ME2 DLC done

Downloaded the DLC and got it done. I'm always cynical about DLC, but this time it was well worth it. The two big ones are absolutely epic, and the thief one was pretty good too. I also got the one where you can visit the wreck of the original ship from the first game, but that was really sad, seeing it all smashed up and having to recover the dog tags of the dead crew before putting up a monument.

So now I just need to finish it again.

New glasses are fine. They fit OK but my ears aren't used to them so are complaining a bit, but they'll settle down.

Rugby fun

Yesterday everyone went to Rob and Em's new house for the rugby. Really good day, not least because in their new house there's more room so people can fit in more comfortably. Had snacks and Chinese which is always good.

Woke up today feeling basically 100% for the first time since I got that cold, so I'm going to celebrate by crashing out in front of the Xbox. Makes no sense I guess but the weather outside is horrible. While my ME1 new Shepard is playing through quite nicely (although not as evil as I'd hoped), I've deleted my ME2 saves back to a certain point and set the Xbox to download the DLC while I go to Rhyl to get my new glasses.

Not much else going on really.

Moving day

Today was the day that Rob and Em moved into the new house. It went pretty much swimmingly and it was inspiring to see how everyone rallied round and did everything they could to get all the stuff moved with the minimum of hassle. Nobody complained at all, it was absolutely superb. Even Rob's Mum did her part by feeding the troops in between loads of stuff.

Their new house is great, a good size bungalow with nicely sized rooms, and an epic garden. It's so great that at last Rob and Em have got the house they deserve.

Tired now, it's been a long and busy day!

Exercise is good for you, right?

A fairly uneventful day, mostly building machines including some nice Precision M4500 laptops. I've cleared 28 jobs this week, making my stack look a bit more reasonable.

This evening went to Rob and Em's for the last badminton night before they move. We got Chinese for the last time, and headed out to badminton. We were all still suffering slightly from our colds, so Rob and Em left a bit early. I stayed for a couple more games which I basically sucked at because I kept coughing and didn't feel well. At one point, I went too energetically for a shot and nearly threw up all the Chinese. Managed to avoid it, but had a huge coughing fit. Embarrassing.

Foot improved

Foot better, still slightly painful if I stand on it wrong but at least now I'm not hobbling around. Legs rather achy though after helping to remove at least eight redundant drive drawers from the racks in work, very heavy things. Workload still high but improving gradually.

My new Shepard is proving to be annoyingly good even though I'm trying to make him evil. He has punched a reporter in the face because he didn't like her questions and any time he can try to talk his way out of a fight, he just pulls his gun out and starts firing, but even so, still has more paragon points than renegade. Having said that, I've found quite a few things that I didn't find the first time round, so that's fun.

Watched the Scream trilogy again, finished the third one day which I'd never seen. Thought it was rather strange, but quite enjoyable. Also watched the first episode of Band of Brothers, which looks pretty good.

Car brakes sorted yesterday, but they were more knackered than I thought - £286. Ouch! They feel a bit spongy at the moment, but they'll be fine when bedded in.

What the hell is wrong with my foot?

My foot still hurt all day today, very painful to walk on. It looks absolutely fine, but there's a spot on the left side that is hideously painful if I put any pressure on it. It got bad enough that I saw the doctor this evening after work and he wasn't sure what it is. He prescribed me some anti-inflammatories and to go back if it didn't go away.

Work was a bit hellish after my week off, but cleared down quite a lot of stuff. Tomorrow I'm involved in the new server and stuff for the backup system, should be fun if my foot is still playing up.

Car goes in tomorrow for the brakes. Normally I'd drop it at the garage and walk back up to the top of town to the office, but fortunately I'm getting a lift to Ruthin from a colleague.

Watched BeetleJuice this evening, another film that caused gasps of horror when I said I hadn't seen it. Was a bit underwhelmed to be honest. After that did a bit more ME1 which is standing up very well to a replay, primarily because I can make different decisions and see how they play out. Still equal in terms of paragon and renegade points though, oddly.

Back to work

Went to my Dad's yesterday for much of the day and then last night it was another Wii night with the ex-Proact gang, which was fun as always. One of them has moved to Gibraltar for work for six months, but he was able to attend through the magic of Skype, which worked surprisingly well.

It hasn't been the most productive week off. Not been particularly good for exercise due to weather and generally still feeling quite rough after the cold, and my obsession with Mass Effect 2 meant I didn't really get much else done. I've still got the DLC to download for Mass Effect 2, as I forgot to get it before I started the game, but unlike the first game, you can carry on after the final mission so I can still play it through with my original character.

