It’s simply a good round-up of the happenings and events around here since I last posted.

My Civic Duties

First and foremost, I guess the most exciting news is that I bought a car. Yup, I finally got all my hard-earned pennies and cents together and dove into the world of automobile ownership.

Midway through November I had asked Gerry (my bro-in-law) to keep an eye out for me for a good deal on a decent car, since he works at a dealership and knows a great deal about cars. After a couple of decent but overpriced offerings from a couple of his sources, he came through and found a great ‘95 Honda Civic VTi for me at a reasonable price.

It’s a burgundy coloured, gray-trimmed, 1.6, 4 cylinder automatic 4 door sedan fully equipped with power windows/mirrors/steering, driver’s-side airbag, but alas, no CD player. But I’ll end up getting one soon enough.

So I’m finding out about all the joys and wonders of owning a car… like having to fork out precious cash to renew the registration this week, buy accessories, keep up regular maintenance and fuel costs. But I guess that’s all part of the fun.

Pics below.

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Overtly PC

The other big news item is my latest new PC. In my search for the latest and greatest performance package at a reasonable price, I’ve gone and gotten the rest of my monies and built a custom PC. Of course, if you’d been keeping up with my previous posts and other pages on my site you’d know that I’d had mentioned most of the parts for it on my wishlist

It’s a Core2Quad Q6600 CPU on a Gigabyte EP45-DS3L motherboard, sporting a Corsair QUAD2X4096-8500C5DF 4GB RAM kit (soon to be 8GB), a Sapphire HD4870X2 2GB video card, Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi XtremeGamer Fatal1ty Pro sound card, a XigmaTek Red Scorpion S1283 HDT CPU fan, DVD writer, card reader, all running inside an Antec P182 case and powered by the fantastic Zalman ZM850 HP power supply. I currently have it running Windows Vista Ultimate, but will be setting up a separate partition to try out Windows 7 Beta, hopefully after I grab the install CDs from work sometime this week.

As you can see, it’s no lightweight system I’ve built myself, but I built it to last me a few years, and to perform well at that. So far it has been a pleasure to use. Here’s a pic of the final product:

Take a look at the gallery for more pics.

Putting it together was as fun as I can remember with my old systems, which is to say I enjoyed the challenge but could have done without the frustration. Getting everything to fit in the case was a bit of a challenge considering the power supply took more room than the case was really designed for but I managed to get it worked out thanks to a work buddy who came over and helped me hack it one night (thanks Stuart ).

The best part of it all is that even after buying a car and a building a whole new PC, I still seem to have cash left over. There’s something to this whole saving business.

Christmas Fare

Well, Christmas came and went without a hitch really. Had my sister, brother-in-law, my nephew and niece down from Mt. Isa and my younger brother Juan up from Melbourne and we had a several good family gatherings at which much good food and beverages were consumed, not the least of which were alcoholic. :-“

The Christmas Day bounty was great, but certainly not as much as what the kiddies hauled home. As I’ve mentioned before, our family does the Secret Santa thing, where each person only needs to acquire gifts for a random family member drawn out of a hat (not including kiddies, of course) and spend big on them.
I was special enough to receive the Mario Kart for Wii pack which comes with a really nice looking Wii steering wheel, a funky alarm clock that doubles up as a mirror of sorts, a book, and a Wii-‘mote-shaped lollies dispenser.

It was a good haul. I’m currently devouring the book and hardly able to put it down. The lollies I enjoy only now and then, as I’m not such a huge fan as I was in my childhood. I much prefer and enjoy giving them out to my nephews and nieces.
The alarm clock wakes me every morning with functions, sound and tune I’m still trying to get used to. It’s weird after having spent over half my life with the same old alarm clock (which I also can’t bear to part with just yet ).
The game has been the most fun really. We all enjoyed racing and competing against each other throughout the holidays.
That’s why you gotta love a Wii; it’s group gaming abilities can’t be matched by any of the other consoles.

That’s pretty much about it for now. I’m sure a lot more things happened but they’re the major highlights of the last couple of months.

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[thanks Pily ]

I had bought it last Saturday on DealsDirect.com.au and had arrived at the post by Monday.    How’s that for fast delivery?

I’d been hunting for a chair like this for months and whenever I went into local retail stores, all the chairs of this type started at the ridiculously ludicrous price of $600+, with one specimen waaaaaay less featured than this one going for $799 at Domayne!!!!  I was like, WTF! 
So when I saw this one on DealsDirect going for $220, I just had to snap it up.  Actually, I’d been waiting for them to restock this item for a couple of months, and had settled on this one until they got the other one on again.  Coincidentally, I sold the other chair to my sister since their chair has totally and utterly had it.

So anyways, I got home and got the (huge!) box from the car and proceeded to try to put it together before I had to go out again for dinner.

A few minutes into the assembly, I remembered I should’ve got some unboxing pics but since it was too late for that, I got a couple of pics of the assembly and then the finished product.  I’ve yet to get in-action shots.

Assembly was quite easy, but of course I had to flub it to begin with.    I got ahead of myself and didn’t bother to RTFM, coz like, who does that right?  Surely a geek doesn’t need to read no frakkin manual! 
Well, thankfully, I realized my mistake before I got too far into the assembly and managed to backtrack and correct my mistake fairly easily.

So here’s a couple of pics during assembly.

And some of the fully assembled beauty that is my new chair. 

It’s soooo comfortable and nice.  Its functions include a height-adjustable gas lift, height and angle-adjustable head and armrests, adjustable lumbar support, and apparently a “weight adjuster for different body types” which I’ve yet to work out.    Oh, and the best feature is it leans back and is ideal for watching movies and shows on my lappy. 

So let me know what you think. 

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