Cool

This MacBook is running Leopard...cool overload...

Yay, real computer

OK, the Apple Store is insane. It's nearly 8:00pm and the place is absolutely packed. I finally found a MacBook which wasn't being used. The place is scary, it's like some insane cult. It's just mad. You come in here and it's genuinely technology porn. You can't help wanting some of the oh-so-beautiful machinery.

And the iPod touch is sensational. I just spent half an hour browsing the web on one. The interface works so well it's mad. Now that Apple has said they are releasing an SDK in February, I can only imagine the apps that people will create. Imagine a multi-touch Kaoss pad or something like that. The only way that would possibly be cooler is if they released a multi-touch Mac Tablet. The Nokia N800 does basically the same stuff, and runs Linux, and can take SD cards, and has loads of apps out for it, and so-on. But it just hasn't got that sheer design beauty that you get with Apple stuff. I have to admit I think this MacBook is pretty damn nice too.

Anyway, London is treating me well, the Tube has been OK so far except for the Jubilee line this morning. The queues were so bad that five trains went past before I was able to get on and squidge myself into a strangers armpit. Yummy. Luckily I was only going one stop. This evening after the course finished, found an all-you-can-eat Thai buffet for £8.00 including a very nice cup of green tea. I think I should leave the Apple Store before I buy something I can't afford. In fact it may already be too late. My old iPod 3G has a duff battery and can't be charged via USB... OH FUCK IT.

I originally was going to count November and December of 2007 as part of '2008 - The Year of Thriftiness' but I don't think I'll be able to. Damn it! I am such a cock.

Blogging on an iPod touch

OK, this is being thumbtyped on an iPod touch. This thing is beautiful. Also the Regent Street Apple store is terrifying! London is mad. More will come when I can get to a realcomputer

London and a flying dumpster

Off to London in a few hours. Taking DS, camera and laptop, but not sure I'll be able to get on wi-fi. Oh well, we'll see.

And this looks hilariously fun in Halo 3:

That new car smell...

Well, due to one thing and another, my Dad's wife replaced her Mercedes C-class with a BMW 320i a few weeks ago. Nice, but due to a weird seat design, it does her back in and has to go. So we went looking at the Land Rover Freelander 2 as a possible alternative. I was never that keen on the old Freelander, it always looked to me like a miserable bulldog or something. Also it was the vehicle where Land Rover truly sold out to the soft-roader market. However, the new one looks far better and is apparently a massively improved vehicle.

The showroom was quite nice with a couple of Range Rover Sports, a full price Range Rover and a Discovery 3. All very nice, but I was far more interested in the lovely metallic grey Defender pickup. It may have a new dashboard and a new Ford 2.4 diesel engine, but it's the same old look that hasn't changed since the 1958 Series II. The chassis and coil sprung suspension are the same as the original Range Rover which dates back to 1970. It's an absolute classic vehicle. I was actually after a Defender but found early Discoverys were cheaper and more comfortable.

The Freelander 2 was nice though. She sat in one which had the electric seats which she wanted, and then drove another one which had the diesel engine and an automatic gearbox. In motion, it's quiet, refined and feels like a tall car. Not bad, and a world away from my old Discovery. The new Range Rover and Discovery have excellent off-road ability, not sure about the Freelander but it should have some.

I don't like car showrooms. It's just the way that those new cars sit there, gleaming and shining with that new car smell. The salesmen waiting to greet you with their best sales talk also annoy me. But there was still something about it. It was just that feeling that if I was earning more money, it could be me signing my life away for that shiny new car. This persisted throughout the test drive, the shiny interior with no scratches, marks, dents or smells. The perfect handling and the odometer reading only a couple of thousand miles.

Then we got back to my Dad's house and reality returned. The Discovery may be everything the Freelander 2 is not, but it's mine, and it's paid for.

