The Grax Domain

23 Dec 2006 A multi-lingual festive message

Happy Christmas
Navidad feliz
glückliches Weihnachten
gelukkige Kerstmis
Noël heureux
ευτυχή Χριστούγεννα
natale felice
christmas feliz
счастливое рождество
행복한 크리스마스
幸せなクリスマス
愉快的圣诞节

21 Dec 2006 Soundtrack to my life (shuffle)

This looks like a good way to kill an hour or so. I saw her doing it, who knicked the idea for this person, who "paid homage" to the idea spawned by this lady. So climb aboard the bandwagon.

The rules are quite simple:

1. Open your library (iTunes, Winamp, Media Player, iPod, etc)
2. Put it on shuffle
3. Press play
4. For every question, type the song that's playing
5. When you go to a new question, press the next button
6. Don't lie and try to pretend you're cool...

So without further ado... my randomly selected soundtrack:

• Waking Up: Sounds of Mute City - F-Zero GX
• First Day at School: Just like This - Limp Bizkit
• Falling In Love: War Within a Breath - Rage Against the Machine
• Fight Song: Welcome Home (Sanitarium) - Metallica
• Breaking Up: Here to Stay - Korn
• Prom: Under the Bridge - Red Hot Chilli Peppers
• Life: My Letter - Flaw
• Mental Breakdown: In The End - Green Day
• Driving: Transmission - Static-X
• Flashback: Gone - Kanye West feat. Cam'ron and Consequence
• Wedding: I Wanna Stand with You - Savage Garden (What the...?!? How did that get there?)
• Birth of Child: Shapeshifter - Celldweller feat. Styles of Beyond
• Final Battle: Jump Around - House of Pain
• Death Scene: Too Long - Daft Punk
• Funeral Song: Chasing Me - Korn
• End Credit: Walking After You - Foo Fighters

Hmm... not quite what I expected. A few good tracks but I could have done a better job myself rather than on shuffle.

20 Dec 2006 Xmas Work Party 2006

Last night was the Christmas work party thing. We all went up to London for the afternoon, staying the night at a Travel Lodge hotel thingy, browsed around Tate Modern (where the latest exhibition is a bunch of slides that people can, well, slide down), ate at a tasty yet crowded Italian restaurant, watched the Blue Man Group, and then ended the evening with a few pints at a pub (to which four of us parted with the group and wondered around London talking about ways of making the world better till 01:00am, whilst the rest went to bed at sensible times. Pansies. They missed out on the nipple-erecting coldness of the streets.)

Nothing fantastic or interesting to report, just the same old, same old. Chances are you can just skip this entry.

15 Dec 2006 Wiimote strap porblems? Here's a solution

Does your Wiimote straps break apart due to vigorous movements? Then sex shops may hold the solution to your problems.

You've got to hand it to those Austrians, they sure know how to use their heads.

12 Dec 2006 Green Day: How times have changed

I remember back in the days of Dookie that Green Day was an old school punk band. When they played in front at a concert they would get a cheer of like-minded lad chanting along to all their tunes. It was a satisfying sound to hear.

I recently listened to
Green Day - Bullet In A Bible. It an album recorded when they were at Milton Keynes National Bowl in June 2005 and the sound I heard was unusual.

Instead of the roar of hundreds of guys I heard the screams of hundreds of teenage girls. It sounds so odd, so un-punk, so.... Pop.

I didn't really like the sound of this. The rest of the album was ok, but this noise... I shared my opinion with the guys at work. One of them gave me this repy:

"If you were in a band would you rather play to a bunch of guys or a bunch of teenage girls? Because I know which one gives better head."

... The man has a point.

11 Dec 2006 The sound of one hand tapping

I noticed that it had been quite a while since my desktop PC had seen any action. And there's a very good reason for that; it's cpu fan. My God is it loud! You could hear it when you were in the other side of the house. It's like a five year old kid screaming really loudly in a high pitch voice in the supermarket, and you're trying to sush it up but it won't and everyone starts staring at you with their disapproving eyes. It's not my fault, that was what came with the package! Stop staring!

Anyway it was time for me to do something about this. Time for a new cooling fan. Something very quiet, something silent.

Now my desktop, once in its prime back in 2002, is an older timer so I will be limiting it to be the dedicated DVD player with extra gubbins rather than a pwer gamers PC. It's an Athlon XP with a Socket A motherboard so my choices were gonna be limited. I did consider getting a Zalman Super Flower Cooler. After all it's big, quiet, made of copper, it's bound to be silent, right? But I'm feeling a bit cheap and didn't want to shell out that much money for just a fan.