Have started ME1 with a fresh Shepard, this one is a Vanguard and is being rather crappy to people. My approach so far is that he's being nice to his crew but shitty to everyone else, which means at the moment he has equal paragon and renegade points. I got the nose and chin right this time, but he's got huge and unruly eyebrows, which help him look rather evil.

Back to work tomorrow. Despite it not being a hugely productive week, I haven't really thought about work at all so I'm feeling quite laid back about it, but we'll see how long that lasts.

Spent all day with a bad left foot, agony if I step on it the wrong way. No idea why.

ME2 Complete

Completed Mass Effect 2 this evening. Logged 42 hours on it. I think a lot of that was me being overly OCD about exploring the galaxy, but on the plus side I was very prepared for the last mission. Absolutely epic game. Mass Effect 3 is due towards the end of the year, going to be a long wait. There is DLC for Mass Effect 2 and it came with a code to download it, so I might do that.

When I imported my save from the first game, I thought you couldn't adjust your character's appearance, but Rob said you could so I must have missed the option. It would have been nice to sort out his stupid chin. Oh well, never mind, it's a good, strong heroic chin...really, it is.

1000th post. Scary.

Still coughing

Still coughing every now and again, was woken by a coughing fit at 5am this morning.

Not really been a good couple of days for achieving anything useful. Tonight was good, went to Rob and Ems but we didn't go to badminton as they both had the same cold that I have had and Em was still suffering. Instead just had a pasta thing with pork and apple sausages and stilton, really nice.

Still powering through Mass Effect 2. I'm not sure how much I've got left to do. Somewhat bewildered at Shepard's sex appeal, every woman in the game is throwing themselves at him even the one that would presumably die from a mere touch from him. Found he can get drunk in a bar and pass out, to wake up in the toilets, and while doing a side quest, found he (hilariously) can't dance. Plenty of nice touches like that. The character development is really good in this one, not so much Shepard, but all the others he picks up.

One more day of holiday and then the weekend, and then work again. Oh well.

Disconnected

A fairly uneventful day. Went into town to get the car booked in to have the brakes looked at. It's not stopping as well as it should be, the front brakes are grinding and the handbrake comes up to the top again. It's going in next Tuesday.

Didn't do much else, except, yes, play Mass Effect 2. Still progressing through nicely. There's some interesting characters coming into it, including a heavily tattooed woman who is a complete psycho, although you find out why and it's understandable. While talking to her I seem to have triggered a romance with her, which is proving to be quite interesting because of her many issues about basically everything.

Cold day

It was cold today. Took the dog for a walk and got rained on and shifted some more of the soil that was moved by the floods.

Watched Top Gear on iPlayer. Normally I skip the star in the car bit but not this one as it was Nick Frost and Simon Pegg, classic.

Didn't do much else, except, inevitably, play more ME2. Still enjoying it, like the character development in this one. Had a couple of glitches, got stuck on the ship standing on some guy's head and had to reload, and then another hilarious one where a dead guy got stuck in a door that opened out of the floor so each time the door opened he'd get lifted into the air. Got a video of that one.

Out of curiosity found some German versions of the Mass Effect cutscenes on Youtube. Interesting, but had the slight issue that to me, my version of Shepard is the definitive one, so it just feels wrong and strange. I had the same issue with Saints Row 2.

Nice lazy day.

Truly obsessed

Have logged 13 hours on ME2 since about 6pm last night.

Obsessed? Just a little. It's just so fucking epic I can't stop wanting to see what happens next, and my OCD about exploring means I have to do every side-quest I possibly can before progressing the main missions. I love the way there's so many little details that carry forward from the previous game too. I can only imagine what the third one is going to be like - lets hope they don't fuck it up.

Having just been told by Rob you can get T-shirts and things with Shepard's N7 logo on them, I'm sorely tempted, but it might be a bit wrong for an overweight IT geek to wear them. Would be interesting to see if anyone got the reference though.

Lame? Maybe. I'm on holiday now though and I can use my spare time how I want. If I was to sit down and start reading Lord of the Rings, or even watching all the extended movies it would probably take about the same amount of time.

I have to admit I've been putting off stuff I had planned to do - replacing the fan in the DV7, stuff like that, but I've got all week to get that shit done.

I am going to try and book the car in to have the front brakes done tomorrow and I need to go to the gym and do some digging on the track after it got wrecked by the floods last weekend. So I'm aiming to not play ME2 quite so much in the next few days...

In other news, Nokia has jumped into bed with Microsoft, something I never expected, and will probably doom the company to irrelevance. I can understand how it happened, given that Symbian has so rapidly becoming outclassed, but why not Android? Given Nokia was making a Linux based OS already with MeeGo, Android would have seemed more logical. Intel just got royally shafted too, since it was working on MeeGo too.