Incidentally, my Dad's got one of the new Skoda Fabias, the one they made out of cake for that advert. It's a really nice car, the only fault is the slightly gruff noise from the three cylinder 1.2 litre engine.

Saw a nice V-reg Mercedes S320 for sale. Apart from the engine size and being right-hand drive, it was very similar to the S500 Rob and I drove in Atlanta earlier this year. Stunning cars. Cheap at £8000.

Quick and dirty

Summary of today:

1) Cake day in work for charity, which includes my colleagues incredible brownies. Fat but oh so tasty.

2) Last day in work before London, surprisingly went OK.

3) Got a haircut, which has made my hair civilised again.

4) Badminton was OK, had some good games, some bad. Pub after the game was good.

Dull

Anyone else noticed that this blog has started to follow a simple formula? Start with a whinge about work, followed by some pointless geekery about computers, badminton, basses or cars, and then some pathetic thought of the day and perhaps a link to something equally geeky or pointless.

Dull dull fucking dull.

Wow, I'm boring even myself, how bad is that.

Leopard is out any minute now. I'd be excited about it if I had anything that could run it. Still, I'm sure I'll get to check it out in London next week, and also take a look at the iPod touch and the iPhone.

My 8-string bass is getting a lot of play time recently. It make such a nice sound, and you can do quite a few things with it. I think I made a mistake with the strings on it though,, they were very cheap and sound like arse. The bass strings are just normal strings, but it's the octave strings that are tricky to find. So if I can afford it, new strings will be nice. I'd like to replace the bridge and electronics but not sure if it's worth doing.

Will has his priorities straight

...random stuff...
(18:20:30) DoubleL: Yeah
(18:20:44) William: holy crap
(18:20:46) William: i forgo
(18:20:49) William: i have metroid
(18:20:53) DoubleL: Bye then.
(18:20:55) William: going to play now
(18:20:56) William: hahahaha
(18:20:57) William: sorry
(18:20:59) William: haha
(18:20:59) DoubleL: Heh
(18:21:04) William: laterz dude

His monolithic rod Kurtis

For the first time ever, my primary mail address is getting spam. No idea how that's happened, but it started yesterday. Trying to think what I've done that might cause it.

Bah.

Warren Ellis is a genius

Just read some more chapters of Crooked Little Vein, and I ended up giggling so hysterically I had to put it down.

God, that actually hurt.

Also managed to get Ableton Live running on my MP3 playing Optiplex. It runs quite well and the amazing Asio4All driver lets the crappy Intel AC'97 sound card work with practically no latency. Great stuff.

Also listened to a rather scary but interesting track by Will, which is really good.

Great Balls of Cheese

Work was fairly dismal. I was helping the Unix guy upgrade one of the virtual AIX machines when the console lost connection in the middle of an upgrade and wouldn't come back, leaving it basically buggered. Great. I had to leave it with him as I had to go for an eye blood flow test. The pressure in my eyes has gone down and the blood flow improved by 10%, which is apparently good. My eyes stabilised enough to do a proper test and showed that my right eye is slightly worse and my left eye is rather better. Can't afford new glases just yet though, and I need to get a copy of my prescription.

Made a weird pasta thing this evening with noodles and a peculiar sauce made mostly of cheese. It turned out quite nice.

Rob lent me Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis. I didn't realise he wrote normal books as well as graphic novels. Only read the first chapter so far, but it's definitely his style, and looking pretty good.

Car tax this month. Boo. At least you can do it online now, which makes it far easier than trying to find your insurance and MOT and queuing up at the post office.

BUH-URRRRRRRRRRRRP!

I love this one. His face in the second panel cracks me up every time I see it.

Trial by Fire

In my 12 years of driving, I have never towed a trailer. Not even a little one. So when a friend who is building a house asked me to help him move some timber for the house he is building, I agreed with a little trepidation. They have a rough farm track rather like ours and he'd broken his parents VW van by towing the first load up there. with it.

