Lazy/busy week

It's been the first week off I've had in a while so it's been fun. Alternated between lazy messing about with computers and games and doing exercise.

Did a bike ride on Tuesday on a route I'd been thinking about that goes on a circuit from the village. It went quite well until it got to a stupidly steep 1in 4 hill that I knew about but had forgotten it was so long. It took a while even to push the bike up it after I discovered I could actually cycle up it in the lowest gear, but it made it almost impossible to steer.

Badminton was good today, we had some really good games. I think the recent biking has helped my legs as I seemed to be able to get around the court a bit more and we also had a relatively sensible supper.

Nearly finished Professor Layton and the Lost Future on the DS, so should probably hunt down the next one. Not sure quite why I enjoy the games so much, but they are fun. Also picked up Wipeout 2048 for the Vita, which is fun but hard.

Rob and I have got rid of the rest of the video game stuff for £170, so in total we've made £473 once the Ebay fees were taken off. Not bad for stuff we thought most people would consider junk. One of the rare cases where we bought it when it was junk but now it's retro.

Not much else to report. One more day of freedom and then it's back to work after the weekend, boo.

Finally made the last payment on the evil credit card, which was considerably less than I thought it was going to be, so I'm 100% debt free. Now to start some serious saving!

Fun days

Wednesday was indeed interesting, as was Friday and yesterday.

Thursday badminton was good, and we had some decent games. Steve is better now so we went to his for dinner, sadly we ate a bit much again.

Saturday was a BBQ organised by Robert in work. It was really good, the rain held off just enough, and after consuming large amounts of food, including his astonishing cheesecake, we all sat down and watched Taken because a couple of us hadn't seen it.

Yesterday went for a bike ride from Rhyl to Llandudno with Andrea in work and some of her friends and husband. We intended to get to Llandudno but we got to Rhos-on-Sea and stopped for lunch and turned back. I was the only one who managed to ride over the small but steep hills on the coastal path by using the lowest gears, so I was pleased with that. The bike went fine and Nigel had advised me to pump the tyres up to 50psi for the hard surface. The path was busy but not too bad.

Today went to my Dad's and hung out, before heading over to see Rob and Em to discuss the rest of the video game Ebay stuff. We ate a large amount of unhealthy food and then watched a documentary about the Iron Maiden tour where they converted a 757 to hold the band and crew and the equipment. I'm always slightly bemused at just how massive Iron Maiden are. They were the first real band I got into, which kind of makes them automatically uncool. It's just crazy. After that we watched random bits of the Olympics closing ceremony.

And tomorrow is the beginning of the rest of my week off. Happy days.

People want things

It's been a fairly weird week. Been playing a bit of Minecraft on a multiplayer server, and watching the Ebay video game stuff.

Somewhat astonishingly the Megadrive lot went for £142! This was gobsmacking but I think the MegaCD stuff probably helped bump that one up.

Tomorrow is going to be an interesting day.

Seeing a load of Americans doing the Gangnam Style dance is surreal.

Wet wet and yes, more wet

Yesterday was good. Played a bit of Minecraft in the morning, and then it was off to the BBQ. It was a good long day of plenty of food and chatter. The weather was a bit grey at first but then it went really nice, so that was great.

This morning I decided on the spur of the moment to take the bike to the Alwen and try it out. All went well except for rolling it through a hidden dogshit meaning the tyre was horrible, until it started raining half way there. It rained most of the way round, and I got completely drenched. It wouldn't have been so bad except my glasses got wet and for some stupid reason kept steaming up too.

Still, on the plus side, the bike worked perfectly, even better than it did before, so that was ace. I also rode reasonably well and only had a couple of breaks, although probably motivated to get back to the car and out of the rain more than anything else.

The rest of the day was spent not doing much until I had a go on a multiplayer version of Minecraft with some updates known as Tekkit, which adds new textures and things like railways and other technology. I found a cool cave and spent quite some time turning it into a mountaintop fort with an observation room, several lower rooms and a deep mine underneath. Surprisingly really good fun. It's surprising how fun it can be to make things out of giant blocks. It reminds me very much of the 3D Construction Kit, a program I had way back on the Amstrad CPC which allowed you to create your own blocky 3D worlds, but was quite fiddly so making those worlds was quite a chore.

I don't think I could have cycled that far, but the Ride with Brad thing sounded pretty cool.

LOUD NOISES

Got yelled at for playing my bass too loud for the first time in years today. My colleague and I were testing a bass effects pedal he'd built, using my bass and amp. We didn't think it was that loud but the cardboard walls of County Hall meant that after a minute or so someone hurtled into the room and bellowed at us to shut up. Oops.

