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In the last few months I've been following the Mars Phoenix lander on Twitter.
Its updates are being written by the folks at mission control, of course, but in a style that makes it seem like the lander is a real person. Now that the lander is about to be switched off, its final, elegiac updates are making me feel like I'm watching a friend die. It's a really odd feeling.
Kudos to NASA for using Twitter in such a creative, but still informative, way.
I happen to agree with Wayne Furbert that the choice of Charlie Swan to contest Jon Brunson's old seat seems a poor one. Perhaps he would make a great MP, but I've never heard of him and it wouldn't surprise me if he loses to Marc Bean.
Nevertheless, as a UBP MP (and a former leader), it was inappropriate for Mr. Furbert to publicly criticise the party's decision in the way he did. Without unity, there is no benefit to be gained from having parties - the members may as well all just be a bunch of independents.
If Mr. Furbert only rarely publicly criticised his party, this would be forgivable. But Mr. Furbert's attacks on his party have continued ever since he was deposed from the leadership, and his complaints sound whiny, not principled. The final straw, however, must surely be his comments in today's Royal Gazette, where he publicly threatened to reveal unpleasant secrets about both the UBP and its chairman, Michael Fahy, should the party move to discipline him.
This is blackmail, and it is completely out of order. Mr. Furbert should resign from the UBP immediately. If he does not, the party should expel him, regardless of his threats.
Given my problems getting what I want from Dell or HP, I've started looking at some boutique PC vendors. Falcon Northwest and Puget Systems seem to have pretty favourable ratings (at least as far as PC vendors go) and both look like they'll ship internationally.
Falcon's configuration options for their Mach V desktop are particularly well laid-out with great flexibility in the options (they let me choose 64 bit Vista Ultimate - hurrah! - as well as 8 GB of RAM). Their pricing seems pretty good too - at least as long as you don't think about the shipping and duty charges, which alone are likely to add a wince-inducing $2000 to the price tag. The only question is what kind of warranty and support options I'd have here.
So it looks like I may not be able to get a quote for the HP Blackbird 002 because "these machines are not supported in our region". Best case, even if I can get hold of one there will be no warranty support here. Sweet.
So I go to the Dell site and spec out a machine as close to my requirements as I can get. But my only options for the operating system are 32-bit Vista Home Premium or 32-bit Vista Business and I want 64-bit Ultimate. So I start a chat with a Dell rep to ask whether I can get it, and after trying to fob me off saying that's not what I want, the best he can say is maybe it will be available in my region in a few more months.
This is crazy. The machine I'm speccing out allows me to select 4GB of RAM. Yet each program in a 32 bit Windows operating system can only access 2 to 3.8 GB of that memory (depending on the settings). So with a 32-bit version of Vista, between 0.2GB and 2GB of my RAM is going to waste. Dell's options make no sense.
If I lived in the US, I could order an XPS 630 with 64 bit Vista Home Premium (though again, bizarrely, Ultimate is not an option). Why not here?
Why does buying a gaming PC have to be so difficult in Bermuda?
My PC died last night, damn thing. It was just over two years old.
It had been behaving oddly for the last couple of days - the monitor turning on and off when the machine was first booted up, as if it was having trouble syncing with the signal from the PC. Yesterday morning I set it doing a defrag and got home to a black screen and a quiet, repetitive clicking from the hard drive. I rebooted it, but it didn't get beyond the first Dell startup screen.
I'd been suspicious of the hard drive for a while, so fortunately bought myself an external hard drive for backup a couple of months ago. I think I had most things backed up, but I won't know until it comes to restoring them and I find out what I missed.
Unfortunately, getting a new PC looks like being a pain. Dell continue to treat Bermuda as part of Latin America, and their support has gone from bad to abysmal. We've pretty much stopped using them at work and there are rumours that Computer City, Bermuda's main Dell reseller, may be stopping using them too. The selection and quality of components available on Dell's Bermuda website are inferior to those on their US site, and their customisation options bizarrely limiting (why can I choose Vista Home Premium or Ultimate if I choose an XPS 730, but only Home Premium if I plump for an XPS 630 with over 4GB of RAM?).
As a result, I've specced out an HP box, their Blackbird 002 gaming rig. It seems to have attracted mostly positive reviews for a high-end gaming PC, but it is expensive, even at US prices (I'm now waiting on a quote for a landed Bermuda cost).
Part of the reason I think I'm going to have to spend more than I usually do is that I'm now moving to Vista for the first time. As that bloated OS consumes around 2GB of RAM when it isn't doing anything, I want to make sure I have enough RAM left for the games. That means 4GB is a bare minimum, and I'd prefer 6GB. In turn, that means I'm going to have to upgrade to 64-bit Vista, and although that's not any more expensive than the 32-bit variety, I am a bit nervous about potential compatibility issues.
Best case, it's going to be at least a month before any new PC I order gets here. It's particularly frustrating given that a copy of Far Cry 2 and King's Bounty arrived from Amazon yesterday too.