ME2

It took a while to get into Mass Effect 2 because it's quite different, but well into it now.

Bizarrely, I think it just referenced Saints Row 2. At the beginning of Saints Row 2, your character has just escaped from jail and someone says to him that they thought he was dead. He says 'Yeah, I've been getting that a lot,' and scratches the back of his head. Just now, someone said the same thing to Shepard, he said the same thing in reply and scratched the back of his head in exactly the same way.

How strange. Perhaps just co-incidence.

Fly and be free!

At last this week is over. Been very busy in work trying to clear more jobs down before I'm off next week, but with limited success. I'm going to try and not think about work at all, but who knows what I'll come back to.

Obsession with Mass Effect continues. The version I got had a bonus disk with various documentaries and things, and also the DLC that came out for it. I didn't realise this or I'd have installed it before I started the game. I've installed it now and I'm going to delete the saves back to a certain point and replay the last part of the game with the DLC.

I was thinking about going somewhere next week but my finances are shaky and the front brakes grinding on the car, so I don't think I will. Also it's not much fun by yourself.

Instead I'm going to get Mass Effect 2 - and I'm going to trade in Fable 3 for it. After experiencing Mass Effect, I've realised that Fable 3 is a very shallow experience, overly dumbed down, clumsy and childish. And as I've said before, I always find sci-fi much more enjoyable than fantasy. I still think Fable 2 was pretty good but they fucked up that last one.

Rules will apply though - I must take exercise every day regardless of the progress of the game, and I must also do some geocaching, and take the bike out.

I'm going to have to look into getting a bigger hard drive for the Xbox, but it's hard to swallow the cost of a standard drive in a non-standard casing. That's one thing the PS3 got right, being able to chuck any standard laptop drive in, even an SSD.

Best game ever, maybe

Completed Mass Effect this evening. Logged about 30 hours on it since I bought it on Saturday. Insane. I've never been drawn into a game so completely before, perhaps because I played it most while I was ill with a cold, and it kept me from sitting around and feeling miserable. I can't find fault with anything about it, the only things really being the occasional loading being disguised by elevators, and quite often textures would appear a good second after everything else.

I finished it as a good person overall except a couple of decisions that were bad. My character also ended up making it with the blue alien in the end, although as he has the scariest smile in the world I'm surprised she didn't slug him in the face and leg it.

The sequel is supposed to be just as good but I'm going to leave that for a bit. Apparently you can load your save from the first one and carry on with the same character and decisions you made in the first one. Mind you, does that mean I have to stare at my character's ridiculous nose for another 30 hours? You'd have thought they'd have plastic surgery in the future...

Work wasn't great, did some more jobs, more came in, oh well.

Feeling OK today but my ears are playing up a bit and I'm coughing well. I don't think I'll be going to badminton tomorrow, but they can't complain as The Arse Faced Woman is the one who brought the cold to the meal last week.

Ouchy coughy

Had a surprisingly good nights sleep last night but woke up more snot and painful coughing bouts so spent the day at home again. Managed to venture outside into the sunshine to let the dog have a run which is better than yesterday as the wind made me cough.

Played some more Mass Effect. What a game, simply stunning. It's just so well put together, the story is well written and progresses nicely, and there's always things to do to build up experience and stuff if you get bored of the main story. Also the RPG elements are nicely done, and mostly handle themselves, which is nice if you're not into the micro-management side of things. The only thing I can at all criticise is the planets are possibly a bit samey and the characters sometime stray alarmingly towards the uncanny valley, but perhaps that was just my character's questionable nose and chin. I must be near the end now as I've just unlocked the Paramour achievement, which came suddenly and unexpectedly (no pun intended, hah).

Wish I was better so I could start exercising again, feel really crappy now as I haven't been to the gym or walked the dog properly due to the weather and now illness. Excuses, excuses...

Ill

Not well. Sneezing and snotting all day and generally feeling out of it. Had to phone sick to work, would have been no point going in.

Did play some more Mass Effect when I eventually emerged from my pit of despair. It's rare that I get grabbed by a game like this. I think it's another case of the character customisation making it somehow easier to connect with everything your character does. So far he's still being good. Also I think I've managed to initiate both of the romance subplots with two other characters, not quite sure what's going to happen there when they both find out, hah.

Not sure if I'll be better for work tomorrow. I really hope so as I'm off next week and I really need to get the more urgent jobs and things out of the way.

Mass Effect overdose

Woke up this morning feeling shite, definitely got a cold. Really didn't feel like doing much so fired up the Xbox and overdosed on Mass Effect and Lemsip capsules.