First I had to actually attach a towball to the Discovery, which was easy done by my local Land Rover gurus. I was also pleased (and surprised) that all the electrics actually worked.

The trailer was pretty massive and more than doubled the length of the Discovery. You could feel it there when it was empty, and it was rather disconcerting at first. Just when I thought I was getting used to it, four tons of timber were loaded and things got interesting. It was HEAVY, and also stuck a good six feet out of the back as well. Fortunately the trailer had it's own brakes and the Discovery easily coped. It was an interesting journey as the usual bouncy ride became wallowy and sedate. The most worrying part of the journey was going down a 1in 4 hill, but that wasn't too bad, we just jammed it in 1st gear and used the engine to brake.

I had to reverse it twice, but managed reasonably OK. It's rather weird at first, you basically have to do everything against your normal instincts.

So yay, I can now tow a trailer.

Rugby final last night. Not too interesting though it was mildly amusing to watch Percy Montgomery hurtling over a barrier into a TV camera.

This is an archive of every Calvin and Hobbes comic strip.

Frustration, fat and a geeky book

Work was annoying. Why is it so hard to explain to people the dangers of sharing passwords?

This evening went out with a meal with some people I used to work with. Went to Elements, a place that does all you can eat Chinese. It's actually pretty good and they have a grill where you choose what you want and they cook it for you, which is excellent. After that we went to Borders (at 9:45pm) where I bought a very geeky book called 'The Fender Bass: An Illustrated History'.

Are you feeling Gutsy?

Woohoo, Ubuntu 7.10 aka Gutsy Gibbon is officially out! My installation date from an early Alpha version and kept up to date. It's been rock solid right up to the official version. It's not given me any trouble whatsoever, only getting the Nvidia drivers working was a pain at the beginning.

Work today wasn't too bad, got to visit a few sites I'd never been to before. Got quite a bit done to help out a colleague, though I was thwarted by the refurbished office which doesn't have a lift, making it difficult to get enormous printers up to the first floor. It does however have a dumbwaiter, but as it's four feet off the ground and quite small, it's not all that useful. Also it's scary and I don't like it.

Went to Rob and Em's from the office and enjoyed a very nice pasta with bacon, cheese and spices, before heading off to badminton. It was OK, but I played like shite.

As it is payday today, I ordered some Ernie Ball Power Slinky strings for the Peavey 5-string. The B string is 135 gauge, which is quite huge. Should be interesting!

Flamponio

Steve Jobs has posted a message on the Apple website saying an SDK will be out in February for the iPhone. Presumably that includes the iPod touch as well. Fun fun fun. Nokia has announced the N810 which is another updated version of the original 770 tablet. It's not a phone, but this one includes a keyboard. It runs on Linux and there's loads of apps out for these models.

Work is crap at the moment. It's insanely busy in the north of the county so I'm working there tomorrow. Not really a problem but I got a crapload of jobs today too. Bah.

The Discovery had the wheel bearings and tracking sorted out, which is good. It does however need a track rod end and then the steering wheel lined up again, but that's not a big deal. Also the tyre that had the tread rubbed off on the edge should be OK for a couple of months at least. Had a lift today in a colleague's 1997/98 BMW 316i coupe. Never been in one before and it was really nice. Felt a little claustrophobic though as the roof line is quite low.

Help

Covered helpdesk today for a guy who is away on his honeymoon. It was a nightmare, calls came in thick and fast all day and then just as the final hour of the day broke, it got worse. More helpdesk calls, jobs, e-mails and people all descended on me at once and I literally had to hold my hands in the air and tell everyone trying to talk to me to shut the hell up. It was not an easy day.

After the failure to get to my eye test yesterday, I've got a new appointment next Tuesday, so I've got that afternoon off.

Nokia has demonstrated a new touch interface based on the Series 60 platform. Given that Apple has big influence on technology, despite a small market share, this isn't surprising, despite the iPhone being a bag of crap. Well, actually a handheld running OS X could be insanely cool if it wasn't locked down like a bastard. 3rd party apps would make all the difference, but like the Sony and the PSP, Apple is doing everything it can to stop it.