Tried Minecraft this evening after I was sent a download code by someone. I'd never quite understood the appeal of it with the big blocky landscapes, but it's surprisingly good fun. The creative mode where you can't die is great fun. I made an underground cave system, before I found a lava pit, then spent some time blowing pigs up with TNT and leaving giant craters. The survival mode is great, but scary. Not done too well at that so far.

Not much else to report. BBQ tomorrow at Em's parents. Need to get on the bike and do some exercise and have a bit of a clearout.

Payday today thank goodness.

Traumatic day

Today didn't start well. I was going through a village with a 40mph limit and there was a junction coming up on my left. A car coming towards me indicated and sneaked across, a bit cheekily, but then the car behind it followed blindly. I slammed on the brakes and fortunately missed it by inches, after leaving two giant skidmarks. The other car did stop and after I managed to stop my hands shaking enough to get the car moving again I parked in a bus stop and hurtled out of the car in a towering rage, which kind of dissipated when I saw it was a terrified girl who must have only been 20 or so, stammering that she was really sorry and didn't know what she had been thinking. It could have been worse, if I'd been going a little quicker it could have been a head on collision. The Astra hit 249,000 miles the other night - if it had been written off before hitting 250,000 that would have been a shame, quite apart from the hassle of finding another car again.

In a similar note, yesterday one of the Unix servers hit two years uptime since the last reboot. It has just been replaced by a newer one, and is due to be shut down and scrapped. I didn't expect anyone to care except me but when the news got about I suddenly found people surrounding me, watching my console session to the machine as it hit the magic number. It's been a good box that one, running under pretty much constant load since 2005 with barely any problems.

Today a couple of people from the external support for our backup system came in to find out why we were trying to ditch them. I wasn't involved at all but it didn't go well. In the end they came all the way from Oxfordshire for half an hour of stroppiness. Oh well. It was mildly awkward however when I went to the sandwich shop and realised halfway across the road they were sitting outside. However I didn't let that stop me and strode inside with my head held high. It was worth it though as I got a pork and stilton pie, absolutely delicious.

Then it was badminton, which was good fun. I ended up with Rob and Em and someone else in each game, which was great. We had some really good games, even one with The Ghastly One, who Em and I managed to defeat by clawing it back from 14-11 to them, awesome. She was so cross. Her, not Em.

I listed the first batch of video game stuff on Ebay last night, the Megadrive stuff. It's got loads of watchers and three bids already, which is a good sign.

Payday tomorrow, thank goodness. If my calculations are correct, I may be able to make the final payments on my various cards, and finally be 100% debt-free. A scary concept. 

Family

Sunday was uneventful and the last two days have been family stuff. My uncle on my Mum's side and his wife came to visit, so last night we took them out for a meal, and then today it was taking them around to places and things. I don't enjoy it when they come round, they are very religious and he's extremely eccentric, and not in a good way. Also annoying when my Mum took it upon herself to take my various faults and proclaim them out loud as hilarious anecdotes. Nothing like being made to feel like a waste of space to brighten up your day.

To make the day even better, Steve has been diagnosed with chicken pox - unfortunately I knew exactly where that came from. When I was round at Nigel's last Sunday messing with the bike, his son had chicken pox and the next day I saw Steve at D&D. Oh dear.

Back to work tomorrow. Hope the backup system hasn't died in my absence.

A Long Day

It's been a long day.

1st was off to Steve's for breakfast followed by a stroll around St Asaph setting out a geocache trail. It was good fun and it's been a long time since I walked around there, so it was good to see the place in more detail rather than just hurtling through in a car. A few things have changed since I had my flat there, which is nearly ten years ago, holy shit.

Had a bit more of a clearout of video game stuff. Rob and I are amalgamating our collections and putting them on Ebay. While sorting stuff out I found my old Sharp Zaurus SL-5500, a handheld computer from about 2001-2002 which was a 206mhz ARM based machine with 64mb RAM that ran Linux. I think the battery gave up the ghost after a couple of years so I stopped using it but it would be fun to get it running again. I seem to remember the battery is a fairly standard camera one and the charger is the same as a PSP, so it should be quite easy. By today's standards it's very primitve, but it had a slidey QWERTY keyboard and I was able to even add wifi to it.

Saw a good example of karmic revenge. There's a local guy who has a rather nice Focus RS in green and black, quite a new one and a lovely car. He always drives it like a total prick though. Today we saw it parked up in a layby on the bypass, the fancy carbon bonnet up in the air and a giant pool of oil underneath.

 In the evening it was off to Steve's again with Rob and Em, since due to the date Steve needed some compay. We had some food and then sat around chatting and watching amusing cat videos on YouTube. The original plan was to watch a movie but we all felt too tired.

hIPPY

It's been a quiet week on the whole. Not much going on.

