Feckoff.net

I’m a longtime Firefox user, and Firefox 3 is my browser of choice on my desktop PC (Windows Vista) and on a regular laptop (Ubuntu 8.04), but it seems a bit inadequate for low-powered small-screen devices like my Asus Eee 901, which is also running Ubuntu 8.04.
Firefox seems very slow on this system. It seems to freeze and pause a lot while its doing stuff in the background which I never experience on my faster systems. Because of this, I went looking for a suitable replacement for use on the netbook. I would have liked to try Google Chrome on it, since I liked it on Windows, but it is not yet available for any other platforms. I ended up choosing Opera 9, which feels much, much faster on the little Eee. Its also readily available from the Ubuntu repositories. I wasn’t a big fan of Opera on Windows, preferring the “feel” of Firefox, but I’m sold on it for this kind of machine.

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I went to see Tropic Thunder at the cinema tonight. I thought it was funny as fuck and would recommend it to anyone with a functioning sense of humour.

Trailer:

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The latest version of Fortress Forever comes with a great piece of startup music that many will recognise as a cover of Ennio Morricone’s famous “The Ecstasy of Gold”, from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Its also well known amongst Metallica fans, as they use it to open their live shows.

This particular version is an acoustic guitar rendition of the song, and you can listen to it here.

(embed now turned into a link since it bloody autoplays)
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Well, I got back home on Saturday morning. Managed to stay awake until 8pm, after which I crashed and slept for 16 hours. Now I’m back in work.

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Spent some time messing about with the D90’s video mode some more last night. Here’s the result. I would embed it here, except that Vimeo disables hi-def when you embed. I didn’t bother uploading it to flickr since they seem to compress the crap out of video. Also, all that muck you can see is on the car, not the lens

(Sigma 10-20 @ 20mm, f/8)

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I used my spanky new D90 to capture this clip this morning:

Crazy bastards.
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This song seems to be all the rage here in Idaho at the moment, with widespread play in bars and on the radio (albeit in a more cleaned up form):

Buckcherry - Too Drunk
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At least in US shops anyway! I got my hands on one with the 18-105mm VR lens in Best Buy this morning. The body-only version apparently won’t be available for another month.

\o/

Fare ye well humble D50, you served me well.

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I probably should have mentioned earlier that I’m away traveling for work again. I’m in Twin Falls, Idaho at the moment. Getting here was a pain in the ass, and took 23 hours including driving to the airport. My route was Dublin > Atlanta > Salt Lake City > Twin Falls.

I exhibited pro skillz by losing my laptop just after going through security in Atlanta. I didn’t notice it was missing until about an hour and a half later when I was on the other side of the utterly massive airport. Fortunately the TSA guys found it and returned it to me when I showed up back at the original terminal again. How nice of them to not destroy it, given that it was abandoned in a secure area. That was a fun way to kill time between flights.

I eventually got in to Twin Falls at about 10.30 last night. I picked up my rental car, which turned out to be a hilariously massive Buick Lucerne with a 3.8 litre V6 and a shitty 4-speed automatic gearbox. Well, it beats the Fiat Idea diesel I had last time in Germany

Today’s a public holiday in the US, so I took the opportunity to go take a few photos of local sights. There’s a small selection of them up on flickr.

I’ll be heading home on September 19th. Until then there’s work to be done! Also, free and fast wifi in the hotel rocks.
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