Megafun

Yesterday was spent initially at my Dad's. I took the unicycle over and we took it apart, changed the shit stock tyre for a nice BMX one and attacked it with wire wool to clean it up and get rid of some of the surface rust on it. After that we just chilled until I headed over to meet Rob to play D&D in Wrexham. It was really good fun. Although I didn't get a chance to use my character, I got to play Kat's and rolled a natural 20 at a critical point which killed two monsters at once and saved the day. Ace. Also their stories of the unfortunate mule that was eaten by a panther which was then killed by setting their tent on fire was absolutely hilarious, never mind the current unfortunate situation in the mines. Too long to go into here but damn it was funny.

Work was busy today but productive. Did a very early start to get some stuff done which was nice as I got some flexi built up. This evening took the dog for a walk, fell off the unicycle some more (but can get several feet reasonably often now) and watched the first part of the recent two-parter Doctor Who. Hadn't heard good things about it but it was quite fun. Then I played some more Dragon Age. I'd got to a bit on Sunday where I was a bit lost and not sure what I was supposed to be doing, then suddenly it clicked and then I was kicking arse and taking names. Great fun.

Damn you, weather

The plans for a bike ride this morning were thwarted by dreadful wind and rain. Frustratingly by the afternoon it had calmed down rather a lot but at least I was able to take the dog for a walk.

Didn't do much else today except continue with Dragon Age. I had to switch it to Casual mode as playing it in Normal requires micromanagement of your entire team to a frustrating degree or they die pretty quickly and my screams of rage were making my throat hurt. Really starting to enjoy it now, especially as I'm starting to get the hang of how the plot is hanging together and how to handle the equipment and stuff. I wasn't sure if it would be my thing as I prefer sci-fi settings over fantasy but it's got me hooked at the moment.

It keeps reminding me of Fable II but in comparison, Fable II seems childish and dumbed down, let alone the abomination that was Fable III. I heard that there were complaints that Dragon Age II was dumbed down in comparison but I'll wait and see on that one.

Wood Fest!

Went to the wood fest with Rob and Em and Rob and Caroline. I'd never been before and it was great, really enjoyed it. Apart from all the wood stuff there was loads of craft things and food fair type things going on so it was great. We saw loads of cool stuff.

Got some nice pickle and some cheese that only I liked called Sticky Toffee Heaven, basically a combination of cheese and sticky toffee pudding. It was gorgeous. Lunch consisted of a rather good burger from a burger stand, but it was proper burger with really nice buns.

Not done much else today except play Dragon Age again. Getting into it now and getting the hang of it. Found you can remove the entire team's clothing and make them run around in underwear which makes cutscenes hilarious but not so practical when they get ambushed. So far my character is being nice to people although I'm not sure if it keeps track like Mass Effect.

Also got some new strings for my guitar. I've been playing it a fair bit recently even though it only had four strings and they were knackered. Think it needs a good setup though as some of the strings are buzzing. Also I made the mistake of putting a classic type bridge on it with the three saddles so it makes intonating it more difficult.

Whimsical error messages annoy me sometimes, for example:

'Hold your clicks a moment please, Flickr has the hiccups.'

Oh fuck off, if it's broken, say it's broken. Grr.

Dragon Age: Underpants

A fairly OK day in work.

Came home to find the driveshaft for the Focus had turned up, bloody heavy thing.

Got two 250gb hard drives for the M17x which are now installed and running in RAID0 to give a combined drive of about 485gb. I did think about larger ones but I don't need that much space. These are 7200rpm drives. SSDs or hybrid drives would have been nice too but considerably more expensive.

I thought I'd have to use a Linux CD or something to clone the original drive onto the new volume but investigation showed the best way to do it was with Windows itself. It has an option to create a system image onto an external hard drive and then create a bootable DVD which you can use to restore the image back onto the new drive. Then use Disk Management to expand the partition to fill the space and done. Rather impressed as it was easy and reasonably quick given there was 50gb of data to transfer.

Played some more DA. It's taking a while to adapt to it as it's quite a complex game. There was a memorable incident when I was exploring a dungeon with two companions and picked up an item of armour. I then accidentally unequipped everything else, which left my character standing in his underpants which was hilarious. The way the dialogue works is taking some time to get used to. Unlike Mass Effect, your character doesn't speak, which is odd when everyone else does. So far though, quite enjoying it. Looking forward to seeing how it develops as I think it's a big game and I've only done a little bit of it.

Not much

Work was OK. Had my PA which went fine and we installed an update to the backup system.

Badminton tonight was OK. Had salad again and played OK. Shame the hag was there and the numbers meant we had to play with her twice.

