Pyxis

Life is definitely harder to do well in since the recession started back in 2008, although it was definitely a kick up the arse for me. A lot of admin type jobs just vanished and made me realise the importance of getting a skilled job. I didn't go to university. I decided to take up IT and it has taken years to get where I currently am. My salary is double what I was on back in 2008 and my job is pretty cool (I look after around 1% of the Internet). My currently role feels like 50% hard work and 50% good luck, but I think that if you give things 100% of your effort, you will succeed. People will see hard work and reward you for it.

I'll be buying my first house early next year and I will definitely be growing my own veg, it's a great idea and food is only going to get more expensive. I definitely want solar panels too in order to live the good life. I live in Basingstoke, but plan on moving to Southampton as the homes tend to be older there and have bigger gardens. Do you make your own compost? I am going to try and avoid buying fertiliser and make compost using food waste and other things like fallen leaves. When I get my own garden, I will divide the area for fruit and veg into 30cm x 30cm squares and will have around 100 of these for various vegetables. Some crops need less space, like onions, so I will try and be as efficient as possible. If I can persuade my wife, we will also have around 3-4 chickens and give them a nice and big coop and run to live in. Apparently they make good pets and it saves the inside of the house getting messy. Yup, I feel old too... I will be 27 soon, so perhaps I am!

I am pretty sure I didn't say that since I did own a Wii. I have owned every Nintendo console apart from the 3DS. I hated the Wii as the graphics were terrible and the controller just didn't work for me. The GameCube controller and the Xbox 360 controller were so much better, but that is just my opinion. Nintendo had to re-release the controller with motion plus because it was so bad. I didn't say that Sony and Microsoft need to think twice about plowing money into consoles with decent specs. I hope they do because the Xbox 360 and PS4 were bargains for the consumer, unlike the Wii, which was a rebranded GameCube (you could buy one for £79.99) with a new controller. Thanks kav82, you are welcome to call my post one of the most retarded and uninformed you've ever seen, but it's quite similar to what everybody else here is saying, apart from the fan boys. Just out of curiosity, why do you have CoD on the Wii? Don't you have an Xbox or PS3? Anyway, you guys are welcome to feel outraged by somebody giving their opinion.. I might buy a Wii U at some point, but I don't even know where I would put the controller when not using it, so can't fathom even owning one at the moment. I'll probably get the next Xbox or Playstation and rely more on my PC.

The Wii made me lose faith in Nintendo, much like most people on here. Most Nintendo fans migrated to the Xbox 360 and so did I, but the lack of Nintendo's core franchises on such a platform made me lose 90% of my interest in gaming, which is a shame as I miss the glory days of the GameCube, which was an absolutely stunning console. The DS maintained my interest in Nintendo for a few more years, but game makers eventually ran out of new ideas on how to utilise the handheld's features and the 3DS has done absolutely 0 to fix that... I haven't bought a 3DS and I don't think I will buy a Wii U either because I hate tablets and can't see how one will ever fit into my life. I'll buy a 3DS when they release a Pokemon game on it, but I am not sure if I'd even buy a Wii U if they released F Zero on it since the Wii U is already an ugly and obsolete console and it hasn't even been released yet. Its a shame that Nintendo games have to run on such terrible hardware these days... Like others have said, the Wii U will get the last few multi platform games being released on the Xbox 360 and PS3, much like how the Wii got PS2 ports.. People who think that the Wii U will be remotely close in terms of specs to the PS4 and Xbox 720 are kidding themselves! If they try to release the same games on the Wii U, they will look horrific in comparison, so why waste your money? Half the cost of the Wii U is probably spent on that ugly tablet controller that will give people nothing but a headache. Nintendo just seem to be trying to copy things they think will become popular, like 3D and tablets.. Where did the innovation go? Sony and Microsoft are going to have twice the amount of money to spend on producing a console with decent specifications, unless they also decide to waste the same amount of money on useless peripherals and sell at the same budget price with the aim of making a profit. If companies want to bring multi platform games out on the Wii U in the future, they will have to make the graphics look horrible and spend ages adding lots of useless features to utilise the second screen, which wont even be available if using the controller as the main screen? The whole concept of the Wii U sounds like a mess.

Are both the processor power connectors plugged into the sockets the right way round so that the shapes line up inside the socket? That caused me to have that sort of problem. At least it sounds like you are very close to getting there.

You need to connect the SSD to a sata cable and then connect the other end to a sata port on the motherboard. your motherboard might have a mix of sata 2 (3Gb per second) and sata 3 (6Gb per second) ports. Make sure you plug it into a sata 3 port on the motherboard so you get the full speed. The motherboard instructions probably tell you which ones are which. Then just find a power cable from your power unit that fits and plug that into the SSD too. My SSD came with a bracket but I dont think I used it. The hard drive bays pop out on the fractal design cases and there are the screw holes available to screw the SSDs on to the normal 3.5 inch bays. Not sure about your case though. Try finding screw holes in the case that line up with the screw holes on the SSD. Edit: nevermind. Ignore this post! Its interesting to know where an SSD goes in an antec 300..

