BioShock

Completed BioShock today. However I reloaded the penultimate save and went back through the game finding things I'd missed.

Forgot to mention, after first setting up the 360 at Andy's yesterday, it did the 3 red lights of death a few times before it came on. Today however, it appears to be fine. Weird.

Didn't do much else today, feeling rather under the weather. I think I have a cold coming on, which isn't a surprise as Rob has had one and quite a few people in work have had one too.

Rugby and Halo 3

Went to Andy's with Rob, Em and Will where we watched two rugby games. We saw Wales playing dreadfully against Fiji and being dumped out of the World Cup. Fiji were playing like a bunch of cheating bastards and the referee was absolutely useless, so that combined with a poor performance from Wales meant it was not a good game to watch. After that there was Scotland vs Italy, which Scotland won.

Between rugby we played some Halo 3 multiplayer. We experimented with the Forge levels which was fun. I found that you could spawn a vehicle in the creation mode and drop or hit the other players with it, which proved to be quite entertaining. Found this out quite by accident where Rob was trying to put some barrels down and I dropped a Ghost on his head.

Also saw a bit of Westworld where a guy bonks one of the robots. Scary.

Plopinbon

<-- Huh?

Had to set up remote access for my manager's manager today, which was a bit alarming. But it went OK. Other than that, work was reasonable.

Badminton was great this evening. Had a couple of really good games. I'm not sure why, but I got in there and was waiting to play and just felt really unmotivated and miserable. Then the first game happened and I instantly felt much better.

A remixed, slightly less tedious version of the TECHNOVIKING with better music.

England 36, Tonga 20. Boo.

ALL HAIL TECHNOVIKING

Pieces of Randomness

Firefox is being gimpy. Top reckoned it was somehow using 104% of the CPU - bit weird as apparently the system was 47% idle. Perhaps having dual processors confuses it or something.

Work was meh, helpdesk day. Not too bad though.

Badminton was good, had a couple of decent games, all good fun. Also a nice chat with Rob and Em, which is always good. Exchanged commiserations with Em regarding her car being hit by a lorry while it was parked up, as my old Pimpmobile suffered the same fate.

Here is an exercise...

Compare and contrast (sound required, safe for work):

Video 1

Video 2

Halo 3

Just spent a few hours playing Halo 3 with Will and Rob. Played through a few levels co-op with two 360s Will and Rob shared Will's large TV, while I played on a smaller TV. It was really good fun, and the theatre mode lets you replay all your actions.

The multiplayer was good too and we spent some time playing that as well. Also ended up in wild hysterics after playing the Forge mode where you can edit levels as you play them. We were trying to create as many exploding barrels as possible to then ignite them while standing on them. It was unspeakably hilarious to see three Master Chiefs fussing round the barrels, trying to pile them up neatly, before being thrown violently through the air. It really was funnier than I can describe.

So far the campaign mode looks quite good.

360 weirdness

Ironic that I was going on about how well Ubuntu runs on this machine and then Firefox dies for no apparent reason.

Work was bleh. Got the hotel booked for my AIX course in October, which should be good. Hoping to get a look at the Terracotta Army in the British Museum as well.

Started going through the rugby photos. Some are good, particularly the ones from Sunday evening. Also got a lot of pictures of peacocks for some reason and two bass guitars used by Feeder and Motley Crue

The 360 was misbehaving this evening. When I was playing BioShock, it was flashing up certain textures and areas of the screen as bright green or black. I've read that this can happen on PCs when the GPU is overheating. So not a good sign. Perhaps it's a sign of impending failure. If it does it again or gets worse, perhaps it's time to call Microsoft.

Tried out the Second Life client for Linux. It seems to work as well as the Windows one. Doesn't stop the game itself being a huge pile of crap though, now I know why I haven't been on it for a couple of months. Took one step and then flew into the sky without any way of stopping. It's total cack.

Tedious day

Today was one of those days where I just sat there in work and wondered why I even bother showing up. Most days I can laugh annoying stuff off but today drove me insane. Also a mega boo goes out to Epson laser printers.

Spent the evening taking the dog for a walk and then enjoying a Chinese takeaway. I'm trying to eat more healthily but it was my Mum's birthday and she fancied the food. Oh well. I have however discovered the joy of fresh raw carrots. Mmm.

Tried playing Wii tennis left handed. Apparently doing stuff with your non-dominant hand is good for your brain. Actually managed to play quite well, oddly enough.