Got Dragon Age Origins. So far it's a little like Mass Effect but more complicated. I was able to create a reasonable replica of my original Shepard in it but only had time for a little play on it.

Three wheels

Got a takeaway on the way home and ate it in front of Futurama. Then felt fat and disgusting so decided to take the bike out for a very quick ride to test it. It worked fine although the handlebars shifted in the stem so I had to sort that. I think I've done it but not quite sure if it's right. Also fell off the unicycle a few times. I think it needs a new tyre and/or inner tube as it loses air pretty quickly and the tyre on it looks cheap and crappy.

Still feel crappy and fat. Damned bad food. I remember when Rob made that salad a couple of weeks ago, felt great after that.

Went mad last night and shaved my whole head except eyebrows. Felt really strange and the double-takes from everyone in work got tiring quite quickly. Oh well.

Even more meh

Two fairly average days in work. Did get annoyed over something this afternoon but after I took the dog for a walk I felt better.

Really not much to report this evening. Didn't achieve much.

Ultra bleh

What a pointless day. The weather was crap for most of it with high winds and spurious rain. Didn't feel particularly inclined to do anything, so I didn't. All I did was wash the car, get shit food and eat it in front of Futurama again. Always feel shit and worthless after doing that.

Wish I could get motivated to exercise properly and stop being a wimp about the weather stopping me doing it too. Annoying.

Sold the first of the laptops I got to fix up, made a fairly decent profit on it, hurrah.

Tired now. Not looking forward to work.

Installed Ubuntu 11.04 in a VM. I always thought the interface had got pretty good so why they had to change it for that stupid Unity interface, I don't know. It's rubbish and makes no sense.

I love this, but not sure why:

Miranda - Gnocchi.

Argh, no updates

Forgot to update this week for some reason. Beginning of the week was fairly unspectacular.

Thursday was badminton. Despite the successful salad experiment of the previous week we had more Currywurst, which was a mistake.

Friday was the funeral of my grandfather-in-law. He died a little while back. He was 96 with very severe Alzheimers so it was a bit of a relief in the end. I only met him a few times and he never remembered me after the first couple of times. He seemed like a really nice guy though and I wish I'd had a chance to know him before the dementia got so bad. In the evening met up for a few drinks with Rob, Em, Andy and Maz, which was great even if it was a fairly early night.

Today was spent at my Dad's. We did loads of work on the bike. Got the tyres seated on the rims properly at last and rebuilt the handlebars with a new adjustable stem, a new bar, and new ergonomic handgrips. Also replaced the brake blocks with nicer ones. I never realised before just how fiddly it is to get the blocks angled correctly though. The new brake blocks allow you to change the pads without removing the whole lot though, so once it's set up, that's it. We were going to put the newer side-pull brakes on it but that would have meant all new levers and cables too so it got too expensive. Anyway, it feels great to ride now and if the weather isn't completely horrible tomorrow I'll take it out and try it out properly.

Saw a Boardman CX Team bike in Halfords which is meant for cyclocross. It is my perfect bike. Built like a road bike but with bigger tyres and has drop bars with four brake levers with shifters built into them. Absolutely stunning in every way. Shame it's £899. Here:

http://www.boardmanbikes.com/cx/cx_team.html

It's fun tinkering with bikes. I can see how people spend time building them up from parts and tweaking them.

Took the car to have the rear tyre looked at. As I suspected it did have a puncture. Sadly they also told me that my left front tyre was nearing the limit and the right one also had a gash in it. As much as I like the Toyo tyres it seems that they are too soft and fragile for what my car has to put up with. So they had to be replaced. They did the tracking too and found the back end was totally out of alignment, presumably due to the crash on the 29th. So that's all sorted and it does drive better. Still needs a driveshaft to stop the shaking at 45mph+ though. Damned thing.

In one of those moods where I can't get motivated to do anything except listen to music and piss about on the Internet.

Eurovision apathy

Rob came up with the idea of watching the Eurovision in a big group a couple of weeks ago. The idea was that everyone would select a country and then dress appropriately and bring food and stuff.

It was a really good evening. The actual contest itself was fairly underwhelming but it was really good fun watching it and commenting on the daft voting. There was loads of good food and drink and general banter.

I had already bagsied Germany (surprise) and decided I would bring Currywurst. I assumed the sausage would be easy enough but I wasn't sure about the sauce. It's one of those things where there isn't a definitive recipe as the point of Currywurst is to make it with whatever's handy. I tried one of the recipes and it came out really well, tasted pretty authentic, even if I had to miss out two of the ingredients as I didn't have them.

Today has been a fairly uninteresting day. I did however go to the car boot in Rhyl for the first time in ages but it was fairly tedious and crap as it was raining. I went to Halfords to get a new saddle for my bike as they had a huge retro leather one with actual springs on the bottom, which is ace and really comfortable. Still need to sort out the handlebars though.