Also, who the FUCK wants a toothbrush that plays music into your mouth?! Who comes up with this shit?

Stupid day

I had today off work to get a follow up test on my eyes. However, that didn't happen. I set off to Wrexham, but didn't get very far as I realised the Discovery's brakes were being odd. The pedal felt hard and only worked properly if you revved the engine quite hard. Didn't want to drive it like that so I took it (carefully) to the Land Rover gurus up the road. One look was all it took for them to identify a split hose from the vacuum pump and it took a few seconds to fix. Brakes are back to normal now. They also identified the scrubbed front tyre as a tracking or wheel bearing issue, which they are going to check out on Wednesday. I think the tyre will have to be replaced though, the tread is just too worn on the left side. Bah. Anyway, got a new appointment at the optician next Monday and also visiting the doctor that morning to talk about food allergies.

Took some stuff to the tip, part of an ongoing attempt to clear out the spare room downstairs. Used to be my Dad's room before he left and now it's just full of crap.

Also played some Halo 3 with Will, which wasn't too bad. For some reason I wasn't on form today which Will found frustrating, especially when I drove off the same cliff three times in a row. Still, it was entertaining enough. This was followed by a long session of Canis Canem Edit, where I got some more missions out of the way. Then tried to play Wii Sports and Wario Ware but got frustrated. Also made the discovery that the cheap batteries that Rob put in one of my remotes had leaked.

While googling for stuff on Rammstein, somehow came across a forum called the Stormfront White Nationalist Community (Wikipedia). Some of the crap being spouted on it is just sick and it seems worryingly busy as well. Absolutely in-fucking-sane.

4tb hard drives are coming up. Sounds dodgy to me. I still think the 1tb drives are bad enough, how do you back that much data up? I'd rather have a smaller solid state drive.

Can't sleep

Been awake since four. Bah.

Pic is of a Rickenbacker 4003 in Blueburst, a colour I've never seen before. It's absolutely stunning. I've played a 4001 (largely the same) in a guitar shop in Washington DC, but I was frightened of it as it was a 60's model and worth a lot of money, so I didn't really try it out properly. Rickenbackers are expensive in the UK, even second hand, as they're only made in the USA. Even a totally stripped one with no hardware and a cracked neck is over £500 on Ebay. Anyone who tries to make copies, like the absurdly named Rockinbetter by Tokai, are usually shut down by Rickenbacker pretty quickly, as they are fiercely protective of the design.

Just gone downstairs for a pee and found the dog had made an incredible mess. A LAKE of piss, one huge sloppy aromatic turd and lots of small hard turds scattered about. Lovely.

Stuff and things

Didn't do much this morning. Played some bass and listened to some music. Then went to Andy's for 2:30pm to play some games and watch the rugby. Andy was still a bit under the weather after a wild night out to celebrate his 28th birthday* so Rob and I played some more Halo 3 and got another level out of the way. It was fun but a bit annoying in some parts where a tank killed us a ludicrous number of times. Then after Andy woke up a bit, we spent some time playing around in the Forge mode. We don't actually try and kill each other, we just play with things like the Banshees and teleporters and stuff like that.

We had already agreed that we were going to get a Chinese when Will came round, so we got a 4 person banquet. This amounted to rather a lot of food and so by the way the the rugby came round, we were all rather stuffed. It was pretty good though and the chicken and sweetcorn soup was really tasty.

So yeah, a good day overall.

Never been particularly impressed with Vauxhall cars, but the one I have always liked is the Calibra. Yeah, it's just a pretty Cavalier, but it looks amazing, even ten years after they stopped making them. They're cheap now, but that means that all the boy racers are buying them and ruining them with bodykits. My sister had one identical to the one in the picture, and it was a great car.

*Actually 30th but we pretend to believe him when he says 28th.

