The Shuttle KPC A Force To Be Reckoned With

Shuttle are best known for selling barebones and ‘normal’ pc’s in handy packages at reasonable prices, their latest relese (as you may have guessed) is the KPC which, in case you’re wondering, stands for ‘Korporate PC’ (see what they did there?).

The other small part of this remarkable little machine is its price tag, which comes in at a rather manageable $209 (about £100). It comes in one of the ever trendy cube cases with an Intel Celeron 1.8GHz processor, sadly only 512MB of RAM (though this can be upgraded up to 2GB), and an 80GB har drive. You may be thinking ’so what?’ in which case my answer would be to look at the price tag again! It’s not meant to be a top of the line brand spanking new movie editing producing box, its your standard home PC that does everything with its electrical components that you need it to on a day to day basis.

Linux runs best on it (what DOESNT Linux run best on?), and interestingly the boys over at computershopper stacked the KPC up against an older 3.2GHz Pentium 4 system running Vista Ultimate with 2GB of RAM and a 320GB hard drive, and the KPC came out on top for most common tasks. From opening spreadsheets to loading up Firefox the little black box came in consistently 2 seconds quicker, even with its standard spec 512MB of RAM.

As for extra’s, how’s a one year warranty and just 30watts of power consumption at idle? Thats less than half your standard PC tower AND you won’t hear it! Remember, if you’re buying it for your company then add it to the fixed asset inventory tracking database.

Water Purifier Heaven

You may think its stupid, and you may think its girly, hell, you may not even have ever considered it ever as a posibility, but these days its actually possioble to purify one’s water, with a ‘water purifier‘ to be more specific.

A crazy idea I know.

The benefits though, are significant, purified water contains fewer metals and oxidised chemicals found in tap water, and it is generally far more healthy for you then standard old tap water too! Not to mention that it’s yet another gadget that just makes your batchelor pad look that little bit more refined and sleek.

Having a water purifier has genuinely made me drink more just for the pure reason that it tastes so much better! And we all know how we’re supposed to have 8 glasses a day, well a water purifier actually makes that an achievable task rather than a sightless goal.

Buy Yourself A Dino

No, really. The first ever Dinosaur is being sold on ebay as we speak, the complete skeleton of a ‘Mastodon’ (it’s like a mammoth’s really big ugly older brother) was dugg up just before the turn of the millenium in North Eastern California, weighing in at just over three hundred thousand tons*.

The big fuzzy mother frapper is on sale on the infamous auction site at a starting bid of £57,000 and is predicted to fetch over £400,000 at the end of bidding in 12 hours time. A little optimistic, given that it has yet to receive a single bid.

It has to be said, if I had £60k lying around, I wouldnt by a bloody dino skeleton, christ I could have a prosthetic one made that would probably look better for £5k, and use the other £55k on a totally unnecassary car. Like a Vauxhaul.

Still, if you like dino’s, and you’ve got a spare stable, or more accurately a whole block of spare stables, then bid up kids! bid up!

*Figures may not be accurate and are probably entirely made up

Pimp Your Pad: With a Wine Fridge

The time for pimping your pad is ripe, everyone knows that there is nothing more effective when taking a girl home with you to get her clothes off quickly like having her walk through the door and gasping at your man-shack. “Whats the matter?” you say innocently, “nothing” she says, removing her dress.

Perfect.

This guy has the right idea, the open brickwork and the paintings really finish it off nicely. That sofa must be sticky.

It is missing one thing though, and that thing is the subject of today’s entry. A wine fridge.

Its all very well having a nice batchelor pad, a nice sofa, nice paintings, etc, but as soon as she sees the Nintendo Wii sitting under the TV and the empty pizza boxes from two summers ago she’ll be out the door quicker than a hooker with a crack habit. You need your pad to say things about you, more specifically; that you are clean, mature, and sophisticated.

Strangely I’ve found that a wine fridge (and a little vacuming now and again) pretty much takes care of this. There’s nothing like coming in and asking her if she’d prefer the Sauvignon or the Chardonnay while reaching casually into a dedicated fridge full of wine bottles like this one.

She’ll probably blush a little and tell you that she doesn’t mind. By this point you’re pretty much in there, so just pour two glasses and let the evening unfold before your eyes. Along with her legs.