After that I drove around aimlessly for a bit so the odometer and trip counter on the car would read 1234567890 so I could take a photo. Then went home and completed my renegade Shepard in ME2 before playing a bit of Portal 2 and watching some more Futurama. Slightly alarmed by Mass Effect 3 spoilers being around already when it's not due for release until next year so I need to be careful about those.

Running the M17x on battery. Fairly pointless, I don't know why they bothered putting a battery in it. It might be laptop shaped but it really isn't a laptop. It lasts about an hour on battery doing not much at all, so if you actually used the quad-core or the dual graphics cards it would probably last about 10 minutes. They might as well have put a third hard drive bay in instead so you could have RAID 5.

So far really happy with the machine though, the only thing I would like to do when funds allow is take out the single 160gb drive and replace it with two larger ones and run it in RAID0. God knows why it only has the one tiny drive, can only imagine it was refurbed because there was some issue with the original drive(s).

Rocket powered badminton

Thursday night badminton was great. We decided last week that we keep eating the wrong food which makes us play badly, so this time Rob and Em made a nice light salad. It made a massive difference and also due to the numbers, we didn't have to play with the Hideous One at all.

Friday was a fairly average day. Work wasn't too bad and had a nice lazy evening sorting out the M17x and playing a bit more renegade ME2.

The Galaxy S has proven worthy. The battery life is really good, tons better than the HTC Magic. I'd imagine it would suffer if lots of games and things were run on it but it survived three days with 30% of the battery left, and was used for more than the normal amount of voice calls and usual texting and fiddling. Also it even came with a spare battery, nice.

Picked up a new handlebar for the bike on Thursday evening, just waiting for new stem to arrive now.

Headache and squits

Not a bad day in work. Not much had gone on while I was off. We've all had upgraded BlackBerrys in work. Not too soon either, the trackball in mine has already failed twice, even though I've tried to keep it clean. The new one has a trackpad instead so no moving parts.

The Galaxy S got a lot of use today as I was talking to the insurance people and the garage and my Dad. It held up pretty well, although it seemed to struggle more in areas of low signal than the old HTC did.

Car is being picked up by insurance preferred garage next Wednesday. Liability is still being worked out. They have asked the other insurance company to get Enterprise to call me but I don't know if I want to risk arranging a hire car until the liability issue is decided. If I still had the motorbike it wouldn't be an issue, bloody typical.

Had a headache most of the day and felt a bit crappy and now this evening I've had major squits. Not good, and not sure why.

Played a bit more of my renegade Shepard in ME2 who is nearly at the end. I like renegade Shepard, he might be a complete arse to basically everyone but at least he's consistent and is usually being a bastard for a reason. ME3 has been delayed. Oh well.

10 years since Douglas Adams died. I always remember it because it's the day after my birthday.

33 today

Birthday today. Since I did so much over the weekend I had no plans today except to do nothing at all useful.

So far all I've pretty much done today is sit around eating chocolate and watching Futurama, so I consider it a job well done.

My Dad got me a new wallet to replace my ancient FCUK one which I've had since about 2001. This led me to clear it out of all the crap that was in it. However some of it had memories so I put it all into a scanner to have a record of it. I suppose I don't need several Berlin public transport tickets, or tickets for the New York, Washington or Boston Metros and there were loads of receipts and tickets for places in many places on holiday.

Also set up the phone I got to replace the HTC which arrived today. I ended up getting a Samsung Galaxy S as it got really good reviews and supposedly has better battery life than the HTC Desire which was the other one I was considering. So far it's really good. It was used but looks pretty much like new.

Finished watching Band of Brothers, which is a hugely impressive series, really good.

Fattest weekend of all time

It's been a very, very fat weekend. Yesterday was one of the meetups with the people I used to work with which happens on a fairly regular basis and takes place in either Ruthin or Crewe. Last night it was Crewe so we headed over and stayed the night. It was a great evening, the usual vast amounts of snacks, followed by takeaway. There was the usual video games, with me being forced to play Fifa, and then we all played Lego Rock Band while watching night fall on The Rock in Gibraltar courtesy of a Skype link to our friend who is working there at the moment.

This morning we emerged and had a nice breakfast of croissants before heading back. I was a little tired so I had a lazy rest in bed finishing off The Eyre Affair. Then it was down into town to meet up with Rob and Em before heading off to meet up with the gang at the Semaphore for fat birthday food. Sunday night is the all you can eat buffet so it was another fat evening. Good food though, really, really enjoy it. The highlight is the satay sauce, it really is incredible.

