Well, the review has yet to be written but I’ve uploaded some photos for the meantime and added an advantages/disadvantages thing!

Advantages:

• The 9 cell battery lasts almost 6 hours between charges
• Backlit keyboard is really good
• Integrated webcamera is much better than expected.
• Quite light at 2.45kg
• Fast

Disadvantages:

• Temperamental fingerprint reader
• HDD drive could be a little bit quieter.
• Aero features are a bit let down by the NVidia NVS 160M graphics card. Minimising/maximising could be more “fluid”
  

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Decided to drive to the Torry battery to view the fireworks display assuming it to be much better than the beach. Turns out it was a bit too far away but it was pretty good. Got some pretty good photos though:

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Well after an internetless few days in Rome, due to the hotel’s wi-fi connection being broken, I’ve found someone’s new unsecured wi-fi wafting through the room’s balcony. Who knows how long it will last before they realise they’ve made a small mistake…

Well, the initial impressions of Rome were poor; from the dark and dingy airport to the overcrowded, sweltering, sweaty, unairconditioned train from the airport to the main train stration and the €35 taxi charge for the 1 Kilometre between the train station and the hotel.

After that it’s been generally better. The days have mostly been spent walking the streets of rome getting ridiculously hot and burned, visiting sites and getting scammed for small amounts of money by all and sundry.

A few photos from the adventures so far:

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Are they a sensible place to put your phone when you’re not using it instead of putting it in your pocket with all the coins and dust and crap or do they make you look like a class A twatsicle?

VOTE!

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Julie and I decided to make some pudding tonight for shits and giggles and had a good leaf through a recipe book and decided upon the sticky toffee sponge/pudding and OMFG is it one of the best puddings I’ve ever tasted. If you like the pudding and want to make it yourself I recommend the recipe after the break. This is how it turned out in the end!

It’s also one of the easiest recipes to make too. It actually turned out like what it was supposed to unlike some of the moderate disasters we’ve had so far and only took an hour and a half unlike the dulce de leche recipe that took 3+ hours and looked like a whole pile of crap…

Informal flat ratings:

Ben: 9/10

Julie: 8/10

Twe: 8.5/10

» Read the rest of the entry..

So there seems to be a surplus of beers from the party last night and Peter, my flatmate, has decided he’s never drinking again so I’ve taken it upon myself to whittle down the stocks. I was thinking about having one at 1pm but apparently that’s just alcoholism according to Julie.

So, when is it acceptable to have the first drink of the day?

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>>> You’ll need to use the poll in the sidebar. Apparently you can’t have the same poll in two places…

So I was thinking about getting a new camera to replace my Canon Powershot A640. Not that there’s anything hugely wrong with the camera just that it can be limiting sometimes:

• High noise at high ISO
• Low maximum ISO (800)
• Minimum shutter speed of 15 seconds
• Can’t shoot RAW

So to that end I was thinking about getting the new dSLR from Canon, their 450D. But then again to make full use of it you need a whole range of lenses which would total up to around £2.5k (wide angle, low light, standard zoom, telephoto zoom, flash, teleconverter…) Anyone have a few grand to spare? No? I’ll put it to the back of my mind for a while then…

The above song with the combination of greats that are Madonna, Timbaland and Justin Timerlake is probably the most irritating and infuriating song I’ve heard in quite some time. Not helped by the fact it gets significant airtime on the local radio station and is guaranteed to be playing that song at some point during my car journey. Thought I’d turn to BBC Radio 2 just now and guess what song was playing… yup that’s right, 4 minutes to save the world…

*sigh*

It’s a weird thing to have in this day and age but there was a power cut that lasted from just before 1am to about 6am this morning. The highlight of the night was when a moth flew into the candle wax and died, now encased in his solidified waxy grave.

Turning off the light pollution gave a good view of the stars outside though.

I had the pleasure of having lunch at the titular restaurant which is situated upstairs within the new museum on Tuesday with the girlfriend. After a bad start of being told to come back because it was packed full inside and with people loitering about outside waiting we decided to run some errands and come back again half an hour later whereupon we were welcomed in with open arms and apologies given by the woman who had turned us away earlier.

She had the locally caught fishcakes, which were of the smoked variety and I had the “sassermaet brunnie” (spicy sausage meat) which all in all was a glorified burger in a ciabatta roll with a sauce of some description and sliced tomatoes upon it. Mine came with salad and coleslaw and hers with a homemade tartar sauce and a superabundance of salad (neither of which she likes heh). We both had the potato wedges as a side (which were really chunky).

Afterwards we both had the bread and butter pudding which was a huge chunk of a thing. Quite an eggy taste and ultimately too sickly to finish but it was excellent nonetheless.

The price for two came to £21 which isn’t all too unreasonable for the amount of food.

Julie with her unfinished bread and butter pudding which ultimately proved too much for either of us.