Firing up the old PS2

It must be said that since I got my Wii and 360, the PS2 has been sadly neglected. Mainly because there wasn't a spare power socket for it and so it had to share the power cable with my practice amp. However with the Optiplex now storing my MP3s on the internal hard drive rather than an external one, I was able to plug in the PS2. Impressively, after about 6 months unplugged, the clock was only half an hour out. I used to think the PS2 was noisy, but after the roaring behemoth of the 360, it's fans are like a gentle breeze.

The main game I was last playing on the PS2 was Canis Canem Edit. Will, Rob and I went and got this on the day of release last year, and it's an excellent game. It's basically GTA in a school, but what makes it work is all the little details. I remember the hilarity when in the first few seconds of playing, Will pressed the wrong button and smacked a girl, incurring the wrath of the headmaster's secretary and having to escape. This is like when we first played GTA: San Andreas and failed the impossibly easy first mission because a Spitfire dropped out of the sky and exploded, killing the guy who was trying to show us where to get pizza.

One of the fun aspects of Canis Canem Edit is goading girls into fighting by kissing one after the other. The same works if you use the controversial 'warm tea' feature where you can kiss some boys, if you get them jealous, they beat the the living shit out of each other which is far funnier.

There's going to be a version of this game coming out on the Wii and Xbox 360 and I'm quite tempted to pick it up again and play it through again. I'm at about 52% complete at the moment.

Shit-kicking

Got into the Discovery this morning to be greeted with a pungent stench of well...shit. Didn't have time to look at it properly and drove to work. When I sat at my desk, realised my left shoe had a lump of presumably greyhound shit on it. Worse, it had dried on and proved near impossible to remove. Getting into the car in the evening, I discovered more dried shit on the clutch pedal.

Bah.

Fun with silly computers

The blue and white G3 proved to be even more unstable after the Tiger upgrade. So I've retired it in favour of a Dell Optiplex GX240. It's an elderly small form factor machine with a 1.7ghz P4, 384mb RAM and a 20gb hard drive, but only USB 1.1 ports. Also the CD drive is a laptop style one and it only has half-height PCI slots which I was hoping to populate with a USB 2 card.

However I found that I had a USB 2 card that fitted, but the rear panel was full height. This was 'solved' by removing the panel and securing the card with duct tape. After next pay day I'll track down a proper half-height USB 2 card. I didn't realise that it wasn't until the GX260 that they had proper PCI slots.

Despite these problems it runs Windows XP nicely enough and seems stable. I've also found that I can connect to it via RDP from Linux without rerouting the audio from the sound card, which is perfect. However, I have encountered a problem I hadn't considered. My iPod is a 3G model, the one with the four buttons under the screen. It can't be charged from USB, only FireWire, which the Dell doesn't have. I guess I could put a FireWire card in instead of the USB, but can you get half-height ones? It's either that or find a broken 4G iPod to put the hard drive out of the 3G one in. Either way it'll have to wait until next payday.

I never thought that the day would come when I would be buying Dell hardware. But Macs are too expensive for what you get, and I've lost interest in building computers from scratch.

I didn't expect to be using Linux as the primary OS on my main computer either. It's always been a side project for me, and I haven't been without a Linux machine in some form for over ten years, but it's never been my main OS until now. The reasoning is that this machine has a Windows 2000 CoA sticker, but 2000 is old and doesn't run very well on this machine. Windows Vista would run OK but it's too expensive and the first service pack isn't out yet and XP is hard to get hold of and again, expensive. A Mac? Yeah, it would be nice and I still really like Mac OS X, but I can't afford one with an Intel processor, so there isn't much point. So the obvious solution was Ubuntu, specifically the Gutsy Gibbon pre-release. I've been running it since one of the early Tribe releases and it's been absolutely fine. It runs far better than Windows 2000 on this machine and has more up-to-date features.

