My first electric guitar. Epiphone Les Paul Black Beauty. It has an EMG 85 in the neck and 81 in the bridge. The middle pickup is still active and is very nice to use on clean. I daresay that Les Pauls are the finest instruments on the planet, their build is just beautiful. Plays like a dream, sounds like a demon. :twisted:

Ibanez S470, named "baby blue". I got this fairly cheap from SoundControl, right before they went A over T bust. When standing up with this, it feels like there's nothing there, it's so light. The action is very low and gives off some expected fret buzz, but it is amazingly easy to play. The maple neck is very smooth and the higher frets are easier to reach than the Les Paul. I use this guitar a lot for solos so I can go ape on the ZR tremolo, which by the way is easy as pie to restring.

I also have a Hofner acoustic, but the battery on my camera died so I cannae be arsed recharging it just yet. :P

Valkyria Chronicles. Seriously, this game is so good it's untrue. It markets itself as a tactical strategy RPG, but essentially it's a turn based Battalion Wars. I really dislike stratergy RPGs, I never got past the 4th mission in Final Fantasy Tactics and can barely do the first few missions in Advance Wars, but this game has got me hooked. If you have a PS3 I really recommend you buy it, even just to look at it's gorgeous anime visuals.

So Mondays I have a lesson 2-3 and then another 6-8. Unfortunately the bus I catch is every half hour and so if I was to, by the time I get home it would be time to leave again. So I'm stuck in uni using MSN 5.0 and Internet Explorer 6.

So it's been an hour already and I've finished all my reading, handed in library books and now surfing web comics. Penny-Arcade and Least I Could Do delivers, as usual. I checked out Ctrl-Alt-Del's new comics before, which I haven't done in a few weeks. For those who don't know it's now turned into a soap opera, right down to the suspected cheating and make up beach wedding thereafter. VG Cats updates about as regularly as a constipated squirrel, so nothing new there.

I've also found that a lot of websites are bought on the sheer chance of accidentally misspelling a URL. The keyboard I'm using is filthy so I'm trying to maintain as little contact as possible. I tried to access CAD, but left out the R in Ctrl, and just now EuroGamer, spelt Eruogamer. Both times I'm sent to a credit authenticating site that sends about 3 popups for screensavers. I remember the good old days when you just got "address not found".

So Halloween, time to break out the pumkins! Well pumkin, Tesco's was a bit low on decent ones. As they say on Blue Peter, here's one I made earlier.

I did a sort of Igor type face on this side cus the pumpkin had something resembling barnacles on it. It looks better in the dark though.

And the other side...

Awesome face! :D

I recently got a laptop as part of my 21st birthday. My actual birthday isn't until Christmas Day, but I got it early to help with my dissertation, which I now find invaluable. Anyway, here's a picture of it:

The specs are: Vista Premium, 160GB HDD, 2GB Ram, AMD Athlonx2 1.8Ghz and a ATi HD2600. This is for the very humble sum of £500. The first thing you notice when you open it up is that the keyboard is a bit squashed. MSI decided to put a full numeric keypad on the right, which leaves the "./" and right shift keys very small. Also the blu "Fn" button used to adjust brightness and volume is where the Ctrl button is, which for a laptop marketed for gaming isn't the brightest of ideas.

Slightly cramped keyboard aside (once you get used to it it's fine), the actual OP feels a bit forced. I had a lot of problems with Vista, where the taskbar would lock up and need restarting, and once the entire thing just decided it was no longer 1280x800 but 640x400 and turned everything purple. Gaming felt disappointing as Source based games like TF2 were choppy even with the graphics turned down to minimum.

I have since customised it with a 300GB hard drive and Windows XP. If you get this laptop I strongly recommend you do the same. Since doing so the laptop has had a new lease on life. Frame rates of all games played have jumped 10-20 frames and aside from having to manually transfer drivers onto it, I've had no problems whatsoever. I've even started to customise it with themes:

I'm going to install Crysis at a later date and give it a real run for it's money. For the price it asks for, it really is a great piece of kit.

I give it 8/10.

My boredom got the best of me last night, so I decided to record a power metal song.

http://profile.ultimate-guitar.com/AirGuitarist87/

I'll just give some background info on the songs there:

March of the Dragons: My attempt at power metal, done in about 30 mins from scratch. Some of the timing is a bit odd because Audacity kept messing me around with the metronome/click track. Also, it made the track very buzzy if you play it too loud for god knows what reason.

Paint the Walls: 10 minute rough ideas + improvisation. I had my Les Paul in drop C, so decided to give it a go.

Panzer Rush: I downloaded a drum machine and this was the second song I made with it.

Destination: Ohio: This was the first track I did with a drum beat. I'm quite pleased with this one because the entire solo was done in one take. You can tell cus I fudged a little bit in the middle.

So here are the some pictures I took today.

Seems like the cash machine is using a bootleg version of Windows.

So I want to get AC/DC tickets for my mate's 21st birthday, so off I go to MEN Arena website and wait, pressing F5 occassionally, for 10am when the tickets go on sale.

*click*

Network timed out.

*click*

Sorry, we're sold out. This is literally the space of 5 mins.

Goddamn it. It was limited to 2 per purchase too. So I check on eBay, as I had suspitions. Lo and behold, there are 7-8 people selling tickets, with as many as 20 "in stock", going for 3 times the normal asking price. That is just stupid and rediculous. And the worst part is they get away with it because people still buy off them.

Oh well, I'll just get him a card or something.

Sorry I haven't been reading too many blogs recently. I feel really thick for admitting this, but I didn't realise that they moved the Tracked Blogs thing down near the bottom of the page. I've been reading the Update thingy that's on the top right that shows everything everyone's doing.

Seriously. Everytime someone does a "My computer is acting wierd" thread, someone will inevitably jump up and down telling you the wonders of Linux and how much better it is then Microsoft/Apple.

I've tried 3 different versions of Linux. Ubuntu, which won't load on this computer for god knows what reason, won't detect the internet, and can bearly run Firefox without dying on it's arse. Fedora, which decided my 8800GT graphics card couldn't handle the LOG ON SCREEN and so I had to sift through DOS like command lines in order to shut down. And finally something called Musix, which was the only one that would work for more than 20 mins, but after which decided to delete the sound off the system tray and give out System Errors like confetti at a wedding.

I don't know if I'm supposed to know the complete inside workings of Linux in order to understand how great it is, but I feel that I shouldn't have to. Any program which slogan is "the operating system for humans" or whatever it was, should live up to that promise.

I feel that a lot of Linux OSs and programs simply exist for the "because I can" factor. Linux systems are fine for people who know how to use them, but for the rest of us who just want to do some work or play a quick game of TF2, it's just unnecessary hassle.