Booked the 21st and 22nd of November off work. Going to see The Black Crusade tour in Manchester with Ally. Should be interesting. It features Arch Enemy, DragonForce, Machine Head, Trivium and Shadows Fall. Can't go wrong, though I hadn't heard of Arch Enemy or Shadows Fall. This video is an example of Arch Enemy, and it's good, but I never before heard a woman sing like that. Scary stuff. I have got one of Machine Head's albums and a couple of DragonForce and Trivium's.

About to start Making Money, the latest Diskworld book. Terry Pratchett is one of the few authors whose books I will buy without reading a review.

Games games games

Spent a lazy morning doing nothing much. Came across a cool video of the French train world speed record from earlier this year. It's a modified TGV running on standard rails and it managed to reach 357mph. There's a shot at 03:49 of it going under a bridge at that speed and it's just insane.

Spent the afternoon at Will's messing around with games. We spent some time on Halo 2 and Gears of War on Xbox Live, which was fun, and I had a quick go on Super Paper Mario. It kind of plays like a classic Mario game, but with plenty of twists. Really good stuff. Also tried out Mercury Meltdown, which was also good, but very frustrating.

Restrung the mandolin as the ones on it were crap. I hate doing this, it's such a pain. Sounds better now though.

Odd day

Today has been slightly odd. I've had the house to myself for most of the day, which makes a nice change. Headed into town and jetwashed the mud off the Discovery. I was careless though and managed to hit the sunroof in just the wrong spot, hence a huge puddle in the passenger seat. Unfortunately my newly purchased AA batteries were there. Oh well.

Took the dog for a walk, nothing new there. It didn't rain. Didn't meet anyone or anything. Boring.

Cardiff was good on Thursday and Friday. Got a few pics which I'll soon put online hopefully.

Heading off to Ruthin now, meeting up with some old work colleagues, one of whom is the PS3 owner. Yet I've been asked to take a Wii controller. Hmm.

Gwamprah

Odd encounter this morning. I had just set off for work and there was the tiniest little pure black kitten you could imagine in the middle of the road (single track, very quiet). It was so small and bewildered that it had no idea that I was bearing down on it. So I stopped and rescued it. It was really tiny, it looked like it had just opened it's eyes, had a look at the big wide world and taken it's first wobbly steps, right out onto the road. I knew where it had come from, an irresponsible house that has unneutered cats that breed prolifically, so I took it back there. Hopefully it'll soon learn to stay away from the road. There really is something about kittens. I got a big smile and a wave from a woman in a Freelander who had stopped behind me while I rescued it.

Went round to my Dad's this evening. It was his mother-in-law's funeral today. It all went off well enough. Met her daughter and her boyfriend as well. She lives in Norway and he's Norwegian. Given that she's at least 40 and he's 50-something, they were behaving like love-struck teenagers. It's all very cute but when they're talking to each other in Norwegian, you can't help but wonder if he's saying dirty things. Had a lot of left over food from the buffet, so I ate some and brought some home for the dog.

The Discovery looks manly and rugged with a covering of mud all over it. Our neighbour came up in his tractor and the large wheels pick up all the mud and rub it all over the overgrown plants, which then transfer it to the Discovery when I drive up the track.

Tired now.

I hate computers

Spent the evening (yes, I KNOW I'm a hapless geek) installing Windows XP on an old Compaq iPaq desktop. It's fairly pathetic, being a 500mhz Celeron with 256mb RAM and a 6gb hard drive. But I wanted to see if it would run iTunes reasonably well as a possible replacement for the dodgy G3. I got Windows installed from a spare OEM disk and activated (despite the key being from a broken Acer laptop) and everything was working, when I suddenly realised that it only had USB 1.1. Experiments with an external hard drive showed that it was far, far too slow to use with an iPod.

So now I need something with preferably at least a P4, a PCI slot, and ideally cheap or free. Oh well. Pissed off that I activated Windows, if I try activating with this key again it'll probably tell me to fuck off, like the one off an old Dell laptop did. I only tried it because I was certain it wouldn't work.

Cardiff was a cool place. Weird to come back home again with that slightly different perspective that going somewhere you really like gives you.

Uploaded the photos from the weekend. I'm going to have fun labelling this lot.

Incoherent Rugby report

Saturday: Got up early, got the train and ended up in Cardiff in a train jam-packed with people. It was insane. The station was packed, the city was packed. I'm surprised they didn't close it up and put signs up saying 'City full, sorry'. So we hung around for a bit, before making our way to the stadium. It was a reasonable game, though I had the loudest Australian in the WORLD directly behind me. It was very annoying. To the point where a little Australian woman next to me actually apologised on her country's behalf when he went for a drink.