This probably seems like a cop-out to those who seem to regard it as a matter of honour to have as much cracked and pirated software as possible and run it on a cracked version of Windows, but these days I just can't be arsed. Free software works for me. For Windows, there's Ubuntu, for MS Office, there's OpenOffice, for IE, there's FireFox and for Photoshop, there's the GIMP. The only thing I can't do so far on Linux is run Ableton Live, which I do miss, and Bryce, which I haven't used for a while anyway. And who knows, there might be open-source equivalents that I haven't found yet, though that is doubtful when it comes to Live. Blender is supposed to be good, but I found it very hard to use when I looked into it a couple of years ago.

One day I'll be able to get a Mac again, and that day will be glorious. The one I really miss is my Pismo PowerBook, which suffered some sort of power manager failure. It accompanied me to Paris and New York and was the platform for some crazy music creation due to the excellent sound circuitry in it.

Didn't go to badminton tonight due to being headachy and tired, and I'm also insanely poor so I'm treasuring the diesel I have the Discovery as I can't afford to fill it up. I also desperately want to put new strings on the Peavey bass, but I can't afford that either, and so-on and so-forth.

Wow, saving sucks.

Wii keyboard flappery

Well, now the Wii finally supports a USB keyboard in the browser, allowing me to type this actually on the Wii itself. Also as a major bonus, this means that the Buffy Swears keyboard at www.rathergood.com works on it. Hurrah!

Ignore earlier post, had a fit of depression and mental anguish, but then wrote a long and somewhat self absorbent article on why I hate the world and then did some exercise which made me feel better - no, not that.

Oh well. Fun fun fun.

One downside to blogging on the Wii - no way to insert a link or pictures, so I edited it on a PC to have them.

Sod it

No point updating this any more.

2008 - Year of Thriftiness

Rob and I have agreed that 2008 has been declared the year of thriftiness. I'm basically shite with money and have little to no self restraint to when it comes to buying things for no apparent reason. This is why I have shedloads of old computer equipment and video game consoles, guitars, radio controlled cars, a diesel guzzling 4x4 and even a damned unicycle.

Recently I realised that this can't go on for ever and so I have tried to become more responsible with my money. This is proving to be surprisingly difficult. I keep seeing things, that I find rather appealing and then I realise that it's just like it was before. Why do I need a rare Psion Organiser II XP which has a translucent case? Or a left-handed Squier Precision Bass which needs some parts, so I could learn bass left handed (which is apparently good for your brain). I'm trying to get myself into the mentality that I must only get things which have some sort of use, and try to rid myself of the crap that I have that I don't need.

Oh well. I have now at least got some more savings put away, but the thing I really want to save up for is a house. But now that house prices have gone so utterly insane, that isn't an option at this point in time. It's basically impossible for a single person on my wages to buy a house. Renting would be an option but it's dead money and the cost is about the same. So I'll just keep saving and trying to cope with the humiliation of living with my mother at nearly 30, and hope that somehow house prices come down again. Either that or get a yurt or something.

The Discovery is being a bit of a worry. It's nice, but the fuel economy isn't great and at some point I'm going to have to get underneath it with a wire brush and a bucket of Waxoyl to get the chassis and body protected before the winter. The pic is what the Discovery chassis should look like, but after 17 years, there's more surface rust than paint.

Also it's eaten the tread off the side of one of the tyres indicating the steering needs adjusting, and needs a few other bits and bobs. The thing is, whenever I see a car for sale that's small and economical, the ground clearance just isn't there and it would probably end up wrecked like my old Xsara did, though that was a total piece of crap before the track ruined it.

Though hopefully, if 2008 is the year of thriftiness, then 2009 is the year of holidays!

More rugby

Watched the Scotland Argentina game at Andy's. Not a bad game but Scotland made too many mistakes. Also somehow consumed an awful lot of chocolate and sweets as Em's idea of a healthy meal was crisps, sweets and chocolate. Hmm.

