Random musings of an unoccupied mind led me to enquire the following: why is stealing a car after evicting it’s present occupants known as carjacking? After all, you don’t “planejack” an aircraft, you hijack it.

The sequitur concerned the derivation of the word hijack. Thanks to the newly revamped (but still pop-up infested) dictionary.com, I learn that the word hijack is a verb derived from hijacker or, rather, highjacker, a term coined in America during the 1920’s and is a corruption of highwayman and jacker, a jacker being someone who hunts at night with the aid of a jacklight (which, in turn, is a type of oil lantern).

So there we have it.

(Addendum: I’ve subsequently learnt that during the 1960’s, the term skyjack was used to describe the hijacking of aircraft.)

Because I have little else in my life that’s quite so important.

I wondered what I’d be reduced to playing with my backup graphics card today. It’s a NVidia GeForce 3 Ti 200, with 64Mb of video memory and a DirectX 8 level card. So I checked the stats on some of the games I do still play (while currently dealing with my MMO addiction) and found that the minimum requirements came in at:

EQ2, SWG, WoW: 64Mb 3D Card (Pixel Shader & Vertex Shader compatible)
Unreal Tournament 2004: GeForce 2 or superior (64Mb memory or above)
Half-Life 2: DirectX 7 level card
F.E.A.R: 64Mb GeForce 4 Ti or ATI Radeon 9000.

Well, sure enough on checking the fine print, the GeForce 3 has Pixel Shader and Vertex Shader capability. I’ve no idea what it does but the card does it and that makes me happy.

I loaded up Half Life 2 and it ran fine. Okay so it only ran at a small screen resolution of 800×600 but I can live with that. Probably. I can certainly live without playing F.E.A.R for a bit so I should be all right for an interim period. But despite what it says, EQ2 isn’t playing nice. It’s jittery and stutters and, well, just isn’t that much of a pleasure to play graphically speaking at the moment.

So, the dilemma is whether or not to spend thirty quid on a DirectX 9.0 level card with 128Mb (or, dare I say, 256Mb) video RAM*. Is it worth having a backup card that will adequately deal with my gaming needs while my primary card gets repaired?

D’ya know, I remember when all you needed to play a PC** game was 4Mb of RAM. Forget the 3D cards and the physics card and the digital surround environmental 5.1 audio experience card, we had an SVGA chip and liked it. If we were lucky, we might have had a CD-ROM too.

*Oh yes, I remember the days when we just needed 16kb of RAM too.

In between going to weddings, getting drunk, sobering up, getting drunk, going on the wagon, not getting drunk, going to the zoo and changing nappies, I decided that changing the PSU on my PC would be A Good Thing ™. Unfortunately I had to find out what PSU meant first but after discovering that it didn’t mean Pissed and Stoned User (a term that would have been appropriate in my recently departed job) but, in fact, it meant Power Supply Unit, I felt confident I could go to my locally run PC supply store and buy one.

My only criteria was this: I needed an ultra quiet one. The kind gentlemen in the shop said that the only one they had registered at under 26dB which sounds pretty quiet to me although I couldn’t tell you what 1 decibel sounded like, let alone 26.

You see, the reason I needed a new PSU was not because the old one had failed but because the bearings on the cooling fans were creating a hell of a noise. I did drop a drop of 3-in-1 not long ago but fear that this was something that could have been worth doing a year or so back. (Top-tip: don’t use WD40. It’s not good for it.) So, to quell further complaints from the spouse unit, I figured a new PSU with bigger wattage and quiter spinning parts would be the order of the day.

Changing the power supply ranks a little more complicated than changing batteries and marginally more difficult than changing a light bulb or installing a new PCI card. It’s all the wires, see. One for each of the DVD drives, one for each of the Hard Drives, one for the unused floppy drive (which is a different size connection to the other lot), a special small one for the wotsit on the motherboard and a special big one for the doodah on the motherboard and, finally, one for the graphics card.

Changing the power supply also fried the aforementioned graphics card. Bastard.

I hoped at first that the corrupt display might actually be the archaic CRT monitor that I purloined several years back but oh no, my ATI Radeon All Singing All Dancing Big Number GT with go-faster stripes in British Racing Dayglo Red was not outputting the desired content that I wished it output. Replacing the card with a sturdy but less powerful and considerably superceded model worked, confirming that the graphics card in question was at fault.

So two options: the first and cheapest would be to send the card back to ATI because I believe it’s still under warranty (although any mention of PSU swapping shenanigans might be ommitted owing the inhalation of too much talcum powder and baby oil). The second and more appealing option would be to check out the price of new cards. Oh, look, there’s the latest model of the one that broke and it’s ouch, how much? Oh well, I’m sure I can justify it somehow I mean, it’s not like it’s the most expensive, top end graphics card available, capable at running Half Life 2 at 60+ frames per second or such like. I have modest needs and one of those needs is the capability to capably cope with video processing. So £275 is probably worth it.

But what the hell is this PCI-Express thing? Faster than AGP is it? When did this come in? I mean, I’ve only had my brand new motherboard for, oh, two years. No wonder it’s obsolete. So a new PCI-E graphics card at £275 and a new motherboard with slot at £120 because I need a pretty good one and while I’m at it, I’m going to need a new processor because the PCI-E capable mobo doesn’t support my current one so another £300 and that’s £700 for a new graphics card.

I’ll be in touch with the warranty people tomorrow.

If you need to travel home by train after a night out on the beers, resist the urge to sit down on as hard as you can and stand instead. Unless you’re particularly skilled, you won’t fall asleep and miss your stop.

