Still ouchy

It was the second DnD session last night, after the snow forced the cancellation of it last week. It went really well, great fun all round. However Rob's character and my character so far do not see eye to eye, so they could end up killing each other. Also discovered I'd forgotten to equip my angry headstrong dwarf with any armour to go with his gigantic club, which was a bit of a problem when dealing with some undead zombie bastard.

Today was not in a good mood for some reason, and my face has flared up again. During the morning I went to the loo and discovered what seemed like half my face was peeling off and I have pustules developing on my nose and upper lip. Not good, especially the lip one because it's really painful.

So I spent most of the day glaring at my screen with headphones on to drown out some of the inane chatter that was going on at the tops of people's voices. One thing I did discover is a bonus 'track' on one of the Iron Maiden singles, which is basically Steve Harris, Nicko McBrain and Bruce Dickinson having a furious argument. Due to the sheer amount of fucks, fuckings and cunts involved, it's pretty funny.

Quiet evening really apart from discovering the dog had a cut on his back leg, goodness knows how, and was bleeding everywhere. I managed to distract him with food to get a bandage on it but he wasn't very happy about it. It's frustrating how you can't explain to them that you're actually helping.

Tired and still a bit achy so going to bed early to read on the Kindle.

Ouchy

Yesterday went out with Andy and Maz for a bike ride, which was pretty good, but VERY windy. The track between Rhuddlan and Rhyl was very exposed so you had to lean into the wind. Enough was enough of this so we turned off, went back round to Rhuddlan and then across the dual-carriageway to St Asaph business park and back down again. My front tyre went flat just as we reached the town, but we weren't that far from the cars at that point. I took the opportunity to pick up a new tyre and inner tube as the tyre was a bit crap, and got it fitted in the evening. It was a bit of a pain to get the new tyre on, but it was done. Investigation showed the old tube had gone on the inside, so it wasn't a puncture, it had just given way.

Work today was OK. I did some more work on the virtualised NT machine, getting the network drivers working. I'd forgotten how unfriendly NT 4 was when it came to hardware and drivers.

This evening went to circuit training with Robert from work. I'd heard about it but never done it before so I didn't know what to expect. It was bloody hard work though and certain muscles that I didn't know I even had in my lower back were complaining bitterly by the end. Felt good for it though.

Normality restored

Friday was an OK day in work, and I had already decided in the morning that I wanted chips for lunch. I casually mentioned this to Emma, and somehow this snowballed into getting chips for 13 people. To keep track of it I created a spreadsheet to calculate what people owed, what they had paid and what change. Despite the large and complicated order, the chippy handled it well and everyone got what they wanted, although I did get a combined pitying and annoyed look from a guy who had to wait for his chips while they sorted out our one with me ticking them off against a printout of the spreadsheet. Someone asked me to create a proper template of the spreadsheet for future use, although I hope it doesn't become a regular thing.

Succeeded in getting an image of the whining hard drive, and after a bit of tweaking I actually got it to boot up in VirtualBox. I was surprised by this as NT 4 was picky about hardware and it had gone from a PII to a virtualised Core i3. Curiously I had to set VirtualBox to give it an IDE hard drive, despite the real server having a SCSI controller that was a model that VirtualBox was able to emulate. The next step is to see if we can get it transferred into the VMware environment.

Also got a Raspberry Pi, after a guy in work bought one and got bored of it. Not entirely sure what for yet, but it's a fun little thing. Fortunately I had a HDMI to DVI cable so I could use it with a monitor. So far I've booted up the Debian port Rasbian, and RISC OS, which was pretty freaky. I tried powering it from the USB port of another computer since I didn't have a spare socket handy, and that seems to work fine, so that's good.

It snowed again last night but it was warm enough that it just turned into slush, and then it rained like anything. The compressed snow outside the house was lethally slippy this morning. I took a trip into town to drop an Ebay parcel off, then came home and got the water running again which was a big relief after a week of flushing the toilet with a bucket and no shower or washing machine.

Then I went into lazy mode and watched some Star Trek TNG and had a go on Lego Lord of the Rings that Steve lent me. The last time I played a Lego game was probably the original Star Wars on the PS2, but it felt instantly familiar, except they actually have the voice acting in this one. My OCD about collecting all the studs possible kicked in as well so it might take a while. It does seem rather odd though because there's this nicely sculpted organic looking landscape with Lego fixtures dotted all over it and the characters themselves - just seems a bit odd. I can't remember if the Star Wars game was the same but because it was in a sci-fi environment it was probably a lot less jarring. The 360 is still running OK after the thermal paste adventures the other day, so that's good.

I didn't intend to start a rewatch of TNG until I could do it while exercising, but I remembered how crappy the first season was so thought I might as well get it out of the way. I suppose I could just watch the good episodes but I don't like not watching the whole thing.

