JamesThorburn

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.

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.

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.

Absolutely awesome, full of energy and sounding even better than on their studio albums.

I managed to get hold of a first gen iphone to play with the other day to have a play with, so this is a quick test of Safari.Overall I’m quite impressed, the UI is extremely slick, but the lack of GPS is a downer for me. When my contract is up a 3G iPhone from O2 will definately be tempting.

Actually a week is a lie, its very nearly two weeks now, but the first few days it was sat in the garage waiting for the tax to be sorted.

I was really concerned before collecting it that I was going to miss the MX-5 and that the Elise would be a little too hardcore and impractical.

It seems silly to consider the MX-5 practical, but by comparison it really is. The Elise’s boot is literally half the size of the Mazda’s, and thats before I put the tool kit in there. It also has a weight limit of 50KG, and everything you put in it gets cooked thanks to being sat behind the engine and above the exhaust. That said it proved big enough to fit my camera, tripod, laptop, a change of clothes and the soft top in, which is all I really need. The interior is completely devoid of cubby holes, or even a glove box, so any CD’s have to live in the boot too.

But then I knew this before I got it, and I don’t care because it is absolutely gorgeous and makes every journey feels like an event.

The Mazda was an incredibly fun car to drive, but the Elise is so much more physical and communicative that it sucks you in to another level. Nothing is assisted, no power steering, no servos on the brakes (if you need to slow down quickly, you need to press them HARD!), no traction control and the engine is like a living being over your shoulder which communicates to you as you move through the rev range, changing its tone with every modulation of the throttle pedal. Put simply if you want a car that engages you completely there is nothing else like it.

My MX-5 has finally been sold, after almost 3 years I was sad to see it go as it has been absolutely brilliant fun.

 That said, I’m sure I’ll get over it….

Nine Inch Nails have released a new album, ‘Ghosts I – IV’, a set of 36 new instrumental tracks and it’s rather good.

The first nine tracks are available for free, while the rest are available in a range of options, from $5 for a download only option to $300 for a signed vinyl set with various extras. Personally I went for the $10 (+ $13 pnp) download + 2 CD option.

Even if you aren’t a big Nine Inch Nails fan the free tracks are worth a listen, and if you like them an extra $5 isn’t much to ask for the download. You can find it here. It’s a very different sound to With Teeth or Year Zero, and seems more closely related to The Fragile, to my ears at least.

Also worth checking out is the Saul Williams album, The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust, which was produced by Trent Reznor, and is available completely free (although I paid for the higher quality version) here. This one definately isn’t going to be to everyones taste, but if nothing else it’s worth supporting artists distributing music without the restrictions imposed by record companies.

Too much complaining, how about things I like for a change.

• No Country For Old Men – Stunning film, brutal and brilliant.
• Burnout Paradise – The absolute perfect Burnout game, it simply could not be better.
• Dexter – So much better than 99% of the series on TV these days. Also manages to present a likeable serial killer, which is a little odd.
• Skins – Second series coming soon.