Exactly the sort of advice that would have been useful last night and would have saved me a wadge of cash for a taxi from Milton Keynes to home after I fell asleep and missed my stop.

This Public Service Announcement was brought to you by ten pints of Old Speckled Hen, a bottle of Smirnoff Ice and a packet of extra strength Resolve.

In a little over three hours I shall be unemployed. I can’t help but feel a little smug.

Okay, so I won’t actually be unemployed except in terms of not being on anyone’s payroll nor getting any benefits other than those gained from spending quality time with my family and looking after the hatchling. But, to all extensive purposes, I will be gainfully unemployed.

To be honest, even if my status as a “stay at home” dad only lasts two weeks, it’s been worth it just to see the look on peoples faces when I tell them that I’m not actually going to a new job with another company. Sure I’m probably going to be working harder than I do at the moment (with less time to spend on the web, answering emails and all that shite) but in some ways - quite a few I can think of at the moment - it’ll be far more rewarding.

So, three more hours and then a few drinks and I’ll no longer be working as another insignificant cog in the stinking capitalist engine of the ever so great company I’ve been a slave to for the last five years.

Already own an XBox 360 but want to broaden your horizons? Not sure whether to hold on for a Playstation 3 or Nintendo Wii?

Perhaps this video will help you make up your mind!

The post came early yesterday morning. In amongst the usual detritus of loan offers, double glazing promotions and big prize draw entries was an A4 envelope containing the details of another little event I’ve entered. The Original Mountain Marathon, formerly known as the Karrimor International Mountain Marathon (while said company was the primary sponsor), began in 1968 and remains one of the premier tests of fitness and navigation skills in the world.

The name is a bit misleading: the event itself is a two-person, team race that takes place over two days and is subdivided into several classes depending on experience and ability. Only class C actually covers a marathon distance (give or take a mile), requiring teams to cover 40km over the two days. Class B ups the distance to 50km, with class A covering 60km. The Elite course is a grueling 80+km event. That’s the equivalent of a full 26.2 marathon distance each day. Each team is required to carry all the kit they’ll need for the duration of the event, including waterproof clothing, tent, sleeping bag, stove and enough food for 36 hours.

The location of the event changes from year to year and this time round it’s taking place in Galloway Forest Park in Dumfrieshire in Southern Scotland. Apparently this is one of, if not the, most gruelling and challenging locations the race has ever taken place in and the ‘76, ‘86 and ‘96 events are memorably for most of the competitors dropping out, from what I can tell.

We’re not stretching ourselves too much, though, and, owing to the fact that I haven’t been up a mountain in the best part of 20 years, we’ve only entered the B class.

I think I’d better start training.

From the slightly bendy mind of Warren Ellis comes Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E., now on issue 7. View the first couple of pages here.

Fantastic! Absolutely hysterical.

(via Rossingol)

After last weeks terrorist scares and multiple arrests, there has been a variety of cynical and conspiracy-theory ridden posts about the “convenient” timing of these arrests and musings about whether or not there’s some Orwellian (as opposed to Channel Fourian) Big Brother style scheme to subdue and placate the general populous into giving away what few civil liberties they might feel they’ve got left.

This is as illogical and ludicrous as it is preposterous.

Don’t misunderstand me - I’m sure that, if they could manage it, the current government would like nothing better to do than to spy on us 24/7, hand over its citizens to the US under an extremely biased and one sided extradition treaty on some of the most tenuous and spurious charges imaginable and introduce voluntarily compulsory ID cards.

But we are talking about the same government who couldn’t even pretend they’d found some weapons of mass destruction in a sand pit in Iraq thereby justifying the war against them, nor provide some convenient evidence to show how an innocent Brazilian who was shot on the tube just happened to be dating Osama Bin Liner’s pool cleaner’s son’s dog’s breeder’s daughter’s cousin, nor hide the fact that they’d freed 1023 foreign prisoners who should have been deported back to a more civilized and competent country.

So if you’re telling me that you think the government organised a massive PR stunt on the kind of scale that would have the Ministry of Truth nodding in smug approval then I can only point out that on past record, the presiding government seem generally unable to organise an evening consisting of imbibing a superfluous, nausea-inducing amount of inebriants in a fermented alcoholic beverage manufacturing establishment.

On the other hand, this is exactly the sort of disruptive, morale quelling, market lowering stunt that only the government could pull off.

Well it was all very pretty and the acting was great but - and feel free to call me uncouth - I don’t see what the fuss was about. There seems to be a lot of hype about Brokeback Mountain that probably stems from the fact two young Hollywood bucks “get it on”, as it were. Yes there’s a good measure of the victimisation and persecution of 1960’s rural America added into the mix along with a healthy dollop of self loathing and denial but the way the hype went regarding this film, you’d think this was untouched subject matter and that this was a groundbreaking movie touching on a taboo topic that had never been committed to celluloid before. Certainly, when it comes to gay cowboys there’s a bit of a scarcity of material, that much is true.

Still, I suppose I’m glad I saw Brokeback Mountain. It did seem to drag somewhat and it’s a little downbeat with all the homophobia and seventies (yes, it skips forward in period) texan stylings but Ang Lee did direct this marvellously and I should stress that the acting is uniformly superb although there’s one thing I will say and that is cowboys mumble a lot which means I have no idea what the hell they were speaking about for the first quarter of the film. Not too much of a problem as I reckon it was mostly about sheep (they weren’t cowboys, they were shepherds), beans soup and shagging.

I still think that if you want to watch a decent gay love story, you could do worse than check out the Coen Brothers’ “Miller’s Crossing“.