Then had a shower for the first time in days, which was great, and then made macaroni cheese. I substituted stinky blue cheese for the cheddar, which came out OK but could have been stronger I think. Certainly very edible though.

Keep fluctuating between bouts of crappy eating and laziness and being motivated to clear out the house of all my shit, eat well and exercise. I think now that the weather has settled down I can hopefully get back into the healthy eating I was starting out on a couple of weeks ago. Also looking into things like circuit training and going back to the gym and trying to get a routine going. Yes, yes, tried and failed before, but in an attempt to help the motivation I have decided that I want to lose at least a stone before my 35th birthday in May. I'm not sure what my current weight is but probably hovering around 15 stone which seems to have been fairly steady for a couple of years now.

Whining

The week has been OK. I went into work on Tuesday but haven't been able to get the car back up the track until today when it had cleared enough to manage it. Yesterday wasn't good as it snowed in the night and I had to reverse back down and it was so slippy it ended up in the hedge twice and lost the wing mirror cover on the left and the tray thing under the engine is now hanging off. Also managed to take probably a lot of tread off the tyres and overheat the clutch. Poor old thing.

Work has been a bit stressful, especially today since there were issues with Windows machines talking to the AIX boxes using NFS - since the AIX boxes are quite critical and I don't know all that much about them I was very reluctant to make unnecessary changes.

Today had to retrieve data from an ancient Compaq server running NT4 which had suffered a dead power supply and was too old to be backed up. I got the old 18gb SCSI drive out and hooked it up to a PC with a spare SCSI PCI card. The drive powered up and worked, but clearly the bearings were past it as it took 10 seconds to spin up and did so with a piercing whine. It was so loud and shrill I had to find some spare cardboard packaging and fashion a kind of audio muffling device to stop people complaining. Then had to find some way of capturing the data on the drive so the machine could be virtualised. All good fun.

Badminton tonight was good - had a really fun time despite not playing for a while. I did throw myself into getting a shot a little too much at one point towards the end though and my knee gave me a little tap on the shoulder and said 'Now, now, careful, matey'.

The Atari ST has sold but only for £15. Don't care though, that's more than I paid for it. The Vita and vintage laptops have also got bids, so yay on those.

Vicious motherboards

Work was OK today - because I did it from home again. More snow in the night and morning meant I wasn't going to chance it. It was nice being able to fully concentrate and have my own choice of music on in the background. In this case it was the early Pantera stuff that they did before Cowboys from Hell. I was always vaguely aware that they'd had a sort of Glam Metal existence before, but never really heard it. It's not bad though, the early albums are a little dodgy but it gets a lot better.

At lunchtime I tried to get the water working again but there must still be ice in the pipe as the pump gets so far and then stops.

In the evening I realised that my Xbox 360 hadn't moved in probably four years or so and it was probably full of dust. Since the warranty is long gone, I decided to take it apart a bit and clean it out. This ended up turning into a complete stripdown to the bare motherboard, removing the heatsinks and replacing the thermal paste with Arctic Silver 5. I managed to cut my finger quite badly on a solder joint as I was trying to get the ridiculous X clamps off. But it finally went back together, and by this time I was convinced I'd killed it, so when it powered up I was quite surprised. It's been running Saints Row 3 quite happily for an hour or so now so I think all is good. I was kind of hoping that the fans might quieten down now it's all clean with new paste but apparently not.

Snow or not, I do have to go into the office tomorrow to meet with an external person. So long as it doesn't go crazy in the night it should be OK, but I'm not sure if I'll get back. We'll see.

Still white

The snow hasn't gone anywhere, frustratingly, and today it snowed more. It did start to melt a bit, but not enough. The water has finally given up as well, so that's a pain. Having to flush the bog with a bucket of water from the spring outside. The gas bottle has also been troublesome meaning the hob hasn't been working.

So it's been a couple of lazy days really. I've been avoiding going out unless it was absolutely necessary because I don't think I'll get back, so other than the essentials just been messing around on the computer. Today I found out about a thing called glitch art which is loading up an image or video file and intentionally corrupting it. The most interesting way is to load a bitmap image as raw data into Audacity and run audio effects on it. Some of the effects can be quite striking. It's also quite fun to load JPEG and PNG files into a hex editor and change stuff to see what happens.

 Other than that, sat down and watched Torchwood: Children of Earth which I still think is pretty good. I think they lost it with the last series of Torchwood. The first and second series are a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine, it's stupid and silly but I like it.

I've taken the bold step of listing the PS Vita on Ebay. While it's a really really good machine, I'm not using it enough so I might as well flog it now while it's still hopefully worth something. In terms of hardware you can't fault it. I don't think it's going to fail entirely but like the PSP, it'll be in the shadow of the 3DS. I quite liked the 3DS when I had one but it was too small and the 3D was wasted on me.