After the game we had some drinks and then went to the hotel. By then we were all very tired, yet all were embarrassed to admit that we didn't want to go back into town. Fortunately Rob was manly enough to say it and so we had a meal at the Harvester next to the Travelodge. Partly due to alcohol, mostly due to tiredness, it was a rather random meal with everyone talking utter nonsense.

Sunday: Went back into town and looked around the docks and the bay. Had breakfast at an expensive French place with aesthetically pleasing but incompetent staff, before going to the Fiji/Canada game. This was much better and was closely fought to the very last second. Fiji won but there was a try from Canada which was disallowed for some reason. After that game went to a couple of pubs before managing to secure a nice table in the Walkabout where we remained for the next five hours, consuming a worryingly large amount of vodka with coke, lime and lemon, and even white chocolate. This was followed by burgers and cheesy chips before finding a taxi driver who seemed worryingly intent on finding the cornering limits of his Mercedes C220 CDI.

Monday: Rob had to go work so he got a train at Stupid o'clock. Andy, Em and I got a taxi into town later on and had a really good breakfast at a cafe recommended by the taxi driver. It looked small but went back for ages, and you could build your own breakfast. Mine cost just £1.50. In fact, when everything was totalled, it came to £9.99. Less than just one of us at the silly French place. This was followed by lusting over technoporn (Apple shop), instruments (music shop), various purses (TK Maxx) and various other places. Then we got the train and the bus back, which was a bit of a drag. The weather up here seems unsettled. I was trying to unlock the Discovery and it suddenly started hailing, so of course I tried quicker to get the key in and got it horribly wrong.

Anyway, this was just a mind vomit. Photos will be coming along soon.

Early...

It's early...too early...

Off to Cardiff today to watch the rugby. Hopefully it'll be good.

You might be let down. I'm not a hermaphrodite.

Badminton was good tonight. Had several decent games, perhaps because She Who I Do Not Like was not there. I feel a bit bad about that though because she fell over and hurt herself. I don't think I'll go tomorrow night due to an early start on Saturday.

Rob and Em had the disposable camera photos from the wedding, some really good and funny ones there.

Work was annoyingly busy as I was covering helpdesk, same again tomorrow unfortunately. Nothing interesting happened at all really. Sometimes I hate computers.

I was reasonably pleased to be able to plug in a scanner under Ubuntu and use it without any driver faffing. Might have been able to do that on newer versions of Windows, but not sure. I know 2000 would have been painful though.

Having one of those 'Oh my God, is this it?' moments. I can feel my mind teetering on the edge of a yawning chasm of misery and depression. Just...argh.

Image is from Clerks. A great film I can't watch as my copy is region 1 and my DVD player is broken.

Tired now.

Ubuntu

Typing this on one of the pre-release versions of Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon. It ran nicely enough on some other machines, so I took the slightly drastic step of dropping a spare 20gb hard drive into my main Dell Precision 450 and installing it on there. It installed cleanly but then gave me a boot error on restart. This caused a huge outbreak of swearing as I couldn't even get back into the Win2k install. But then I realised the 2nd hard drive was disabled in the BIOS which GRUB didn't like at all. Now it works.

I've even got it working with the Nvidia Quadro and dual monitors, though that took some fiddling. However for some reason it installed a non-SMP aware kernel so the second processor isn't working yet. Selecting an alternate kernel got the second processor working but borked the graphics. Even with one processor though, it seems a heck of a lot faster than Windows 2000.

And for the first time EVER on Ubuntu, at least for me, Firefox downloaded and installed the Flash plugin all by itself, without any intervention.

Further experimentation will be needed, I think, once it's finished downloading the 500mb of updates it wants.

Evil...

The intro to Dungeon Keeper. I wasted a good amount of my life playing this game. Absolute genius.

Platform theft

Some games just come out on the wrong platform. A classic example is Lemmings. When it was re-released a couple of years ago, it came out on the PSP. It worked well with a mouse, but with the dismal analogue 'nubbin' on the PSP? Nope. But imagine it on the DS, with the touch screen and stylus. It would be absolutely incredible.

And the same again has just happened. They've announced Rez HD on the Xbox 360. Rez was a vastly underappreciated game on the Dreamcast and PS2. I was one of the few who bought a copy, and I absolutely love it, though Will has had it for at least a year. But the platform it should be on is the Wii. Imagine using the Wiimote to move the cursor around the screen...

