Thermaltake CL-W0009

I've had the Water Level indicator in my machine for about a week and the inside lining is starting to peel off... I'm not impressed.

It's a Thermaltake product and so is the coolant, so I wouldn't have thought there would be a bad reaction. No warning on the coolant other than "Included coolant can only be used with Thermaltake products."... which both happen to be.

'Tis the season to be jolly.

'Bad Santas' wreak havoc worldwide
Tue Dec 20, 2005 2:48 PM GMT165
By Erik Kirschbaum

BERLIN (Reuters) - Drunken Santas on a rampage in New Zealand, armed German robbers in Santa disguises, a British St. Nick wanted for flashing, and a Swedish vandal in a Santa outfit are giving the big man in red a bad name this year.

Reports of "Bad Santas" breaking the law or otherwise wreaking havoc have been circulating around the world.

Armed with a gun, a man in a Santa outfit held up a furniture store in the German town of Ludwigshafen on Saturday and forced two cashiers to open the safe. He filled his sack with cash, locked the two women in the safe and escaped.

He is still on the loose, but police in Tuebingen were able to nab a bank robber armed with a machine gun in a Santa costume with the aid of an infrared camera and helicopter. They found him hiding in a ditch in a nearby forest.

"The machine gun was fake," a police spokesman said. Dressed in a Santa cap, beard and wearing sun glasses, he was wanted for stealing 500,000 euros in four separate bank robberies.

One Santa was stopped by police for driving 150 kph (90 mph) on a northern German motorway, 50 kph over the speed limit.

"He said he was in a rush because he still had packages to deliver," said a spokesman for the police. They gave Santa a fine and took away his licence.

Last week an inebriated half-naked Santa disrupted a Christmas market in Dabringhausen before police intervened.

In New York, one man fed up with the growing commercial aspect of Christmas set up a ghoulish life-sized Santa holding a severed doll's head in front of his house, local media said.

Those incidents paled in comparison to what happened in Auckland on Saturday when 40 drunken Santas rampaged through the city centre, stealing from stores and assaulting security guards in protest against Christmas becoming too commercial.

In Britain, police said they were looking for a Santa acting suspiciously -- a flasher who exposed himself to women.

Officers in Swanage on the south coast said the flasher had struck a number of times since December 6, and a week later exposed himself whilst wearing a Santa Claus outfit.

A British agency has issued a code of conduct to root out substandard Santas. "Santa is a magical and cuddly man, not a fat, smelly slob," said James Lovell of the Ministry of Fun agency in London. "He must not smell of drink or body odour."

But a foul-mouthed Santa in London nevertheless made children cry by swearing at them recently, local media reported.

In Sweden, one Santa set on fire a 13-metre-high straw ram built by the town fathers by shooting burning arrows into it.

Last Christmas, a shopping centre in south Wales installed a webcam dubbed "Santacam" in his grotto to overcome parents' concerns after several high-profile paedophile cases in Britain.

Gamers better at Multitasking

Cell Phones, Driving Don't Mix

...blah blah blah... something about driving...

In her lab studies, she has yet to test any volunteers who are immune to delays in multi-tasking, though she says some students do much better than others.

"I have to say that the best ones are those who play a lot of video games," she pointed out. "Those are lab studies, however, and not driving tests."

What about gamers that play a lot of driving games?

New obsession

It's been a busy week.

My processor purchase has morphed into me practically building a whole new machine. Half the parts have been scavenged off other machines that I've had lying around and that aren't used for much anymore and will be replaced with new bits at a later stage. The other half consists of a new case (the Thermaltake TaiChi), mobo, PSU and cheapie graphics card.

Now it's just a matter of getting at least one of the machines that I took apart for parts back up and running again and ditching the other two (they've just been taking up space since my move seeing that I can't host my site from home anymore.)

Game?

I briefly considered getting a job at Game in order to get my hands on an X-Box 360 to flog on e-bay.... Looks like I wasn't the only one with that idea...

Despondent

It's been a week filled with disappointment for me.

In the ongoing saga of my internet connection woes, my last conversation with UK Online Support staff resulted in them saying that basically 5MBit is as good as it's going to get on my "24Mbit" service... I'm in denial. I still feel I should be getting more.

I'm allegedly 2.5km away from the exchange, so according to this graph, I should be getting around 12Mbit. Unless of course BT have got an extra 2Km of cable coiled up somewhere on the route (which is possible I suppose).

But still, 5Mbit is nowhere near the 15Mbit that they said I could expect to get when I signed up. I think I'm just going to downgrade to 8Mbit again and start thinking about buying a house that's closer to the exchange.

Other disappointing news: My order for a new processor from Micro Direct that was supposed to be delivered yesterday didn't turn up.... So much for the "Saturday Delivery" option. The guy in dispatch said that he has no idea what happened to the order and I should expect a call from their sales department on Monday... doesn't sound good.

I did read "How To Survive A Robot Uprising" during the week (on Hindu's recommendation) which was a bit of a chuckle. You can never have enough books with killer robots on the cover in your collection.