Good Month For Music

It’s been a good November for New CD’s this year:

Dido : Safe Trip Home ***
Katherine Jenkins : Sacred Arias ****
Hayley Westenra : River Of Dreams ****
Alesha Dixon : The Alesha Show ****
Enya : And Winter Came ***
Anastacia : Heavy Rotation **
Jewel : Perfectly Clear ***
Seal : Soul ****

Plus, Three new Audio Books from http://www.wholestoryaudio.co.uk/

Dune by Frank Herbert (21 Hours)
Bare Bones by Kathy Reichs (9.2 Hours)
Monday Mourning by Kathy Reichs (9.5 Hours)

I had forgotten just how good Dune was, pity they don’t have ‘Children of Dune’ or ‘Dune Emperor’ on there too…

Unfortunately, the concert with Hayley Westenra was cancelled at short notice due to illness, so we will have to wait till early 2009 to see her again, but should still be OK for Katherine Jenkins at the NIA in a couple of weeks time.

Been having a play

With my CCS based website redesign.

Not too much of the new design working yet, just http://startfromhere.redbreva.co.uk/ and My Page (via the ‘My Family’ link).

The rest of the pages are there, either looking really rubbish, or just as place-holders.

Not sure yet though’ why Firefox shows a dark space under the pictures in the Family menu table, it look OK in IE 7.  Hmm bit more digging required into the CSS attributes there I think!

Typical…

Coldest morning of the winter so far – frost on the ground, changing to sleet, and the central heating boiler decides to have a lie in!

The nice man from British Gas came at about 10:00 and found that a fan assembly was seized.  he lubricated it with WD40 and managed to get it running again – sort of, but it’s a bit noisy and needs changing.

He will be back on Tuesday at about 09:00 to replace the faulty part, just hope it keeps running till then.

In the meantime the advice is to leave the heating on as much as possible, because if it stops, it may seize up again!

New GPU

Fitted the new video card this evening, and re ran the windows performance benchmark test.

The 2D figure increased from 4.3 to 5.9

The 3D figure increased from 4.4 to 5.5

But best of all, Photoshop CS4 now uses the GPU on zoom, panning, colour translations etc. to run faster and better.

1st Upgrade in a while

I recently installed the new CS4 edition of Photoshop, which supports hardware acceleration from supported video cards.

Seems my Nvidia GeForce 7300 GT is not one of those supported cards!  Mind you it is a pretty old card now – almost 3 years old and it was only £65 new…

NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GS
Texture Fill Rate (Per Second) - 2.2 billion
Maximum Memory Bandwidth       - 6.5 GB/s
Memory Size                    - 256 MB
Supported DirectX Version      - 9.0c
HDR Lighting                   - 64 bit

According to Nvidia’s web site, this is a card in the “Business User, Casual Gamer, Home PC User” category, and the best card in that group is a 9500GT DDR3 (£38 +VAT)!

NVIDIA GeForce 9500 GT (GDDR3)
Texture Fill Rate (Per Second) - 8.8 billion
Maximum Memory Bandwidth       - 25.6 GB/s
Memory Size                    - 256 MB
Supported DirectX Version      - 10
HDR Lighting                   - 128 bit

So, it should be about 4 times quicker, not bad for less than £50, may even manage to run “Microsoft Flight Sim X” at a reasonable frame rate now ;-)