Not much else to report except I went insane. The Alienware M11x impressed me so much I went out and got a refurb M17x to replace the Acer 7741g. It's a fucking beast. My old Inspiron 9400 was a big machine but the M17x is something else. It is absolutely enormous with a massive aluminium shell that weighs a ton. Part of the reason it's so big is to provide space for the insane cooling. I didn't really take much notice of the graphics setup in it when I ordered it as I was more interested in the CPU and screen, so I didn't realise it had dual 1gb ATI graphics cards running in Crossfire X. To try those out I installed the Mass Effect 2 demo. It looked very very nice, but was weird to play it on a keyboard and mouse (well, trackball) after playing it so much on the 360. But the M17x handled it perfectly at 1920x1200. I'm probably not going to use it for games so much, but it's nice to have the option. It's nice too how the M17x and the M11x have the same basic design, just scaled up and down. As an experiment I put the Mass Effect 2 demo on the M11x and that too coped pretty well, although it locked up at one point, not sure why.

After the accident last Friday I got a letter from the insurance company of the guy who hit me so I've told my own insurance about it. I'll see what they want to do about my car. I'm sure that it'll be a write-off but I'll see how much they want to give me for it. If I hadn't just had it serviced it wouldn't be such an issue...

Weird day

Quite a strange day. Everyone seemed a little weary for some reason. The weather did change rather and it rained so perhaps that was why.

Got some really interesting sausages for the pre-badminton feast. Pork, Honey and Five Spice. They were really nice. However we've decided to try something lighter next week as we think the porking out before the game is affecting our play, hah.

New phone on the way, hopefully here soon. Getting tired of the Nokia I'm using at the moment. After using a touch screen for six months it feels so clunky, something I never expected to happen to me as I was resistant to touch screens for a while, and I still am to a degree.

Jugular

Work wasn't too bad after the breaks. The main Unix guy was back in so with a sense of relief I was able to hand it all back to him and start trying to get back on top of my normal workload. Wasn't too bad today but the leisure centre and library both had big problems, neither of which I usually support.

Lazy evening. Watched the ninth episode of Band of Brothers - holy shit. Then watched some of Eastern Promises while rebuilding a HP ProBook with Ubuntu for something like the fourth time. It's not a bad machine but it seems to have slightly quirky hardware.

Stilton. It smells like feet but tastes divine. How can it taste so different from the smell? The dog stole a great chunk of it, hope it doesn't make him ill.

Burn it all!

Today, Rob, Em and Caroline came up to help clear out the shed that had years worth of shite in it, mainly because there was an old chaise-longue and butter churn that I had offered to Caroline but they were behind loads of stuff.

We had loads of fun chucking all the wood stuff into a big pile for Em to go all pyromaniac on and the metal into a separate pile to go to the scrap. Found a few fun things like a collection of motorcycle magazines from the late 70's and early 80's and my old Transformers duvet cover which had survived in amazing condition. The ancient harmonium was beyond saving and while it still made a few groaning sounds if it was pedalled vigorously, it was smashed up and burnt.

After that I was planning to go on a bike ride but Rob and Em didn't feel like it and I decided I didn't either. So I took out the bike and checked it all out and rode it up and down the front a bit. Also in the spirit of the work I've done on the bike recently, I dug out the unicycle. I cleaned it up and pumped the tyre up but any ability I might have had to ride it seems to have disappeared.

I took the car out and it still drives OK so I gave it a wash. The door seal doesn't seem to be affected by the crumpled arch so I don't think it's going to leak. The plan now is to just drive it and see how it does in the next MOT, or until something goes bang.

Haven't done much else. Watched The Core for the sole reason of enjoying the utterly ludicrous physics and shit that goes on in it.

The BlackBerry I use as my backup phone has developed a sticky trackball, and I don't have anything else I can use. Bah. I'm still trying to work out if it's worth getting another smartphone or if I should just get a dumbphone. The HTC was nice but coping with the generally poor battery life was a bit of a pain. Can't afford anything right now anyway so will have to find something shit to keep me going until payday or so.

Things come in threes? Fuck...

Took the car's wheel off and found the spare one I had lying around and got the tyre moved onto that. Got home and decided to take the dog for a walk in the sunshine. While walking the dog, I called my Dad but then a car came. As I was trying to move into the side of the road and control the dog, the phone slipped from my hand. It landed on the wrong corner and exploded everywhere. I had to dig around in the leaves for the battery and the Micro SD card, but when I put it all together I powered it on to a cracked screen.

Gutted. I liked that phone and due to various shit going on this month (*cough* Alienware *cough*) the last thing I need now is to drop more cash on a new one. So I've dug out the old BlackBerry I was using before I picked up the HTC and will have to live with that again for a while.

If things come in threes, what's next?