Then my friend WiGz gave me some guidance. He pointed me to this charming fan, the Arctic Cooling Copper Silent 3 Socket A CPU Cooler. That's more like it. It seems to be just as good on paper and it's the third of the price.

So I got it, fitted it in my PC and, well, hear for yourselves:

Before with the old fan
After with the new fan
After with the new fan and pc case fan disconnect

A quieter PC and cooler too. Bargain! Definately worth having if you need it.

Now I can enjoy my collection in peace.

6 Dec 2006 Know your path and enjoy it; a different kind of self-help

If you ever have a spare half an hour or so I'd recommend having a read through Scott Young's articles:

When to Quit
When to Quit continued

Scott Young is a self taught self-help guru (or so it would appear) and he has written many self-help articles for all to read and they are rather different. Rather than shoving down our throats the "happy-happy, blindly 100% positive not matter how meaningless it sounds" mythical approach to self-improvement, he questions the conventional wisdom and offers an alternative approach which is refreshing. The "When to Quit" articles he wrote caught my eye in particular.

These articles in a nutshell describe how one should take a look at his or her goals/dreams/current direction/etc in life and decided whether it is worth continuing to do them. In a sense it's giving you permission to say "It's not worth doing this anymore" rather than stubbornly saying "I mustn't give up. I've got to keep going no matter what!" Scott also makes a bold claim that reaching your goals in the end is not the way to ultimate happiness:

"There is an implied assumption when you are pursuing your dream. That assumption is that reaching your outcome is the only valuable part of the process. Being the famous actor, owning the billion dollar empire, selling the best-selling novel. Realizing the dream is what matters most.

There is only one problem with outcome-based thinking. It doesn't work! When you ask most hugely successful CEO's what the best part of their journey to success was they will tell you it was when they were still young, optimistic and struggling. Achieving goals doesn't make you happy because achievements on their own hold no lasting emotional value. Only growth, fullfilment and passion has value."

A bold claim indeed.

After writing the first article various people wrote their comments about it. Some people wrote their own counter-articles on their own sites, including this guy (who basically wrote "You've always got to keep going. Lots of people in history didn't give up, including Spud Webb, and they all did pretty damn good"). The things he wrote are valid and true. Scott followed up with his second article which can be summerised (and indeed was summerised by one of the commenters) by one simple Buddah phrase:

"There is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way"

Enlightening.

I think we've all been in situations where the journey to our dreams itself was much more fulfilling than the end result itself was. I know I have on many occasions. My career choice for one thing. I originally wanted to be a computer games programmer and I dedicated my school and college years toward that goal. Then upon reaching University and realising "Oh bugger, this is actually pretty hard" I diverted my energies towards web developing. I had a blast learning all sorts of new skill, constantly improving and growing with time. That is where a lot of the fun was and it still is.

Ultimately the buzz of reaching your goal is short-lived and is never ever-lasting. Was the journey to it worthwhile?

If you're still in the mood Scott has written various other stuff that may be worth a glance sometime.

6 Dec 2006 Ping pong TO THE EXTREME!!!!!1

Tee hee. This makes me smile every time I watch it. Those crazy foreigners.

Matrix Ping Pong

4 Dec 2006 Wicked the novel review

After watching the musical and being told that it had changed most of the storyline I had the urge to read the book and see the actual story that Gregory Maguire had written. I've finished reading the story and it was indeed greatly distorted in the musical. For you see the story in the book is much, much darker...

This is a story of a green-skinned woman named Elphaba. Born into a family that hated her (a preacher of a father, a harlot of a mother, a sister with a handicap, and a brother that hardly gets mentioned) the story unfolds through Elphaba's childhood, her time at University (where she meet Glinda), her life in her elder years and finally her confrontation with Dorothy.

This story I liked. I liked the plot and how it all panned out from start to finish with various twist along the way. I liked how the story was written overall. I found it engaging and made you want to read more and more to find out what happened next. I liked how it was all dark and sinister, which the musical was not. Don't get me wrong, I did enjoy the musical for what it is (a family-oriented enjoyment show with a happy ending) but I just prefer darker story-telling.

My only complaint about the book was the last third of the book. I felt the ending was very rushed, as if Gregory Maguire was given a 500 page limit for the book and he'd already used up 400 of those pages to tell half the story. It would have been nice if he had an extra hundred pages or so to expand and enrich the story a bit more rather than rushing to the finally.

Regardless Wicked is a fine book to read if you want to expand your mind along the subject of The Land of Oz. However this book should not be found in the children's section of the book store or library as it is quite adult-orientated.

Well how else would you describe one page of the book dedicated to beastality?

GRAX RATING: 4/5