Hobbled

Sunday was mainly spent watching the rugby down at Andy's. I'd tried to replicate these sweets that James had made at D&D a couple of weeks ago called turtles. Basically just mini pretzels with chocolate melted on them and a pecan on top. They were really nice. It didn't go quite right since I could only find nomal sized pretzels. I used cashew nuts and Mars Planets for those who didn't like nuts, and they came out pretty well. The rugby was good too and it was a great afternoon.

However I woke up on Sunday with a painful knee, which I suspect might be from when I nearly fell down the stairs on Saturday. It didn't hurt then but i've spent much of the time since Sunday hobbling around. Yesterday lunchtime was embarrassing as I went to the post office with a colleague and we were being overtaken by old men with walking sticks.

I thought it was feeling better this morning but it got worse throughout the day, and is being a real hindrance. The Prelude isn't helping because it's so low down, but at least I can drive. I scared myself in it this morning, I gave it some welly to overtake someone (which I rarely do) and because I was intent on watching the road, didn't realise it had got to 90mph without even trying and had hurtled past the hapless Rover 25. This was embarrassing since there was a tractor a couple of miles ahead and the Rover then followed me all the way to work at 45mph.

The hard drive failed in the Atom server last Thursday. It just clicks now, which is annoying. Fortunately it didn't have anything on it except backups of the three Alienwares so nothing was lost except some large video files that I left on there but they weren't important. At the time of failure it was only running two VMs, one for FreeNAS and one for Ubuntu. I hate not having backups (something I'm paranoid about in work that follows me home) so in the short term I bought a 320gb external USB drive which is plenty of space to hold the data off the laptops. Not as convenient as having the storage online on the network but I think I can come up with something.

No D&D last night due to Steve being in the USA so I had a reasonably chilled night in, trying not to move much so as not to disturb my knee.

I sold the two Spectrum computers that I dug out from downstairs. They both worked, but the +3 didn't want to load from disks. I got about £50 for them, less than I had hoped, especially the +3, but hey, it all helps.

Watched X-Men: First Class that someone lent me. This caused problems as it was a new Bluray and the software I use to play them didn't want to. I had to get a new version of the software, but that used a different registration system. But it did play it. Bluray is a bit shit I think, it takes forever to the disks to load, they all have their own gimpy custom interfaces and new ones need software updates.

After I finally got the movie to play, I quite enjoyed it. I knew absolutely nothing about it having barely been aware that it had even been released. So I approached it with a clean slate, although certain things were obviously going to happen. It was a bit long, but it was an interesting look at it all and I thought the background to the characters was pretty interesting. Michael Fassbender seems to be the big thing at the moment, so it was interesting to see him in a different role, previously I'd only seen him in Inglourious Basterds.

This article on the BBC provoked quite a lot of comments, which were interesting since most people seem to think religion is outdated and irrelevant. I personally don't care what people believe, but if they then start using their beliefs to restrict how other people live their lives, then that's going too far. I also find her implication that a society can only be good if people are religious rather alarming. If I'm a good person, which I hope I am, it's because it's the right way to behave, not because when I die I'll be rewarded in heaven.