DaveyPitch

We moved into our new office today in work, me and the other 2 IT Techs. It’s so much nicer than our old office, which was in the basement of the main building in the school In our old office, we had no windows, no carpet, no door for ourselves, and we were next to the photocopying room which meant we got a lot of traffic by our room. Our new office is in a completely different building, one of the newest in the school and has everything the old office doesn’t. Our new office is on the 2nd floor, with a window with a great view of greenery and scenery. We have a door for ourselves, which actually locks, a nice carpet, and some custom built benching with plenty of room for the 3 of us to work on several machines at once. It’s going to take us a while to get settled in properly, half of our stuff is still in boxes, but it’s already much nicer than I thought it would be. It looks like the school has given us a great office, and I couldn’t be happier about it.

A great performance and a great result for Everton against Man Utd on Saturday. I was sceptical going into the game as we don’t usually do too well against Man Utd, but for once not only did we beat them, but we did it by outplaying them. When most teams outside the top 4 beat Utd they do it on the back of a solid defence, stopping Man Utd playing proper football, and getting a single goal and defending it with their lives. Everton didn’t do that, taking the game to them and trying to outplay them, just like we’ve done recently against Man City, Arsenal and Chelsea. It was a tremendous team performance, even more remarkable because we were missing two of our best performers this season in Fellaini and Tim Cahill. Without Fellaini in the team I was worried we’d lack a physical presence in midfield, but it seems having 5 talented midfielders playing (Osman, Arteta, Donovan, Pienaar and Bilyaletdinov) meant that we were able to keep possession better, denying Man Utd their usual mountains of possession which they can use to break teams down. Man Utd can possibly point to their midweek exertions in Milan, coupled with the fact they were missing a few keys players of their own (Giggs, Ferdinand, Vidic), but it would be harsh on Everton to suggest they were the reasons we won the game. Even Alex Ferguson himself admitted they were outplayed in the second half of the game. If we can continue to play like this for the rest of the season, we definitely have an outside chance of grabbing a European place. We’re currently 7 points behind Liverpool in 5th place, with a game in hand over them, so it’s unlikely, but I know David Moyes will push the team to go as far as they can.

Great to see Jack Rodwell come on and do so well. I mentioned in my blog a few days ago about my hopes for him, and it was good to see him come on and play well, scoring the goal that sealed the game for us. It was such a well taken goal, showing great composure to place the ball in the corner rather than simply lashing at it. If I were in that position I definitely would have just tried to put my foot through the ball, hitting it as hard as I could, but he showed great maturity to slot it away nicely. Hopefully as he returns to full fitness he’ll get more game time and we can see more goals like that from the youngster before the end of the season.

The new laptop that I ordered on Tuesday evening arrived yesterday, and it’s oh so lovely. Even though a friend in work has a very similar laptop which is the same size as mine, I still wasn’t quite ready for how big it would feel. At 18.4″ it’s one of the biggest laptops you can get, and I think just about still fits the description of “laptop”, as it just about fits on my lap when I’m sitting on the couch. It’s really well specced, and after I upgraded to Windows 7 (which took longer than I thought, roughly 3 hours or s0), one of the first things I did was to load up Fallout 3 and see how well it runs. I’ve been after a proper gaming laptop for a while, so I can enjoy playing some good PC games on the couch so I can still talk to the wife, rather than hiding away upstairs in our spare bedroom/office. Needless to say I was very happy when it auto-detected my settings and set Fallout 3 to High Quality. I’ve transferred my save games from the PC and loaded them up, and I’m really impressed by just how well the game runs, even out in the Wasteland, everything is smooth and looks just fantastic. I definitely need to get some more demanding games to really give the laptop a test. May download the demo of Crysis as that’s meant to be an absolute beast, so that should be a great test.

This laptop really make a difference to my days in work as well. Usually on my lunchtime I’ll just faff around on the internet, but now I can load up a game and spend a good solid hour playing something fun. No matter how badly my morning has gone, a game always cheers me up and considering the way things have been in work recently, this laptop may well save me from saying something to someone that I’d likely regret later. It’ll also no doubt make people jealous when they come into the office and see this shiny beast sat on my desk, so that’s a good thing as well

I’ve become quite bad at getting this done lately, missing another day yesterday, though I feel I have a pretty valid excuse this time. On Wednesday night, I had really bad toothache for some reason, and it kept me awake pretty much all night. Even though I took some painkillers, which eventually kicked in around 4am, I still couldn’t get to sleep properly. I think I ended up dropping off around 5:30am, and my alarm went off a little over an hour later to get up for work. If things had been quieter in work I probably would have rang in sick and just stayed in bed, but things had to get done, moving a lot of our kit into our new office (which we move into on Monday), and just getting lots of various small bits done. I was pretty useless all day as you can imagine, so my brain was in no fit state to get a blog post done. Thankfully I went to bed pretty handy last night and had a great nights sleep, so I’m feeling much more human today. I’m going to try to get several blog posts up today in an effort to catch up with everyone else who have already done nearly 50 posts!

