What an out­come. Before hea­ding into the 2006 ashes I had a strange fee­ling that we would do terribly, what with injury woes, no pre­pa­ra­tion and poor team selec­tions. Howe­ver come today I can say how truly proud of the England cric­ket team I am; they pulled through and wor­ked hard to break pass these boun­da­ries to beat Aus­tra­lia hands down in a com­plete 5–0 white wash! I never thought I would see the day that England could beat Aus­tra­lia so com­prehen­si­vely in the sport that they have domi­na­ted for the past decade. To see England come back from down under with ashes still in hand brings a tear to my eye. They truly have ear­ned those MBEs now, they have done the country proud and let us hope that they can con­ti­nue to improve their game. It was a little bit hairy in Ade­laide, when Aus­tra­lia put on a good score and dec­la­red it loo­ked like win­ning was out of the ques­tion, but Pie­ter­sen mana­ged to pull off the second fas­ted 100 ever and we bri­lliantly grab­bed the Aus­sies by the balls and won the game on the 5th day. My only regrets are that Warne, one of the grea­test cric­ke­ters of our time, has to retire amidst his team’s most dire per­for­mance. But let’s not get too down, I for one shall be in Lon­don next week for the open-top vic­tory parade! Roll on ashes 2009. 

My spe­ci­fi­ca­tions for the per­fect ste­reo have not nearly been matched by any com­pany. Just buying one with blue­tooth and USB plug and play will set me back £280. Thus I have set a task for myself: to build my own. This may take 5 years going by my track record but I see it as a fea­si­ble effort. So, what are my aims for this ulti­mate ste­reo system?

At the moment I use my PC for all of my music, whether it be lis­te­ning to last​.fm sta­tions or mp3s via the highly fle­xi­ble and bri­lliant foobar2000. I don’t like having to have my pc on to lis­ten to music, espe­cially as it has a ten­dency to make fan noise, con­sume power and all the other fai­lings of my four year old PC (which is stan­ding up remar­kably well).

Func­tions I want:

• Wire­less con­nec­ti­vity to play inter­net, last​.fm sta­tions and send play­back sta­tis­tics to the last​.fm service.
• Wire­less or blue­tooth con­nec­ti­vity to quickly sync’ newly down­loa­ded files from PC to the stereo’s harddrive.
• USB Plug and play for mp3 pla­yers, etc, built in ipod dock
• Blue­tooth con­nec­ti­vity to trans­fer files to my phone and other devices
• DAB Digi­tal Radio Tuner, Short range FM output
• DVD-Audio, MP3-CD, CD play­back and DVD/CD bur­ning capa­bi­li­ties (pre­fe­rably tray-less for sexiness).
• MP3, FLAC, WAV, OGG, M4A, AC3, WMA, etc.
• A blue­tooth remote (pos­sibly using Wii controller)
• Tape deck (yeah I still love that ana­lo­gue fix)
• Recor­ding functions
• LCD colour dis­play that shows album art, artist image, now pla­ying infor­ma­tion and play­list info — essen­tially what my foo­bar shows (that’s the costly bit and touch screen is only a dream), spec­trum analyser.
• 5.1 surround sound com­pa­ti­bi­lity, Bass and Tre­ble control
• 100 GB HDD inter­nal and sup­port for exter­nal HDDs
• Phono and digi­tal audio, headphone jack and mic­rophone plugs
• Ideally all run­ning using Foobar2000, but that needs win­dows et al.

I have a mul­ti­tude of spea­kers ready for use, so the sys­tem will be desig­ned to work around them.

I am not asking much of myself.

Here’s my top 10 list as best as I can remem­ber. All of these films had 2006 UK release dates, some may have come out in 2005 in the states.

1. The Squid and the Whale
2. The Depar­ted
3. Man­der­lay
4. Chil­dren of Men
5. Brick
6. Capote
7. Marie Antoi­nette
8. The Pres­tige
9. Super­man Returns
10. Pan’s Labyrinth

I’m sure a gla­ring omis­sion will appear to me as soon as I post this. I am asha­med to say I have not yet seen Little Miss Sunshine or Borat.

Ahh, today saw the release of the Wii trial brow­ser powe­red by Opera; just as I was lamen­ting the pains of having to use my sis­ters lap­top to check my emails over this holi­day sea­son. Even though it is just a trial I am very impres­sed so far; full sup­port for Gmail and Goo­gle Rea­der AJAX and out of the box Flash sup­port that lets me watch You­Tube on the tele­vi­sion or load up my Last​.fm per­so­nal radio sta­tion whilst I pot­ter about. Impro­ve­ments should inc­lude tab­bed brow­sing and a box somewhere on the page that says what site or address you are visiting/on for secu­rity pur­po­ses, but I am sure these are in the works. On pages when the Wii deci­des it can’t cope the page disap­pears and the main brow­ser page appears in its place without war­ning — this is my only anno­yance so far. I’ll hold off on a pro­per review until the full pro­duct is relea­sed, howe­ver I can say this is a tidy little ver­sion to keep us going until then.

The ease and speed with which everything loads on the Wii is also a good point to note, espe­cially after having fallen out with my PSP due to its exces­sive and ridi­cu­lous load times or even my PS2 and Xbox loa­ding times. It makes it very easy just to turn on, play some Wii ten­nis and then leave, a quick 5 minute game is exactly that, not a quick 5 minute game plus 10 minu­tes of loa­ding and options screens.

A friend has bought me 1000 wii points to buy some games on the Vir­tual Con­sole, I think I’ll be get­ting bom­ber­man 93 at some point when I get a few more con­tro­llers but until then i’ll wait to see what else comes out. I can’t wait for Mario Kart 64.