The cat the house and the internet.

Just a quick one to point anyone looking here to the other half's blog! Its new and shall we say rather cat centric.

I am not exactly the most switched on when it comes to Internet marketing so any hints or suggestions in the comments would be warmly welcomed to help her get a few people looking.

anyway without any further ado her site is www.szmata.co.uk

This is our cat and her obsessive owner is trying to document in pictures her last 2 years with us here in West London, so be kind pop over and leave the missus a comment telling her how cute the cat is.

While we are at it have a look at Www.mortgage101.co.uk this is a mortgage blog with info on, yep you guessed it mortgages.

So a year has passed. My system has been upgraded somewhat:

i7 965x
Rampage III asus Board
6GB Dominator ram
2 x 500GB Samsung F3 in raid
1 x CT128M SSD

2 x Asus GTX570 DCII
Corsair 750w PSU
Lian Li pc-p80


The CPU and the MB are both water cooled with a custom loop. (see pictures below).
The i7 is overclocked to 4.3Ghz and the 2 graphics cards are also pushed a little.

The difference between this and the last system is quite extreme. To give an example decoding a dvd took nearly 40 minutes with the old i5 system and now takes only 16 - 18. Gaming wise the 2 nvidia cards really do make a huge difference.

Perhaps the only downside is the heat this system kicks out! Sitting here with the system on and two monitors kicking out their own heat I am near to sweating, so roll on winter and stay tuned for the Ivybridge system that is bound to happen once Intel get their butts in gear.

Crossfire ATI

Background: I have always built my own pc's.

7 months ago I built a budget all purpose system for home.

Here is the spec:

i5 750 - processor

Asus P7P55D - Mother board

Radeon 5770 - Gpu

4GB Corsair - Ram

Zalman cnps10x quiet - Cpu cooler

2 x Samsung f3 500GB - HD raid 0

Silverstone raven 2 - case

Samsung B2330 23" - monitor

Corsair 550w - Psu

A few fans, a couple of lights etc...

Total: £930

I have been really happy with the system but felt the graphics were letting the side down a bit. Long story short, I was gifted another 5770 by a really great friend.

Now if you have never set up a dual GPU system then you like me would be amazed at just how big the difference was. (If you have then skip to the next post as this will likely bore you to death)

My scores on the usual bench tests nearly doubled and the game play on games like borderlands and fallout 3, became so much smoother it felt like a whole new system.

If I had known the difference I would have added one months ago especially as the price on these mid range cards has dropped. Simply put a £100 Gpu has refreshed my whole system and has stopped me looking for the i7 upgrade for another 6 months..

Pic related, that’s my computer running eve on dual screen dual Gpu's.

Crash bang wallop

Okay, so my other half just got knocked off her motorbike. She has nothing worse than a bruised ego and a severe case of the shakes, so nothing too bad.

What this made me think about is safety equipment. I know, I know, biking is about the open road and a sense of freedom but honestly how may bikers do you know that have never had an off? I have been a rider for a while and know quite a few others and almost to a man they have all crashed, fallen or been knocked off at one point or another.

Perhaps this is different in other countries but in the UK you have to accept its probably going to happen to you at some point and you just hope its not too serious. 

So why is there still a belief by a few that wearing a tracksuit and trainers is a good idea? I would love to say its just the gsxr crew and all the young guys but I see jeans and t shirts all the time in the summer from almost all age groups.

My other half avoided injury by wearing a good jacket, great gloves and a very expensive helmet that now looks like it will have to be replaced. Expensive little crash but I would pay out double that again...

I mean just imagine if she had really hurt herself!

who would do the laundry?

Bad company?

There are so many things to worry about when starting a business that it can be hard to prioritise. You have a great idea, you manage to get the funding and you’re off. What so many people always forget is that you are now responsible for all the roles in that company.

Don't understand marketing? you had better learn fast. not sure how to do your accounts? Get someone to help you. Don't  understand sales? Good luck. the buck stops with you!