We had some absolutely devastating news for Everton fans yesterday with the reports that Marouane Fellaini will be out for around 6 months as a result of the ankle injury he received during the Merseyside Derby. It really didn’t look that serious at first, and I thought that maybe he’d just sprained/twisted his ankle and he’d be out for a couple of weeks at most, but the news that it’s this serious is a huge blow for an Everton team that’s really started to find its form recently. While we’re a long way from the Champions League places, I had hoped that a late push for the Europa League spots wouldn’t be beyond us, but Fellaini has been absolutely key for us in the past couple of months and he’ll be a big miss.

The upside of it, if there is one, is that Jack Rodwell is just now returning to fitness, and the defensive midfield role Fellaini has been playing should suit him perfectly. He’s big, strong, can tackle, hits a decent pass, and can score goals from distance with either foot. He’s not in Fellaini’s class yet, but he’s only a kid and a run of games will certainly help his development. We could also put Phil Neville in that role and play young Seamus Coleman at right back, as he’s another very promising youngster who would benefit from a run of games. At least with most of our players returning to fitness we can start to cover these injuries a bit easier. All we need now is Arteta to get fully match fit again, and Jagielka back at the heart of the defence, and we’ll be laughing.

Good result last night against Sporting Lisbon as well, just a shame we conceded that late goal. I’m confident we can go over there and score, it’s just whether we can restrict them as well. Man Utd at Goodison first though on Saturday. They’re in great form lately and Wayne Rooney has been on fire, and he’s the key to the match I think. If we can somehow keep him quiet, we’ll have a good chance of taking all 3 points off them. If he plays as well as he has been lately, we’ll be in trouble. Hopefully Yobo can have a good game against him. I know Yobo isn’t the highest regarded defender around, but he has the qualities to do well against Rooney – he’s quick, he’s strong, and he’s not easily knocked around. He is also prone to lapses in concentration though, and he can’t afford that on Saturday. Fingers crossed he’ll put in a performance I know he’s capable of, keep Rooney quiet, and Saha continues his excellent form and scores a couple for us.

I was going to wait for a while before ordered my new laptop, hoping to win the funds through poker playing. While that is going pretty well at the moment, I’m still some way off the required amount of money. Unfortunately, a few things have happened that have required me to order the laptop sooner rather than later. So, after a fair bit of searching and researching, I ordered an Acer Aspire 8935G last night from Simply Acer. It’s a cracking deal for a really powerful laptop, and I can’t wait for it to arrive. I feel like a kid at Christmas waiting for his presents. One of the things I do with my laptop is take it to work with me, so I have something I can relax with during breaks and my lunch hour. With this laptop, I can see myself wandering the Capital Wasteland or running through Rapture in my free time in work, something that will make the working day much more bearable. Of course, I’ll also be playing poker on it and hopefully writing lots of reviews, and something with a bigger screen and bigger keyboard will certainly make that much easier. I just hope the Targus rucksack I have for my old 17″ laptop is big enough for this new one, as laptop bags this big are really quite expensive!

I’ve spent the last few days watching the entire extended trilogy of The Lord of the Rings with the wife, including a 4 hour session this morning for the entire Return of the King film. It’s not the first time we’ve done this, and won’t be the last either, as we both absolutely love the films. It says something about a film when you can sit there for 4 hours non-stop, only moving from the couch to change the discs over, and not actually feel it’s been anywhere near that long. It’s wonderfully put together by Peter Jackson, and rightfully deserves the high praise it’s received over the years.

One thing I think is pretty unique about the trilogy is that each new film is better than the last. With most film series, the first movie is the best with the subsequent sequels trying to live up to the heights of the original. There are some notable examples of where sequels can match the original, such as Aliens and Terminator 2 being on a par with the original films in the respective series, though both sequels are more action oriented than their predecessors. For me, the Bourne trilogy manages to be exceptional throughout, yet I can’t think of a single film series that gets better as it goes along. I know that the main reason for that is the quality of the story itself, but Jackson deserves a lot of credit for turning that story into an exceptional series of films. All I need to do now is get around to actually reading all the books (yes I know I should have read them, don’t shout at me).

