JamesThorburn

I’ve opened up a new website for news and reviews on Media Centers and Home Theatre PC’s. Be sure to check it out at www.MCE-Pro.co.uk.

A couple quick posters we’re having printed made up from photos taken at Center Parcs last week.

My effort:

And Jo’s:

Comments welcomed

Short video I made showing off my Media Centre configuration the other week, with My Movies 3 and Maximus Arcade.

Thanks to the snow my Elise is continuing its winter hibernation.

Thankfully due to blagging lifts I’ve only missed one days work this week however, here’s hoping it’ll thaw out a bit soon.

Two hours upside down with my legs against the roof and naught but a screwdriver, socket set and two small spanners for company and the Elise finally has its new throttle mechanism.

Took another hour on top of that to convince it to CLOSE the throttle as well as open it, still at least it has a proper bearing in it now.

Also took it for a test drive with the roof off (after I realised this would make working on it ten times easier) only for it to start snowing as I drove through town, fun times.

House -- In, awesome. Garage painted. Shower fitted. Loft boarded and mostly insulated. Nice.

Car -- Still going but trying to use it less over the winter. Took it on track at Castle Combe for a Sprint in September -- finished 2nd out of the Elise’s despite the lowest spec car.

Work -- Keeping busy. Had some After Effects and Premiere Pro CS4 training today which proved interesting.

Christmas -- Presents mostly sorted, weirdly.

Mean’t to update this a few weeks back but things have been majorly busy lately so only just had a chance.

Since the last update I’ve bought a house with Jo and we’ve been here just over a month. Thankfully the place was in great condition so we’ve not had to do too much decorating but getting everything in and sorted was a pretty big task (I horde junk), but we’re pretty much there now.
We had the first of our house warming parties (for people local to us, having another next month for friends from further afield) and all went well, the weather held off for most the evening so fired up the BBQ and ate far too much chicken, burgers and sausages.

I’ve mostly spent today fiddling around with Maximus Arcade – setting up my media centre with a front-end for launching various emulators, so I’ve been playing around with Super Mario 64 (which looks absolutely awesome at 1080p on a 40″ LCD by the way, and works great with the Intel X4500 HD integrated graphics) while Jo has been proving she’s better than me at Sonic for the Mega Drive (I’ll get her gaming yet).

Oh and for anyone who reads this to find out my latest experiences with Virgin Media, although they had improved vastly since upgrading me to ADSL2+ I unsurprisingly didn’t transfer the account and am now using Be There.

And now it’s my bed time, as I get up at 6:45am these days(!) and should be walking in to work tomorrow, so need some rest!

Had some big changes happening lately which will post about once everything is all done and dusted, but for now I just want to make a quick music recommendation…

Lungs

The Florence and the Machine album, Lungs, is absolutely superb. Bought it Friday and have been listening to it all weekend having listened to some of their tracks on Youtube over the past year and seeing their wonderfully energetic performance at Radio 1’s One Big Weekend this year. Not a single bad track on the album and its hard to pick out stand out tracks because the quality is consistantly so high.

Below is the video to Rabbit Heart, which I believe is the current single.

My 18 month Virgin Media contract actually ran out a while back and I’m still using them. This may seem odd as I’ve been a fairly strong critic of what had been an awful service, but just before the contract ran out I got an e-mail saying my service was being upgraded.

So the upgrade arrives and I discover I’m now on the old Bulldog network with a ADSL2+ connection and after a few teething issues (original router, Netgear DG834G didn’t like ADSL2+ – replaced with a DG834N, electrical interference in the house was causing some drop outs – fixed with an iPlate) its been great.

Now I’m getting excellent reliability and performance. Part of me was tempted to change ISP on principle after all the issues but to be honest the last thing I want is to go through the same hastle again with someone else!

Had a while with no updates to this site for a couple reasons…

Due to not updating Wordpress for a while had a header file hacked and while fixing that and updating Wordpress I broke my own access to the sites back-end (or at least I thought I did). A lack of time meant I just left it as was.

In fact it wasn’t broken at all, so today I set out to fix it and…….. it’s absolutely fine! Seems our server was just playing silly buggers last time I went to use it.

Anyway lots been happening and can’t be bothered to write an essay but the last big one was taking a trip up to Scotland with some guys from TotalTorque for a bit of a driving holiday, then touring down through Scotland and the Lake District with my girlfriend. Great holiday even if it did leave the Elise sporting a collection of stone chips and a smashed headlight!

Had a chance to play with Martin’s Canon EOS 5D MkII and he was kind enough to join us on the trip to Inverness taking some video – complete with microphone wired into the engine bay for maximum noise.

Also took literally hours of 720p video on a couple Kodak Zi6 cameras which I have been meaning to sort through and make something with for the past month now. As a quick sample heres me driving down the Applecross Pass on the final day with the TT.net guys.