I don't normally like RPG style games but this one has enough of a decent plot and action to make it worthwhile, and I like the variety of things you have to do. So far I've been doing loads of the side quests which is good for building up the skills and experience. The bit I thought I would hate is the conversations where you have to select what to say next, but I've actually grown to quite like going through it. So far my character has been pretty nice to everyone except for some incident in the first chapter. I wish it was possible to change the character appearance after you start the game though. Also keep hearing voices I recognise such as Marina Sirtis and Seth Green.

Didn't do much else except go outside and briefly attempt to sort out the water flow issues. There must have been some ludicrous rain in the night as the stream that goes under the car parking area overflowed and gouged a shallow trench across.

Arse

Definitely got a cold or something, feel crap.

New glasses are OK for long distance stuff but crap for computer use. There's a weird prism effect that crops up if looking in anything other than almost straight ahead, which when using a computer screen is really noticeable and makes my eyes hurt. I guess it's because of the thinner lenses. Suppose I'll have to go back to the fucking shop AGAIN and see if they can explain it. It's annoying because my vision is better when looking straight ahead at distant things, and the prescription must be better than my old glasses as I can feel my eyes working together much better.

Annoying as I initially just wanted new pairs of my old glasses but they don't do them any more.

From high to low

Woke up this morning feeling much better after yesterday being so awful.

Went to Rhyl and got my new glasses. Taking some time to adjust to them because they are smaller and lighter so don't feel as secure as the old ones, and the prescription feels very different. I can certainly see better but it's taking some time to adjust.

Also picked up a copy of Mass Effect after everyone I know who has played it has raved about it. The only time I played it before was with Will, and that was only to make the most hideous character possible and laugh at the cutscenes. The character creator is pretty good and I set up the usual character I tend to create except I forgot to set the skin colour so he's going round looking like a pale ghost. Oh well. I've played it for a couple of hours and made some progress. Initially I thought I was going to hate it because of the whole selecting what to say thing, but I got used to it. I've done loads of the side quests and it's turning out to be fairly good. It looks like you can be good or evil but so far my character is earning more good points than bad points.

After feeling OK for most of the day, I now have a strange feeling I'm going to get a cold. I hope it is just a cold and not flu as someone in work has had flu recently. I can't imagine what will happen to my jobs list if I'm off sick.

Zombie

Didn't sleep last night, possibly due to large amounts of food consumed. Result was about three hours sleep resulting in feeling like a zombie all day.

It's stupidly windy today, hasn't let up at all.

Workload still crap in work. Had some help of a colleague today to try and get some jobs out of the way which was good but it's still out of hand. I can't stop worrying about it now and all I seem to get all the time is hassle from people asking why stuff hasn't been done.

HP DV7 now has docking station with a real HP power supply, which allows it to be connected to the amp with SP/DIF. Not quite configured right yet. Windows can output surround sound but the media player didn't want to for whatever reason.

Went to pub to watch rugby this evening but felt so tired that I couldn't cope with the noise and excitement so came home at half-time. Feel absolutely fucked but not sleepy. Can't stop thinking about stuff, including work.

Superb evening

Work = poo except for trying to put two 10k SCSI hard drives, a SATA hard drive and a tape drive into a Dell workstation which ran hot so I opened the case and pointed a desk fan at it. Much to my surprise, it made quite a difference.

This evening went to a meal hosted by a woman at the Rhuddlan badminton club. The club usually goes out for a meal every so often, but this time, she suggested she cook for everyone and we'd donate to a charity instead. It was a great evening, she's an amazing cook and everything was wonderful. It was also a good chance for everyone to sit around and chat and also play Pass the Pigs. I also had a piece of Stilton cheese by itself for the first time ever. I've had it in things but not by itself. It was really nice too, tastes so different from the awful smell.

Really windy today, when I went out in the evening I considered turning round because it was so awful.

Fecking water

Went into work to find my jobs list had expanded to the point where it was so bad that I passed the usual point of angst and rage and simply shrugged and sighed. All I can do is just plug away at it and if I get complaints direct them at management.

Water unfroze so I could have a shower. Then the toilet cistern broken.

The car is running much better now the exhaust is fixed and seems to be using less petrol although now I'm driving like an old woman by keeping the revs down. Seems to be working, last tank of fuel it got about 120 miles to half a tank, this time it's up to 190. Hurrah.

Flimpple

Sunday was fairly pointless.

Yesterday was a bit rubbish too, didn't really do much after work.

Today did some stuff with the LED torch and the camera. I painted round more of the car with light and it looked fairly decent. Also my missing SD card turned up after having gone through the wash and ironed in my shirt pocket.

The car went in to have the new wing put on, and they were also able to realign the tailgate, which is now fitting much better and hopefully won't leak now when there's windy rain.