The magic solution for many is a business partner, yay the workload is halved! Find another person who can share your passion, preferably has a different skill set and will work as hard as you. You can see how this would transform the whole experience.

With this comes a word of warning. Fall out with your partner, disagree on how the company should move forward, or find there is inequality of the workload and a partnership can become a living hell.

What never ceases to amaze me when looking in on others businesses is the amount of partners that start a business together without any thought process into any of the above. Of course some of these work out just fine, however other times this turns a stressful operation into an unlivable nightmare. A good friend of mine has a business with great potential. They have a great product and a wonderful niche market. unfortunately this business has a much smaller turnover than its potential and this is due to the fact the two partners have a completely different idea on how the business should move forward and cant stand to be in the same room as one another any more.

If there business wasn’t such a unique product on the market they would have gone under last year and lost a lot of money.

There perhaps is a moral in this. If you really think your idea is good enough then don’t worry about any of this crap, stop reading stupid blogs and get out there and make it happen however you want!

What happend next?

If you have seen the BT adverts with Adam and Jane then this is capture of the website asking the public to choose what happens next......

I liked the idea so I added a few pictures to help story board it. Click image to enlarge.

Apple Vs Kindle

Finally Mac users have realised the futility of arguing against the cheaper more powerful pc and have started to set their sights a little more realistically.

The latest flaming across the web has been mac users shouting how superior their Ibooks and Ipads are to the Kindle book reader. I decided to look into this and see what truth there was in some of the claims being made.

“My mac has a bigger screen and looks much nicer than this rubbish kindle thing” James from a west London coffee shop was quoted as saying. James went onto say “although the Kindle probably has a better processor, if I had it, my Macbook would run Photoshop better!”

Other users of the Ipad complain that the Kindle is way to complex and argue the better ergonomics of the Ipad means they can show their friends app icons much easier.

An independent survey held by macisbest magazine, showed that according to its readership although the Kindle has a better screen for reading on it is simply not as good as the highly reflective surface on the Ibook and Ipad, it fails to have the apple logo and is unable to display its content no matter which way you pick it up, because of this it was almost unusable to nearly 75% of Mac users that tested it. The editor of macisbest magazine “khan Jimbleson, finally summed up by explaining that the kindle is simply not as good value as the Ipad.

We approached a Kindle user who seemed unaware of the rivalry and asked what his opinion was on the arguments between the two brand users “I don’t really know anything about it to be honest, I got the Kindle so that I could read on it, to be fair it just seemed like a nifty idea for £150”

I took this revelation to Khan who refused to comment, however Macisbest magazine later released a press statement.:

“We find the obvious attack on apple's range of products disgusting and verging on racist! The idea that an ipad is not able to read books is frankly offensive and the attack on the great value offered by apple is just plain wrong, you can get the same memory, 3g connectivity and ability to read books for only £550 more and we see no need to be able to upgrade the storage with SD cards. This is simply Amazon trying to throw its weight around and scare the little guys!”

The Kindle community seems keen to compound the anger of Ipad owners by pointing out that the Kindle 3g gives free connection and data usage and has a battery life that can outlast the Ipad by a number of days.

They however offered an olive branch by pointing out that there is a Kindle application available on the Iphone and Ipad to allow the apple users the same access to a quality ebook reader and admitting that the kindle probably isn’t quite as good as the Ibook for graphic design.

I find myself stuck in the middle of perhaps one of the closest matched conflicts of technology. I leave it to you to make your own decisions but as it currently stands there are no clear answers as to who will come out on top. If you want a portable devise that has free internet access, the ability to play music, read books and has a long battery life then you should probably pick Kindle. However if you want to be able to run photoshop and other graphical design packages you should probably get a laptop.

If however you really want an apple logo and to be able to hold your device upside down and still be able to read it then buy an Ipad. Even after all this reasearch I still cannot think of one good fucking reason to buy an Ibook.