Yeah, the 7850 and 7870 are close. I might end up going for a 7850 and over clocking it if it comes with a good cooler. It is also very power efficient at stock speeds. The cost of the top models is kind of crazy if you can get away with a bit less power.

I dont bother worrying about static and touch all parts of my components when installing them so I would say that is the least of your worries. Whenever I build a new pc, it will either not power on or show any video signal and it typically takes an hour or more of confision until I notice a silly mistake like a cpu power connection being put in the wrong way. Just take your time and read the instructions. Youtube is also great for quick and simple tutorials. Good luck with the 60GB hard drive guys. I know that such a capacity is the only choice on a budget, but my 80GB drive is a real headache in terms of storage and I have no games installed on it. I use a 2TB hdd for file storage, but im upgrading to a 240GB SSD asap since I will be installing games on my next PC and dont want to worry about moving files around all the time. The agility 3 is a good choice, but you might want to think about saving up and eventually replacing it with something bigger in the future. The price of SSDs seems to have halved recently so maybe a 240GB one will be affordable in a year or so. I am in Malaysia at the moment and went to a shopping centre in Kl called Lowyat Plaza. It has nothing but shops selling pc components and you can get anything you want, its brilliant. I picked up an i7 3770k a few days ago for just £200.. I also purchased a Corsair H60 water cooler for my CPU. I havent made up my mind whether to go for 8GB or 16GB of RAM yet. I am planning to use vmware workstation and have a cisco contact center solution along with a call manager up and running from time to time so I can route voip telephone calls and play around with vxml scripts, but I might be able to get away with 8GB. I was thinking of buying an AMD Radeon 7870, but Nvidia will be releasing their 660 next month, which will offer superior performance and be in the same price range. I will wait and see which one is cheaper. My case of choice is the white fractal design r3 with usb 3 and a transparant side panel. I have a black one at the moment, but it shows dust and the led light never worked.

About 15 mins a day. I havent done any work for the last three weeks. people think im doing stuff but ive just turned not doing anything in to an art since that is my job these days. Just make yourself look like ure thinking really hard about things, type away at the keyboard when youre just googling random things and rush around like you are busy.. That is my life at the moment and ive been told that im doing a great job.

My job is ok. I am 25 and it is probably the first decent job I have had. I gained my CCNA networking qualification in July last year after studying networking for 2 hours every evening for 6-8 months and that led me to getting my current job. I am a trainee for a company deploying Cisco Unified Communications technology, so I am basically learning how to build and deploy the VOIP telephony/contact centers for companies around the country. I am also in charge of our company lab any everything network related in our office. I am getting hands on experience with routers, switches, servers and etc, so I am really lucky in that respect. I did want to get into a proper networking position and had little interest in voice, but here I am. The company is very relaxed, so I work half an hour less each day than I am contracted to and I haven't really done much work in the last 6 months.. Every day is pretty much just me figuring out what to play with in our lab each day... I create virtual machines and mess around with them. I kind of feel my role is redundant as nobody needs me and I have got a feeling the company is eager to promote me as soon as possible so that I actually have a purpose, so I am just rolling with it at the moment. I am getting paid for doing pretty much nothing each day and its the first time I have got promotion prospects. My life does feel a bit meaningless with nothing much to do at work. I also worked for a bank (office environment) and left after 3 years. Time flew past and I stayed there for so long because it was quite a comfortable role and wasn't that demanding. I also didn't know what I wanted to do in terms of a career. I kind of look back on that role as a waste of 3 years of my life. I utilised my last year by studying web design in my evenings and gaining a foundation of knowledge for a more technical role in the future. I worked at Barclays and all they cared about was getting rid of people and cutting costs and they took this to the extreme. They had people going round each department timing how long things took with a stop watch in order to calculate how quickly different jobs could be done in order to get rid of as many people as possible. By the time I left, I was doing the jobs of 3.5 people and I was treated like dirt. Banks don't care about their employees, they only care about money and bonuses. They prevent all the hard working people from getting a bonus by setting crazy targets in order to maximize the bonuses for the managers and executives of the company that do the least amount of work. If you want to get far in a bank, the key is to do as little work as possible, then complain as much as possible about how much work you are made to do. This, coupled with wearing a suit to work = promotion. Two people in my department were promoted just for dressing smartly each day.

I've been to Beijing and the food was really bad, it didn't paint a good impression of Chinese food. We had to buy our meals from Macdonalds. Normally I wouldn't touch fast food, but it felt like fine cuisine. We were greeted at one restaurant close to Wangfujing by a little boy, who dropped his trousers at the door and urinated on the street. They served us noodles with something resembling dog food thrown on top.. It was a meal so terrible I will never forget it for the rest of my life. The noodles were from a big bowl of cold noodles that looked as if it had been lying around behind the counter for the whole day. Chinese food is much tastier in Malaysia. I've only ever tasted Chinese food here in the UK in china town and the food there is simply ok.

I wouldn't mind a series based more around space travel instead of time travel. I was watching Frontier in Space and Planet of the Daleks the other day and I would rather enjoy seeing more episodes based in the future and on other planets instead of the past.. hmm, what is there other than time and space? Perhaps they could shake things up a bit.