My hip has been a bit achy off and on, but I think it gets better the more I use it, so I went on the bike last night for a while before being interrupted by the neighbouring farmer who was checking on his sheep.

Played badminton tonight. My hip did complain a bit but nothing I did made it worse, so I think it's getting better.

F*cking bikes 2

Decided I felt like a pre-work blast on the static bike, but then I actually got up, and my hip hurt. Quite badly, as though I'd been for a long walk. I don't know why but I hope it wasn't the go on the bike yesterday. I decided the saddle needed to come forward but the only allen key I had that fit it was lost a while back inside the Astra's dashboard, where it remains. So I gave it up as a bad job. My hip is still hurting now.

Work was frustrating today, I had to do several restores for people which kept interrupting what I was trying to do.

It was D&D tonight for the first time in ages, which was good fun. Took a little while for us to get back into the rhythm of things, but it was good. The classic moment was when James was playing as a character who has in the past accidentally set fire to Steve's character. Unfortunately he rolled a 2, and then used a power to reroll it. It came up as a 1, a critical miss, and then when he had to roll the damage to Steve, it came up as a 20. Ouch. But hilarious.

My hip is really painful at the moment but I tihnk it was the long drive back from D&D that's made it worse.

Awesome to see that they managed to land Curiosity on Mars and to get the first pictures back so quickly. It's things like this that make me glad we're still at least trying to do some space exploration. I saw a quote a while back which was something like we're the generation that's too late to explore the Earth and too early to explore the stars.

F*cking bikes

It's been a fairly ordinary week so far. Badminton on Thursday was good, we had some decent games except the ones with Her, which were annoying as usual. Friday didn't do much.

Yesterday was Steve's housewarming. I was supposed to make a curry to take but a series of incidents thwarted me. Ths most annoying was a full jar of mayonnaise that unexpectedly dropped out of the fridge and went EVERYWHERE, which was annoying. The stink of it when I was cleaning it up was enough to temporarily make me allergic to the wretched stuff. Then the blender didn't work and since this was a crucial step I gave up and took pizza instead.

The housewarming was great, loads of people from everywhere turned up, and it was great to see everyone. Also ludicrous amounts of food and pyromania Em running the BBQ. The weather was grey but OK, but could have been worse given the thunderstorms earlier in the day. The time was largely spent chatting, watching weird movie clips on YouTube and seeing what was going on with the Olympics. I left a bit earlier than most but it was a great evening.

Today headed over to Nigel's to sort the mountain bike out but hit more snags. First the bottom bracket was some gimpy type that needed a different type of tool, so that was a faff, then we found that the Suntour crank used a non-standard size for the chainrings, so the ones I got wouldn't fit. After a lot of cursing and adding Suntour to the shit-list, we ended up going online and ordering a nice Shimano crankset that would fit on the gimpy bottom bracket. At least the new cassette fitted on the wheel OK, so that was something.

Still, if the bike is now my bad luck vehicle instead of my car, I can live with that - it's cheaper to fix.

I realised the other day that I had only heard Led Zeppelin IV. So I listened the first album. Holy FUCK. I've listened to it a lot since, and found it works rather well to listen to on the static bike. Not quite sure how I've not heard it really but hey.

I'm really enjoying using that to exercise except I don't like the saddle as it's not very comfortable although I'm not sure if it's me or it's not set up properly.

Have lost exactly zero weight since last week. Not really a surprise though.

Free sweeties

It's  been an OK week so far. Monday was interesting with a new AIX database server going live, which I inititally built and set up nearly a year ago. It had a couple of little issues at first but has been fine since. The old server it replaced is just short of 2 years of uptime without a reboot, most of that under heavy load.

Been riding the static road bike after work, now that the rear axle is suited to a trainer. It's surprisingly hard work even in low gears, and so far only 20 minutes or so is enough to make my legs go feeble. I'll have to try the bike on the road at some point.

I've also ordered the bits to get the mountain bike working again so can resume the Alwen rides. It's having new front chainrings, chain and a rear cassette to start with which should be enough. The chainrings were the most expensive part, but the supplier included a mini bag of Haribo with them, and some stickers. So there's customer service!

Bradley Wiggins got his gold in the Olympics time trials today, cementing his place in history. What a year this has been for him and British cycling. Inspiring.

Tried a bottle of alcoholic ginger non-beer that Rob made. It was delicious. I had decided my session on the bike justified sitting down with that, a bap with ham, cheese and chorizo, and a DVD of Star Wars.

Dug out an old Tamiya Grasshopper radio controlled buggy I got at a car boot sale a few years ago and stuck it on Ebay. It did work, and it's probably one of the original 80s ones, so it might be worth something. If not, it gets it out of the house at least. Same goes for a lot of shit I've got.