I am Iron Man

Good news and bad news (both unrelated to the house).

The bad first - my headphones went walkabout from work during a moving day last Friday. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth - they were a fairly nice pair, bought for around $80 from the Akihabara shop while in transit in Tokyo. They were getting on a bit, but still had good sound and I had some sentimental attachment to them.

Now the good news, I got to go out and buy some new Sennheiser canalphones (CX300 - II)! They sound great and have excellent sound isolation, which is a mandatory requirement for open plan office living. Some more good news - we got newer (second hand) computers as a result of the moving day, with new shiny (for me at least) Windows 7. And I netted a window seat again, with an excellent view of the plaza outside the front of my work.

I'm using the new headphones to listen to Black Sabbath. Here's a video of Metallica covering Black Sabbath's Iron Man, I think at Black Sabbath's induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame or something. Anyway, it's a good cover. Yeah.


There are other things to blog about, but I need some more time to think about them before I put them up. Which makes them sound more ominous than they are, it's more just that I don't have time at the moment!

Entertainment, art and clothing

Having just handed over an exorbitant amount of money for stamp duty (that I wouldn't have to pay if I'd bought a house any where else in Australia), my mind has already turned to things that I want, but cannot afford to purchase at this juncture. Some of them may well still be mine in the future, some less so.

The first would be in the "probably not" category - the artwork of Shawn Smith - which was featured on Engadget Alt recently.

The two pieces pictured above are "Gemsbock" and "Re-kindling". I encourage you to check out some more of his work at his website. Shawn created these three dimensional versions of pixel art, which I've always rather enjoyed. I may even have blogged about it at some stage. Anyway, they look excellent. They seem to be mostly made of small painted wooden blocks.

The second item I was lusting after this morning is an AV receiver and some decent speakers. This are firmly on the list of things to buy when we move into the new place. I haven't really made a choice yet, and there are ongoing discussions with Dana about the aesthetic nature of such a purchase (she thinks they're ugly, whereas I think they're beautiful), but we'll get there in the end. Speaking of Dana, she's discovered the magic of RSS feeds and is now subscribed to this blog. Hi Dana!

Anyway, at the moment, I really like the options from Yamaha.

Pictured here is the YHT-694AU, which retails at around a grand. I'm hoping that discussions with Dana can be progressed by the smaller "bookshelf" style rear speaker, and the knowledge that the receiver and central speaker will probably be hidden by a TV unit. It remains to be seen if that will be a successful angle. Wish me luck.

The last is a very groovy t-shirt from Etsy store Happy Family featured on gizmodoAU (if memory serves me correctly, anyway) called "Robot and Triceratops.

Two mortal enemies, together at last. Not really much more to say on that one.

To round what has been a thoroughly nerdy post out, here's a rendition of the Tetris theme on bottles....

PS: I totally forgot to mention, the Fonzy and the Shark Jumpers, my netball team, had an epic victory last night. We are also pioneering a special move I like to call "the Shark Jump" where you do a cross between a star jump and an epileptic fit in front of the opposition if they get the ball. Go the Jumpers!

Plasma

It completely slipped my mind, but we also had a few little events at home before Christmas that are probably blog worth. The first is that I picked up a new TV in the pre-chrissie sales, for a bit of a bargain too.


With a little help from a friend in the brash bargaining department, I picked up a Panasonic 46inch 1080p Plasma (TH-P46G10A) for $1,850, around $650 off the ticket price, and $350 cheaper than I'd seen anywhere else. Pretty sweet deal! Here's Panasonic's website photo of the bad boy:

It seemed so big when we got it that I almost second guessed the purchase - it seemed to dominate the room and it was so much bigger than it seemed in the show room! That wore off in seconds and the size doesn't look too big at all. I'm very happy with the purchase, although at first, it was painfully obvious how low resolution the SD digital channels are.

As a bonus, the TV came with a free camera (via redemption, which is taking forever). The camera is a Pana Lumix DMC-FT1, which is all kinds of rugged, shock proof, water proof etc. It can even do HD video underwater! I'm pretty excited about it, I have never had a camera quite so fancy before, and am very much looking forward to it.

The other big thing is that our housemate moved out, which is most excellent! We now have some additional room in the living room, a spare bedroom and less clutter generally. There's also one less person to consider when we have people over, or want to stay up late etc.

The spare room has already come in handy a couple of times over the Christmas break.

Good times.

On a more sombre note, I leave you with a warning - Don't watch Terminator: Salvation. It's really terrible.

New TV!

Its my birthday this Thursday (hooray!) and I got one present early - a new TV! This is the first thing we've bought for the house in a long, long time, and its the first thing we've really bought that is for the new place. The main reason we've avoided buying anything is that we haven't really thought it worthwhile when renting.

The TV is a 32 inch Samsung LCD 5 series (I think it's this one) for the bedroom, and it's friggin hot. I've had a tiny little one in there for ever that I bought years ago so that I could escape my parents in my bed room. It looks pretty much like this:

So far I've just been watching TV on it - we don't have a DVD player for the bed room yet, that's another purchase for another day. Suffice to say, I'm enjoying having FTA digital channels and HD channels in the bedroom - waking up to the ABC breakfast show on ABC2 is SO much better than Kochie (the goddamn smugtron 5000) and Mel on Sunrise.