The whole Silence plot just seems stupid because they can't just introduce something like that into a 50 year old TV series where nobody has ever noticed such a thing before, it kind of ruins the franchise just for the sake of an episode or two. The fact that they have shown the Dr hundreds of years older than the current one with the same appearance is also rather strange, how are they going to explain that when the current doctor regenerates into the 12th? The whole time travel thing only worked in the last series because they conveniently all woke up from bed and none of it had ever happened.. Are they all going to wake up from bed again at the end of this series? Isn't travelling into the future a better idea since it wont undermine all of human history? oh yeah, too many cliffhangers!! I am a huge dr who fan, but might stop watching the rest of this series until Autumn unless the 3rd episode makes up for the last 2...

aww, I can't embed a youtube video:p Got it!

I have a 32 inch 1080p Toshiba, but it must be an older model compared to that one. I haven't had a Samsung in the past, but the upscaling of the Toshiba TV is flawless.

*waits anxiously for bulldozer* Hopefully it wont hit similar problems.

Had a miserable day today. When I came home, I decided to randomly google my old workplace in google news. I was fired from this company and the article on there was pretty much about them firing me: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/yourbusiness/8251027/The-red-tape-free-way-of-firing-people.html "Mr Clarke has fired around 35 people during the company’s 14-year history. On the day they are sacked, employees are asked to leave the Basingstoke-based business immediately and are rarely given formal warnings. This goes against the Acas code of practice, which would leave the business in a weak position if a claim ever did reach a tribunal. The fact that the company has never faced a claim is a “tribute to the quality of people we bring in the first place”, Mr Clarke believes." The company has around 25 people and used to have a lot less until recently.. They pretty much fire everybody who leaves. "It’s in their best interests to send sensible people in because they’ve got skin in the game. If they send you a lemon, you’ll drop [the agency].” They dropped the agency after employing me, which made me feel like c**p working there. They had people come and sit by me when being interviewed for jobs in order to secretly replace me over a month before they asked me to leave with no notice. "Somebody who doesn’t fit is like a splinter in your finger,” he said. “The offending article is gradually pushed out. It’s a bit organic – there’s a clear understanding among everyone here of people who fit and people who don’t. We’ve had to get rid of good people as well as bad, but they know we’re not doing it for any other reason than the good of the whole.” I knew they were going to fire me 2 weeks after they employed me and I managed to survive for 5 months in that environment, where they were constantly setting me up to fail and didn't even train me for my job role. I didn't fit in because I didn't have a degree and that annoyed the people I worked with. Ah well, what a good way to make my day even more miserable than it is. A Telegraph article calling me an orange and my life a splinter in everybody's backside.. Orange is a code word I use for certain people and now I am the orange.

If you want a nice looking case, I'd definitely recommend the Fractal Design R3: I bought it in black just recently and its great! Perfect for cable management as you can hide all of the cables behind the motherboard tray and it just looks perfect. It is nice and quiet too. It has lots of padding on the inside to absorb any noise. I upgraded from a cheap £29.99 case and the difference in quality and noise reduction is huge. This one costs £79.99 though..

We have the intelligence needed to be human. Didn't intelligence evolve for the same reason as eyes, bones n etc? It is not some magical thing in a wiggly world.. We like and dislike things as a product of nature and what proves successful. If you want to change humans, where is the environmental need? If there was a need, wouldn't we change ourselves rather than being told what to do by a dictator playing god and then getting it wrong? Are we even capable of change? If you want humans to change, you are not the one who will change because your dna is not going to change over night. It is offspring that changes compared to us and these changes are governed by our environment. We should realise that.. If you want to change the world to the way you like it today, the only solution would be to kill everybody you don't agree with because that is just your ideal and the way you are and not how everybody else is.

Sounds like a load of nonsense to me. Our function as living things isn't really too difficult to realise unless you want to confuse things. Does anybody else get annoyed when somebody asks for the definition of a word we all understand?

I have had quite a few accidents (including being hit by a car and falling from the top of a really tall tree) and been in a few fights, but I have never really damaged anything. My bones are indestructible.:p

I am not sure how many films he has made (just checked and he has made a lot), but I have watched a few of his films. I think films like Gozu and Happiness of the Katakuris, although meant to be amusing, are the most disturbing to me because they try to make nasty imagery into something that wants to make you smile.. That makes me more uncomfortable than something that is purely meant to be scary. I have avoided watching some of his films because of their bad taste. Audition was ok. It was a bit more memorable than some other films.

I'd recommend the Japanese film Gozu by Miike Takashi.. It is more disturbing than scary. You probably wont have a good night's sleep after watching it.. Weirdest film ever made and there are things in that film that will never leave your mind, like the lactating old woman and the sex scene at the end where a man's hand comes out of the woman's vagina and grabs onto the guys penis.. A seriously messed up film....

Looks 100% Chinese to me: http://www.nottingham.edu.cn/en/index.aspx

I am currently saving £550 a month in my ISA account and an additional £50 a month as a sort of baby fund for whenever the time comes.