Damn it.

Fun fun fun

Unix day today. Always a nice change from the usual tedium of dealing with hapless users, incorrigable printers and the near constant annoyance of HP machines with failing hard drives. Whenever I hear of one, it's always a Maxtor drive.

One thing that caused me near panic was my laptop having a network spasm. I was logged onto a live system and I nearly shat myself when it suddenly stopped responding. Also I was downloading 2.5gb of updates for one of the machines, and it was at 98% when it froze. Fortunately for some reason it was easily sorted with an ipconfig release and renew. The download wasn't lost, fortunately enough.

Played some more BioShock this evening, but didn't get much done, it must be said. Wasn't in the mood or something and got annoyed at it.

It occurred to me that the G3 might be overheating, so I had a look at the CPU heatsink. It doesn't need a fan on it, but I found that the standard thermal stuff was rather crap. So I scraped it off and put some Arctic Silver on instead. Perhaps that'll help.

This is an AWFUL promotional video for MS-DOS 5. It is a MUST see, simply because it is just astonishingly bad. Not sure if it's a real Microsoft video or not, but someone had to pay for all those effects. MS-DOS was truly dreadful. It boggles the mind that Microsoft managed to dominate the world on the back of that piece of shit.

Currently listening to The Downward Spiral by Nine Inch Nails. Also two-thirds of the way through Look to Windward by Iain M Banks. His Culture novels are really good.

Remember when cool computers were blue and translucent?

Well, this evening, I decided to rebuild my MP3 playing Blue & White G3 with the latest version of OS X (10.4 Tiger). I'm not sure why other than I've been meaning to do it for at least a year. The music and everything important is held on an external FireWire 160gb drive, so it's easy enough to rebuild without affecting that.

The CPU in this old beast is only 350mhz and it only has 384mb RAM, but all it does is rip my CDs into iTunes, play them back and sync it to my antique 20gb 3G iPod and my Shuffle. It also shares the 160gb hard drive over the network. But for some reason it's not the most stable machine, and is susceptible to crashes. I've swapped out the hard drive, memory, video card and the CPU and also tried various versions of the OS, and it still does it. Possibly it's caused by the problems with the crappy Revision 1 motherboard IDE controller.

I suspected it would have problems booting from the install DVD using the Sony drive that was in it, as this was why I hadn't upgraded it in the first place. I tried another drive, which turned out to be faulty, so I put the Sony back in, and tried that. And it worked. Why now, when it wouldn't all those times I tried it last year? Stupid thing.

As the machine runs without a monitor or anything, I was intrigued to find that Apple integrated VNC into Tiger. This appears to work well with the client on my Windows 2000 machine, but the wretched thing is a touch unstable and keeps dying. The machine keeps running though, so I can log on via SSH and restart the VNC server.

So it was a bit of a geeky day today. Apart from that, I didn't achieve much. I was hoping to continue BioShock, but that'll be tomorrow now. Perhaps I've been playing it too much though. After I had a marathon session last week, I had a weird dream where I was in work, but the offices were underwater and water was leaking in and it was all dark. It was quite odd.

South Park won an Emmy for the World of Warcraft episode. If you haven't seen it, watch it NOW. It's on YouTube (admittedly in chunks), so there's no excuses.

Not listening to music right now, the G3 is still syncing the iPod and I don't want to worry it in case it crashes.

Rob's put the honeymoon photos online. No, not what you're thinking. Take a look, they're pretty good.

Overtime and yet more rugby

This morning was overtime. It should have been a simple case of connecting up PCs, logging in, updating the network config and the printers. But this job was made harder by stupid desk layouts with not enough power sockets and a distinct lack of keyboards and mice which were all packed away in boxes. We got it all done in the end but it wasn't as easy as it should have been.

Rugby was on at Andy's house, so we watched that intermingled with Family Guy and some really nice pasta bolognaise.

Tired now.

Family Guy has it's moments.

Rugby. Then rugby. Followed by more rugby. Then Wii.

My arm ached all today from badminton. Bah.

Went to Rob and Em's with Andy at midday and watched some rugby. First it was New Zealand defeating Italy, 76-14, followed by Australia defeating Japan, 91-3 and then finally England defeating the USA with 28-10. The scores don't show the true facts though, Japan battled valiantly against Australia and New Zealand were 'a bunch of cheating bastards' to quote Em on the matter. Also England played shite. This was followed by Wii bowling and laser hockey before everyone declared exhaustion.