Tall Ships Are Cool

Browsing YouTube today, (nothing new there!) and came across this compilation of videos of various tall ships, some amid frantic canon-fire. Must say, I’m not particularly a fan of old things, especially boats – but these bad boys are pretty cool. The sheer size of them is pretty overwhelming in itself! What I can’t figure out is how come they look better in these various short amateurish clips than they do in say, oh I don’t know.. pirates of the caribbean?

Tall ships go back literally hundreds of years, and as such they are really a site to behold when you finally do witness one afoot along the thames river, which I did during the last tall ships race, and will do again during the tall ships race 2008 !

The Property Shop Brighton

Well well, welcome back friends and family to another warm fuzzy edition of publicisizing corporate criminals. This time round, The Property Shop, in Brighton.

I rented a flat some time ago in Brighton, it wasnt a particularly nice flat, and it was a great deal of money each month, but I needed it, so I paid the money. The estate agents, as you may have already guessed, were the property shop in brighton. Lisa Simmonds is the queen bee in the property shop, or at least she seems to think she is as she has her husband steve completely by the balls, not allowing him so much as sole access to his own email account, which she instead chooses to blunder through on a daily basis. Now, upon visiting the property shop, Lisa was terribly charming, like a good old fashioned car salesman being sleezy during his pitch.

The second the contracts were signed however, little Mrs Simmonds transformed it the kaniving little prat that she actually is under the sweet-sickly-sales-exterior.

Upon moving into said flat, all the problems with it which we were promised would be fixed… were still there. Broken floorboards, leaking sink, smashed bathroom tiles, broken boiler, leaking windows, leaking skylight were all still there, and to this day (a number of years later) are still there!

But for some reason when I went to get MY security deposit back, I was charged for ‘cleaning’ even though I left the flat in a far cleaner state than it had most likely seen in the last decade, ‘removal of furniture’ even though said furniture belonged to the PREVIOUS tenants which I had requested to be removed on numerous occasions, and ‘late rent payments’ which as per contract, have to be collected AT THE TIME, and which I was never informed of. Some nice corporate hospitality there!

Not to mention the fact that they took almost 2 months after I had vacated the property to return my deposit, and Lisa actually hung up on my over 5 times when I called up to have it returned.

NEVER go anywhere near these absolute criminals. The only reason they get away with it is because they are the ONLY estate agent in Brighton that is not regulated by a larger governing body. Go somewhere that is, or you WILL lose money the same way I did.

Water + Board + Boat

Wakeboarding has been on the up for a couple of years now, I used to wakeboard over in the Philippines and it was an absolute delight. Admittedly though, over there its hard to find a decent lake or wakeboard boats so we used to do cable wakeboarding, which is where a very long cable rotats around the edges of a lake suspended by strategically positioned pylons all the way along. The line which you hold onto is connected to the cable rather than the back of a boat. There is no ‘wake’ ironically, so cable wakeboarding tends to be a lot more about kickers (ramps) and sliders (rails).

I was surfing around on YouTube today and came across this great video of some guys tearing up a lake in…. somewhere.. they don’t say!

These guys are awsome, backflips when wakeboarding are called Tantrums – which these guys have down to a tee. The Tantrum is the sort of trick that will either end you up in bed with a supermodel or in bed with a broken jaw at the Garden Hospital!

Stay Healthy With Mens Health

I know it sounds obvious but staying healthy is something that a lot of men these days are either forgetting to do, or can’t be bothered to do. I think its pretty ridiculous in all honesty – as its usually the ones who moan about ‘not getting women’ who can’t be arsed with any form of excersize. Yet they see no relationship between the two?

Let’s reel off a couple of facts about mens health for our avid readers who are too lazy to do any excersize;

1. Excersize makes you less fat, being less fat is more attractive to women
2. Excersize gives you more muscle, muscles are attractive to women
3. Excersize increases your testosterone levels, testosterone produces more pheremones which are attractive to women
4. Excersize gives you a good body, a good body gives you more confidence, more confidence gives you more women
5. Excersize strengthens your immune system, which means you wont get sick, which is beneficial when it comes to to women.

So, what have we learned today children? Get off the internet and try reality for just half an hour each day, and maybe you’ll actually have some luck!