FFXII OST fails to impress

Yo, folks.

Being a fan of the games Final Fantasy 7,8 & 9 was easy for me. Great music, great storylines, fantastic athmosphere...Well, talk about music in this place.

Honestly, after Part 9, which had a pretty chacteristic setting and an enourmously adequate soundtrack, Nobuo Uematsu seems to have become less inventive. It seems he lost the love for the subject, with only a few really appealing tracks to occur in FFX ("to zanarkand",ending theme and a tiny amount of others). Also, a big part of the tracks has been handed over to other artists, similar as happened later in FFXI OST and "FFXI - vision of zilat" OST. In these two albums, I liked only one track ("recollection").

Part 12 has been given to Hitoshi Sakimoto, never heard of, and reflects the tendency already visible in parts 10 and 11: The attempts to sound perfectly symphonic overrule the ambition to write memorable melodies, simple tunes like "terra".

FFVII Advent children featured some of the piano collection's songs, but also didn't bring any new amiable stuff.Nobody exepts Aerith's Theme Part II, but this (p.12) is the first FF OST I'm not gonna keep...Really, really disappointing, same development as shines through with the FF game series...

First Impressions on The Captain And The Kid

there's a lot of stuff on the web about the new album (Basic info: see below). First of all, there's the lyrics on eltonography.com.

First impression: Good with exceptions.
Now eltonjohn.com has sneak-peeked two songs, "The Bridge" and "Postcards From Richard Nixon". I have checked out the first one already, and the sound is awesome. A grandload of Piano and a brilliant voice give the rather weak lyrics of this song a really strong intonation.

More to be added about Richard Nixon later today.

___UPDATE___
It's been released a while ago now, and I still listen to it frequently. Many opinions can be found in the alt.fan.elton-john newsgroup, mine as well.
Long story cut short : The album rocks!

PC-Silence : AMD Geode serves the purpose well

I needed a CPU for my Audioputer, which i record tunes from my Piano with and edit some MIDI.
The goal was to have a low-power, low-noise computer that has enough power to run i.e. cubase or reason without being more than slightly audible.
I found out about The Geode Series (AMD), with a mere 14-25 Watts for a 1750+ (@1400Mhz) the probably perfect solution for my purpose. Reports on the web said it should be possible to cool the cpu passively, so i took an interest.

Finally after all parts arrived (... after lots of ebaying...) I assembled the following into a nice, small machine:

*AMD Geode NX1750+ CPU (Socket A)
*Asus A7N8X Motherboard
*512MB Kingston Value Ram @266Mhz (...the geodes FSB)-->added 512, so it's a gig now.
*some dvdrom
*Maxtor 160GB 8MB Cache HDD
*seasonic 200Watts Power Supply
*matx case
*creative soundblaster card (nothing special) -->replaced by M-Audio Audiophile 2496
*GF2, 64MB, TVout

Big Drama: The CPU is recognized as An Athlon 800, since the board doesn't support it. More research had the following result:
For the Geode, only a few Boards work properly!

So i exchanged my A7N8X for a ASRock K7S41GX (there is also a non GX version, offering 400Mhz FSB instead of 333, but Geode operates at 266, so go for the cheaper one) and found it working smoothly. Noiseless cooling is achieved by active cooling:
*2 60mm 12V Case Fans @5v
*12V CPU cooler @5V

Everything fine. Windows MCE works properly and I am happy to have a silent beast standing in my room. One drawback nevertheless: The case is not all good for HDDs, since they get pretty hot in their place...

Summary: Geode rules, what a pity so few boards support it.