Super Mario Strikers

Work was boring and pants, although I did manage to sort out the Windows registry stuff that was causing me such anguish yesterday. The evening was much improved by an evening at Andy's house, where we played Super Mario Strikers. We also ate a really nice chicken curry made by Andy, and a vanilla pudding made by me, which was a decent success.

Anyway, I hate football games. Mainly because I hate football. There are a number of reasons I hate football, mainly due to being forced to play it in primary and secondary school. Back then I was always breaking my glasses, so they made me take them off to play. I couldn't see the ball. Or in fact the goal. Or the other players if they were too far away. My strategy was to run away from the ball if I ever caught sight of it. For some reason I was often put in defence. Odd. However, I was usually treated as a last-resort substitute. That suited me fine.

Football games on consoles are even worse. The machine randomly flips your control from one player to another, so just as you get the hang of it, you suddenly realise that you are in fact controlling the player who is running into the edge of the pitch. Stupid. Then you have to remember whether you are shooting or passing, and it's all just annoying.

Fortunately, Mario Strikers barely even pretends to be a football game. It is in fact Speedball remixed into a Mario game, and it's pretty good. OK, I'm pretty bad at it and nearly drove Will to tears by constantly getting the shoot and pass buttons mixed up, but we still won a respectable number of games. It's a really good laugh.

On the way home today I saw some fox cubs playing on the road, they were really cute little things. I know they're supposed to be vermin and hated, but I quite like them. I wish we could persuade them to get all the damn rabbits that are spreading around our fields.

Also, this is something I thought I'd never see: Dell computers with Linux preinstalled. It's using Ubuntu which has got pretty good in the last few releases. I'm typing this in Firefox on Ubuntu 7.04 right now. I couldn't stand Dell hardware a few years ago but it's machines now are OK. Well, the business orientated ones are at least, I haven't really come across it's consumer lines. I use a Latitude D520 laptop in work, which is pretty nice.

One thing I did today was figure out the meaning of life...but I forgot it. Sorry Will!