Just a very quick blog post today, as I’m really tired after getting far too little sleep last night, and completely forgot about this until now. I shall make sure I get my thinking cap on to try to come up with something interesting or amusing for tomorrow’s blog post

In my efforts to get myself a new laptop, I’m been digging through my boxes of old PC equipment to find stuff I could sell at Computer Exchange. To my surprise, I found 2 60 GB Sata hard drives, one 80 GB Sata 2.5″ laptop hard drive, 10 sticks of DDR ram, a 20 GB Xbox 360 hard drive, and my recently replaced 8800 GTS graphics card. All together it came to a pretty penny according to the CEX website, so I bagged it all up this morning and went off into the city centre.

I booked all the stuff into CEX around 12:30, who said it would take around 2 hours to test everything, so I went off to lunch with the wife, my mother-in-law, and the wife’s granddad. After lunch was finished, I wasted a little time wandering around before heading back to the store to see the state of everything, and to collect my cash, as I knew everything to be in perfect working order so it should have no problems. After queuing for about 20 minutes, I was less than impressed with the response.

First of all, they told me the graphics card had failed because the woman testing it didn’t like the sound it made when running. That sound, dear readers, was merely the sound of the very large fan on the card, but despite being told this, she said they wouldn’t take it. Then I was told that they wouldn’t take 8 sticks of the ram, due to them not having a particular sticker on them which they apparently now require. Fair enough I guess, rules are rules, even though the ram tested fine and I probably should have been told that earlier. Then it was time to move onto the working stuff.

The nice chap serving me brought the rest of the gear and said that although they would take the hard drives and 2 sticks of the ram, they didn’t have any money in to pay me. They apparently didn’t even have enough to pay for one of the hard drives, a mere £6! As I’m sure you can appreciate, I was more than a little miffed by this point. Not only were they not taking perfectly good, working ram, not only were they telling me my graphics card is making a funny noise when it’s working fine, but they’re also telling me they can’t give me the money for the stuff that actually does work! I decided not to take them up on their offer of coming back tomorrow for the money, as there was no guarantee they would have it, and I was less than impressed with them by that point, so I left and managed to catch up with the wife to get the bus home.

Eagle-eyed readers might spot one thing I mentioned taking in which I didn’t mention in the above two paragraphs – the Xbox 360 hard drive. It was only when I was already on the bus that I realised they hadn’t given it back to me, so I had to get off at the next stop, make my way back into the city centre, and pick it back up again. The staff member I spoke to was pretty apologetic about the whole thing, and I don’t blame him for it, but surely to god if you’re a store that buys a lot of items from the public, you should make sure you have some way of paying them for their stuff?! I would have happily have taken a cheque for the items they were willing to take, or they could have funded my account directly the same way some stores do with refunds, straight onto my bank card. As it stands I’ll now have to send everything off to their website, where I’m hoping they have more qualified testers who will take everything in, though I’ll have to leave out the hard drives as they will simply add too much weight to the package and the cost of sending them all will be way too high.

Hopefully they’ll deal with it all pretty quickly online, and I can get the money soon. I’m impatient enough as it is, but I’m getting sick of not having a laptop I can trust to run things without crashing, so the sooner I can get the new laptop the better.

It’s currently lunchtime in work which is thankfully quiet enough I can get a quick blog post up. It’s only a few hours now until 4pm when I can leave work, something I’m really looking forward to today. I’ve got Monday and Tuesday booked off as next week is half term, and with all the shit that’s been going on in work lately, I feel I could really use the break.

My plans for the 4 days off are currently – nothing, which is exactly what I want. Normally I don’t mind having things planned for my time off, but with feeling like I need this break, I’m happy to just go with the flow each day and do whatever I feel like doing. I do need to nip into the city centre tomorrow as I have some bits to sell to go towards my new laptop fund (getting there slowly but surely),  but beyond that, nothing concrete has been decided. I do have the house to myself tomorrow night though while he wife is at the 30th birthday party of a work colleague, so I’m sure I’ll get a good session in on something like Bioshock 2 or Batman: Arkham Asylum.

I like weekends where I can just decide on a whim what I want to do. It just seems to make everything much more relaxed, which is what I need right now so I can de-stress properly. I’ll just need to remember to get my blog-a-day posts done as they will definitely be one thing I’ll likely forget to do. Should probably set a reminder on my phone to make sure I don’t miss any days.

Roll on 4pm though, the weekend can’t come quick enough.