This was accompanied by Pringles, pizza, homebrew beer, and we were introduced to a new Andy personality - Export Andy, who is very competitive even in the face of utter defeat. All good fun.

Working tomorrow. Boo. I could use the money but I really don't feel like going. Oh well.

Really tired now. Need sleep.

Today's random pic is of a Silicon Graphics IRIS Indigo workstation. This company made computers that looked aesthetically pleasing, way before Apple did. Very nice high-end systems, running a Unix variant called Iris and very solidly built. They commonly had very powerful 3D graphics and were used for film work. The other cool thing was the names: Indigo, Indy, Onyx, Crimson and Octane were just some of them.

Work and Badminton

Work was OK, but annoying. It was supposed to be my Unix day but I also had to cover helpdesk so it was a bit fractured. Still got a bit done though. Also it was someone's birthday so there was cake, which is always good.

First badminton day of the season. I think I played reasonably well, but it was quite interesting to see how people were out of practice. Even people who are terrifyingly good were playing less well. Also it was very busy and the sports hall was very warm for some reason. But it was all really good fun.

Also just learned that my Dad's wife's Mum died today. She was 90 and very frail and ended up breaking a leg and then developing pneumonia.

Talking Linux

Day off today. I had to take my Mum for an eye test after which she couldn't drive. The rest of the day I played BioShock and experimented with a talking Linux distribution called Oralux (dodgy name!)

It's designed for the blind and so it starts up with speech synthesis and various screenreading desktops. I ran it on an old Toshiba Portege laptop and it seems to run quite well. However the non-GUI desktops are rather peculiar and quite hard to use without looking at the screen. Or at least I thought they were. Perhaps you just have to get used to them.

Ow

Attempting to play slap bass is probably one of the more painful ways of discovering you have a splinter in your thumb...

New Apple stuff...

Wow, new iPods. Again. There was a time when I would wait on the Internet during an Apple announcement, hitting reload every minute to see what the new stuff was. New iPods or Macs would be examined minutely, looking for every detail of the sleek and shiny new hardware.

That time has passed. However I still think Apple makes some interesting things. The multi-touch interface on the iPhone and the new iPod Touch (Nintendo? Is that you?) intrigues me because I've always liked touch screens but found them limited. The new fat Nano looks interesting, and the Shuffle is always good. But my antiquated 20gb 3G iPod works well enough for listening to music in bed, and my two year old 1g Shuffle still works great for the car, where a screen is just a distraction.

Had a performance appraisal in work which went OK. Just need to get myself on an AIX course before the next appraisal in November.

Perhaps I'm just in a bitter mood today.

Finished Michael Crichton's latest book, Next, which is a lot of silly waffle about genetics. It did raise some interesting points, but didn't draw me in. I finished it and put it down, and just...didn't think anything about it. The only book I read of his which is any good is Jurassic Park. It's a lot better than the film and is where I first learnt of Chaos Theory.

Also just finished the last episode of Futurama season 4. What a great show. It never should have been cancelled.

Geeky Linux fun

Today was dull, nothing really happened. Doing overtime on Saturday and perhaps Sunday as well due to massive office moves. I really don't feel like doing overtime right now but I could use the money.

Didn't do much this evening. Played around with my dual-PIII Linux box and also the Gutsy Gibbon Ubuntu release on a couple of old laptops. Considering it's still under development, I've not had any problems with it really. My Toshiba Satellite A40 runs it pretty well. Also ran some network monitoring software to see what was going on with the network. Interesting how it picks up the Wii talking to WiiConnect24.

Spoke to Rob, he and Em have returned from their honeymoon into the harsh reality of life. But they had a great time, so that's OK.

Random pic today is of an albino peacock - how cool is that!

Currently listening to Thunderstruck from the AC/DC Live album. Superb.

Screwed up eyes and the 1 string bass

Behold, the 1-string bass in all it's crappy glory. It actually works now after I changed how the string is attached. The other main thing is I put fretlines on it so it can be played in tune. Measuring those up was annoying and fiddly, but they seem close enough. Pic is too small, but click on it for a larger version.

Had the day off work today so I could go and have an eye test. Usually these are pretty much a formality, but the optician was concerned that my eyesight seemed to be changing almost from moment to moment. He did a blood flow test and found that the flow in my eyes is really low. He thinks it's either a problem with my diet, or a food allergy, which could also explain the eczema on my face. So now I have to take a special supplement each day and go back in six weeks to have another test. Also need to see if I can find out what I'm allergic to, if anything. One of the weirder things about my eyes is that I don't have proper binocular vision, and I can choose which eye to look out of, something my optician says is quite unusual.

