I've had success. The mistakes making the success all the much sweeter.

This entry seems to be more about my past experiences than anything, but that's what blogs are. My general message is that you need to try and look past the bad things, and appreciate the good things. Terrible things happen, things that I wouldn't wish upon anyone, and so do amazingly good things.

I hope you had a good year, and that the coming year is even better.

/philosophical ranting.

Saturday 11 December 2010

Xbox 360 Slims and their Wireless madness.

Hey Guys and Gals.

I know only two or three people out of the five followers I have actually enjoy video games, but I thought I'd post it anyway.

Back in October, I purchased a 250GB Xbox 360 Slim. Today, I returned that very same console to the shop I bought it from, thinking it broken. Anyway, got the new one back today, and it had the very same problem.

Turns out, it wasn't a genuine problem, just a stupid thing Microsoft have done. Now, this following problem is only wireless, it works fine if you're on a wired connection.

I brought up my network connection page on the Xbox, did everything correctly, and it still refused to connect. Me and Dad had added the MAC address into the filter, applied a static IP address, you name anything within reason, we did it. So, we rang up the ol' fellas at Microsoft, and began speaking to some Indian people. They asked us to try plugging the xbox into the router via ethernet cable, signing in, and then removing the ethernet cable. To our surprise, this worked.

Not very interesting, but a good thing to know if you're thinking about getting a slim on a wireless connection!

Friday 3 December 2010

And since there's no place to go - write a blog post!

I didn't really want to use a cliche title, but it was all too much to resist.

It doesn't seem like to long ago that I was writing my last blog post on snow, turns out it was a good 11 months ago!

That in mind, this snow really kicks previous snows cold white ass! In January/February, we got about 2 inches of snow, and everyone was please with that. Then, on the night of December 2nd, we got about 5 inches! Granted, places up North have about 12, but 5 inches is pretty good for the South Coast.

Anyway, me and my little sister wake up on Thursday morning, take a peek outside and cheer. Went to the nearest laptop, looked on H'cliffe school website, yet another cheer! School was closed.

So after that, when everyone was ready, we went for a walk up to the Rec. It was like a white blanket, and it was really surreal. Even though the sun was behind clouds, it was still strangely bright because of the snow. And there was still snow falling, so it was great fun.

But today has surpassed any activities from yesterday. Me, Dad, Mum, Esme, Ben and I went to Buckland Rings to go sledging. Buckland Rings was a settlement for a large group of people, and they had a defense system of hills to make it more difficult for people to get in uninvited. Who'd of thought that hundreds of years later people would be sledging on it eh?

There were two main hills. One that was short and steep, the most popular one. But there was another hill in the field just further on that was longer, and slightly less steep. This had about ten people in total on it, and was great.

Now, we had two pieces of equipment, if you like, for sledging. We had a skimboard, which was great for tandem stuff and going stupidly fast, and a make-shift snowboard. This snowboard was made of an old skateboard that had been left in the rain too many times, minus the trucks. This was excellent for sledging, i.e. sitting down/lying down on, or standing up. Me and Ben preferred the snowboard, whereas the others preferred the skimboard.

Where the skimboard was relatively safe, the snowboard was not. And, there was barely room to
stand on. So you get the idea. On a few occasions, whilst going on the skimboard in a tandem fashion, me and Esme managed to somersault over eachother! Another occasion, whilst on the skateboard, some girls decided to walk and stay in the path me and Ben had been fashioning for about 10 minutes. I was already half way down, so I tried to stop by pressing down hard on the back of the board. This didn't work, the board ended up hitting some less compact snow and I went flying two or three meters in front of me.

Overall, it was amazing. I thoroughly recommend it! Go sledging at your nearest hill today!