Noo Pea See - 22/07/09
Today was the day I placed my order for a new PC. My Gefore 7950GX2 video card had slowly perrished a while back. I had presumed it was a whole host of other components before I got a massive clue. At first I thought that the 580W PSU was actually a 480W one and was under-powering my AMD4200+, 2GB of RAM, X-Fi Music and 5 HDDs (4 in RAID0). I still thought there may be some power issues even when I realised the actual voltage. Interestingly, I had tested the actual voltage requirements at idle and it was around 250W, so I had presumed the PSU was correct. When games started to crash I had taken out all but two of the HDDs to ease the PSU load. Yet still the crashing continued. I then read a few things that suggested it could be the sound card. I removed this and played around. All seemed good, but then it went again. I'd even reverted back to Windows Vista from 7 to see if that helped - presuming it could have been driver related.

Things seemed okay, but then when playing GRID it crashed. Then it started crashing all over the place. Graphical anomalies occured all over the screen making it look like a Sprectrum ZX loading up. Finally she gave up the ghost. Power came on, a beep was heard, and the hard drives whirred, but nothing on the screen. It seemed to realised that I had both HD video footage and 1300 photos to edit and thought it would be funny by going to PC heaven.

So I picked Scan because I'd bought from them before. The last system was well built, but I think I just picked badly with the video card. It was one of the first SLi cards on one slot and I doubt the drivers were ever tailored properly for them.

System consisted of:

* Silverstone Fortress
* 850W Corsair TX Series ATX
* Asus M4A79-T Deluxe
* AMD Phenom II X4 955
* Scythe Mugen 2 Quiet CPU
* 6GB CorsairTwinX XMS3
* 1GB Asus GTX 285
* Blaster X-FI Titanium Fatal1ty
* 1TB Samsung F1 7200
* Akasa 3.5 AK-ICR Memory
* LG GGC-H20L
* Acronis True Image
* 120mm Akasa Case Fan
* AcoustiPack ULTIMATE

I figured this would be beefy enough to cope with any game, or video/photo editing application. I won't put the price on as I don't want to start crying again.

Overhang - 08/07/09
Climbing tonight was indoor, rather than the 'usual' outdoor. It was going to be a gym session, working our fitness levels. Unfortunately I started off on a couple of 4cs, which the second one I actually found very hard. There was a massive difference between the two and I strained the fingers of my left hand. I was hoping to use the climbs as a warm up! Perhaps I should have stretched a bit more, I sometimes stretch too hard and cause injury that way.

So we did about 4-5 climbs before Paul decided he fancied leading one of the overhanging climbs. I don't particularly like overhangs as my experience on ice has shown that unless you get the footwork bang on, your arms take a battering. Paul flew up with no real issues. It made Vinny and me squirm slightly as we knew there was a lot to do to match. In fact we were planning on top-roping, leaving the rope where it was.

I stormed up quickly, but soon burnt out as I got stuck under the overhang and couldn't figure out my feet. I came back down and it was decided that it would be fine for me to use any hold just to get me beyond the overhang. This time was much better I mastered the lip of the overhang, but could go no further. My hangs were losening. Sure enough I pipped away from the wall in what felt like a massive swing - clearly it was only a couple of metres.

I dumped it and let Vinny have a crack. He got higher than me, but seemed to give up in a similar fashion, which interestingly, was above the overhang.

We did a couple of 5cs and a 6a, which I had a good crack at. Then we warmed down and shot off home.

Wedding Rehersal - 06/07/09
As Rob's wedding is fast approaching I got invited to the rehearsal. This would allow me to get to meet the priest and find out where I am and am not permitted to photograph from. It's also a useful way of finding out timings so that I could work out where I wanted to be at a particular point, and also which lens I needed to use.

The priest was nice and friendly, which was good, as you can get some miserable sods. She went through the process of exactly what would happen. Both the bride and groom didn't need to say their vows, but we timed roughly how long they would take. It was actually a good excuse for the bride to get her giggles out of the way.

All the time they were working out where they would be standing and which way they needed to face I was taking test shots at different settings to then review back home. From that I could work out the optimal settings for the church lighting. However, when I switched to my 18-70mm the photos came out very dark indeed. Dropping the shutter speed enough to get decent lighting was meaning that it was something like 1/25 or slower. This was going to cause blurring unless the fill-flash was strong enough to lock the subjects. I bumped up the power on the flash. It made a little difference, but the amount I was pushing it to was unnatural. I was baffled. It was only when I looked at the lens itself that I realised that I had left my polariser filter on the end, which stole 2 stops, or there abouts. I was suitably embarressed, though I'm not sure why as I didn't tell anyone and no one noticed.