Other than that, got a couple of books while I was out, and watched yet more Futurama. I am now half way through the fourth series.

Back to work tomorrow, bah.

Wow, I found it, after 19 years!

No, not my self-esteem...

I blogged a while back about a tape I had when I was about 10 which had a whole load of stuff on it, but I didn't know who it was. The Motley Crue stuff I figured out, but I still didn't know what the rest of it was and there was one track in particular that seemed to stick in my mind.

I've just discovered at least some of it was Whitesnake. The one I remember in particular turned out to be the track 'The Still of the Night'. To be honest the only bit that I really remember is the cool guitar riff. The rest of it's a bit...hmm.

The video is here on YouTube. Scary stuff. I really don't think it could BE any more 80's...

So there you go, a mystery solved after 19 years.

PS3 thoughts and adventures in minimalistic bass

Last night met up with some people I used to work with in Ruthin. The guy whose house we went to has a PS3 and a 40" LCD TV. So we spent the evening playing games and in between eating crisps and dip, followed by chips and chocolate cake. Yeah, it was a fat evening. After the Indian the previous night, cue massive guilt trip.

The PS3 was interesting. The machine itself isn't particularly pretty, it looks like a shiny, overly bulbous PS2. The menus are pretty much the same XMB interface as the PSP, which I always found easy to use.

The controllers...well, they feel just like any PlayStation controller from the last ten years, just much lighter and because of that, flimsier. Played MotorStorm and some F1 game which used the motion sensing. It worked, but was nothing like as good as the Wii sensitivity. Resistance: Fall of Man was better, and looked pretty good. Also watched a bit of Casino Royale on Blu-ray. It looked quite decent, but does HD really add anything to films?

In conclusion, the PS3 is OK. However it does appear to be a better hardware design than the Xbox 360. Mine has crashed twice while playing BioShock in the last week and also twice claimed that the disk was unreadable. It really does seem to be a case of not if it will fail, but when.

I revisited my homemade 2-string bass today. I had previously attempted to add a Precision Bass pickup to it and got pissed off with the wiring, before throwing it under my bed in disgust. I've modified it to have only one string, but the pickup works and it even has a jack socket. The whole thing is held together with duct tape and bits of plastic, but it can now actually be played like a normal bass guitar. If nothing else, it has taught me that I cannot play an unlined fretless in tune.

Other than that I didn't do much other than tidy the downstairs room. Quite a lot of the stuff in there hadn't been touched since I moved out of my old flat, and I found quite a few treasures. One of the things was a Milton Bradley Big Trak, which I think I paid £1 for at a car boot sale in St Asaph cathedral. I don't know if it works, it needs a lot of batteries. One day I'll get some and try it. It was one of those toys that I found fascinating as a child but never had myself, but I knew a couple of people who had one.

Also downstairs is a shedload of retro gaming stuff. In the flat I had a complex series of switchboxes hooked up to my TV which let me switch between a NES, SNES, N64, MegaDrive (with Master System adaptor), Saturn, Dreamcast, PS2 and GameCube. It was slightly OTT and very geeky, but it allowed us to have many and varied gaming sessions. Such as doing a direct and somewhat hilarious comparison between the Saturn Resident Evil and the GameCube remake, or switching between the NES, MegaDrive and N64 versions of Micro Machines. Somehow I never got around to reconnecting it all up when I moved home, so it's all down there in boxes.

I really, really, really need to have a clearout.

Currently listening to Don't Look to the Eyes of a Stranger by Iron Maiden, one of the few decent tracks from the not so great Blaze Bayley era (The X-Factor and Virtual XI). I edited a couple of minutes out of the middle of the track and it's much better.

Mmm...Indian...

Went out with some people from work last night for an Indian. The venue was the Saffron in Mold, which proved to be very good indeed. I had onion bhajis to start and a slightly unadventurous chicken tikka korma for the main course with a portion of keema nan instead of rice. It was all really good stuff.

Somehow got sandwiched between two Corsas loaded up with chavs on the way home through Denbigh. One pulled out in front and one behind me. The people in front were driving slowly trying to see if the other one was there, while the one behind was tailgating, trying to see the one in front. A bit annoying, but when the first one turned off, I took great satisfaction in leaving the other one behind in a great cloud of diesel fumes.