I only briefly saw Battalion Wars on the GameCube, but now there's a Wii sequel coming out, which should be entertaining.

My Linux backup machine (dual PIII 550mhz, 20gb SCSI boot drive, 160gb IDE drive and a DLT7000 tape drive) was accidentally left running while I was out and when I came home was emitting that acrid smell of overheating electronics. However it was still running and the drives were all OK so I'm not sure what was up with it. I'll have to have a look at it tomorrow. Weird though as it's been left running before with no problems. Perhaps it's sucked up a load of dust or something.

More rugby

Watched the Scotland Argentina game at Andy's. Not a bad game but Scotland made too many mistakes. Also somehow consumed an awful lot of chocolate and sweets as Em's idea of a healthy meal was crisps, sweets and chocolate. Hmm.

I only briefly saw Battalion Wars on the GameCube, but now there's a Wii sequel coming out, which should be entertaining.

My Linux backup machine (dual PIII 550mhz, 20gb SCSI boot drive, 160gb IDE drive and a DLT7000 tape drive) was accidentally left running while I was out and when I came home was emitting that acrid smell of overheating electronics. However it was still running and the drives were all OK so I'm not sure what was up with it. I'll have to have a look at it tomorrow. Weird though as it's been left running before with no problems. Perhaps it's sucked up a load of dust or something.

ARGH! Computers suck!

Why do computers crash when something that takes a while is nearly complete? I was copying my MP3 collection to a network share from the iBook, when it suffered a kernel panic with 97 files remaining. It's probably the second or third time I've ever seen it crash like that in five years.

Also my 80gb external USB hard drive has somehow become unusable by any machine. The only one that even sees it is there is the iBook and it says the partition information is corrupt. It's not making any bad noises, so I could probably put the bare drive into a laptop and reformat it that way, but why can't it just work?!

Bah. Sometimes I wish computers were simpler again. I had a quick play with a Tandy 200 earlier today, which was nice. It's very basic, but is quite versatile and is quite capable of talking to Linux over an RS232 connection. It also has a very, very nice keyboard.

Untitled

Went to badminton tonight but left early as I started to feel unwell again. Wasn't too bad.

A video of Geddy Lee playing bass. Never heard him before. Sounds quite good. I have however played his signature Jazz Bass, and it was really nice.

The Unclyopedia entry about Halo, worth a read.

Gits with guns

Feeling better today but not quite enough to go to badminton. I did however take the dog for a walk for the first time in a few days. The weather was really good too, so that helped.

Then played some Halo 3 with Will online. It was quite good, had some fun with the Forge levels. Found that teleporters can be quite hilarious and if you hit someone on a quad-bike with a gravity hammer, the effects can be quite random. Also played a couple of games with actual people and this is where I get annoyed. I freely admit that my gaming skills are limited when it comes to FPS and so I find that basically everyone on Xbox Live is better than me. So I get annoyed and shouty. Oh well.

Rargh

Frustrating day in work. Various stupidity and things causing untold hassle. Also having to drive miles to pick up a small piece of plastic and electronics. Oh well. Not improved by still feeling stuffed up from this stupid cold which is dragging on.

I finally put the rugby pictures up. They can be found here. As before, please excuse the iPhoto gimpiness (Up takes you to page 1). Also apologies if your photo is in there when caught unawares...

Pictured is a peacock I took a photo of in Cardiff castle.

Nothing to report

Boring day.

Finished Race to Dakar by Charley Boorman, which Andy lent. Having read through all the things that happened, I don't understand why anyone would want to do such a thing.

Bah

My cold turned out to be one of those one day things. Didn't sleep very well last night and my throat did that annoying grainy hoarse thing all day.

Had a test drive today in a Fiat Doblo for work. It was metallic orange and drove OK, though the driving position was rather strange and the pedals too close together. Lots of room in the back though.

Finished labelling the rugby photos, it's currently exporting them so with any luck they'll be up tomorrow.