I can't see it melting much overnight so I'll probably have to work from home tomorrow, but by the time Tuesday comes round we'll need supplies regardless, so I'll have to go to work.

The White Stuff

As expected, it snowed. It was the powdery kind of snow however, so it didn't really stick all that much, but blew around in the wind a lot. It was a really bitter wind too. So I worked from home today. I never have before, although I did do on-call at my last job. It was quite nice really, being able to listen to music and things.

In the evening I was at a bit of a loss and then remembered that I'd fancied playing Sim City again. So I got Sim City 4 from Steam. After a disasterous start where I built a city and ran out money almost immediately, I blew it up with volcanos and started again. This one was going quite nicely, but then it crashed and I hadn't hit save. ARGH. So I started again and made a big weird flat city that has lots of unhappy people. It made me think of Magnasanti, which is quite honestly fucking terrifying.

Lance Armstrong is a bastard, and I think the worst part is that he doens't seem at all actually sorry, unless you could being sorry he got caught, which I don't.

Coldness

Last weekend was good, my brother was over from Germany so we all met up. My cousin came down from Blackpool too so we had a good couple of days. I went down to my sister's and spent the evening with her, her fiance and my brother. We had a meal and then played Pass the Pigs, which was new to my brother. Good fun.

The next day we went down to my sister's again, and my Dad came over with my cousin. Spent the day hanging out and exploring the town, including the castle where my sister intends to get married. Should be great. In the evening we couldn't decide on chips or Chinese, so we had both. Fat.

On Sunday we all went to my Dad's for lunch, and then left a bit early as the weather was threatening. My brother was originally going to stay over at my Dad's and then go on Monday but we all decided that it would be best to get him a hotel room near the airport so my cousin could drop him off on the way back. My brother is also doing the Berlin half marathon again on the 7th April, so I'm hoping to go over for that weekend and watch. I've done it a couple of times before and it's always good fun with a really good atmosphere.

The rest of the week has been quiet in work. Tuesday evening was the first DnD of the year, with Steve as DM and a whole new campaign with all new characters. I wanted to be a half-elf, half-dwarf, but that didn't seem possible, so I'm just a dwarf. Last time I was a long-distance magic user, so this time I thought I'd be a tank. I'm pissed off dwarf who hits things a lot. It took less time than expected to sort out the character sheets as Steve had a spreadsheet that did it for you, so we started out quite early on. It was pretty good fun and there was an almost instant dislike and rivalry between my grumpy dwarf and Rob's character of The Great Danton. One thing that really worked was that we all came up with our characters completely independently, so it does feel like a proper random collection of people thrown together unexpectedly into an adventure.

All week they've been threatening snow on Friday, which is a pain. I even picked up extra emergency pizzas yesterday, just in case. It's been grim and cold all day today and then this evening it started snowing and sticking, so I errred on the side of caution and didn't go out for badminton unfortunately. I've been bringing my laptop home from work most days just in case, since the work I'm doing now can be done from home quite easily.

I gave up on the Precision M65 as it kept running hot and not quite right, so I've put it on Ebay for spares. Also listed a boxed Atari STFM I got from a car boot sale years ago and never did anything with. Not sure if it works, but it seems to power up OK. There's also an Atari ST-E somewhere.

If the forecasts are correct, I should wake up to a foot of snow tomorrow. Oh joy.

Random random

Not much to report this week. Have tried to modify diet with reasonable success, but it's more from point of view of taking note when I am actually full and not just gobbling on past that. So far so good. I did have a packet of Maltesers but after I'd eaten them, I wasn't sure I'd enjoyed them. It was odd. I'm just tired of being greedy and fat. I'm thinking I'll start some proper exercise next week when I feel properly better, which will also help.

Felt better from the cold throughout the week but still had occasional bouts of snot production which was a bit gross.

Badminton was OK this evening, but during the last game I suddenly ran out of energy. It felt like an actual switch had been flipped and I just couldn't get round the court any more. Before badminton we went to Steve's and had a very nice chicken casserole.

Spent one evening working on my sister's laptop, an Asus one I got her a couple of years ago. Needed some malware clearing off, but the main thing was the trackpad not working. I've tried everything I can think of to make it work with no success. I can only imagine it's a hardware issue, but the only thing I haven't tried is to boot it up off a CD to see if it works then. Also I've got the old Precision M65 back off Rob since he had the new laptop off me a few months ago. I was going to put it back on Ebay but I have a bit of a soft spot for it after bringing it back from the dead so I have a plan for it. The only real downer with it is the 32-bit chipset so it's limited to less than 4gb of addressible RAM and no 64-bit OS.

The car went in today to have the turbo looked at. As it turns out there was a split in a pipe. The pipe is enormous and right in front of the engine, but the split was underneath which is why I hadnt 'noticed it. I think it's also up to it's old trick of losing coolant, so they are going to check that out tomorrow as well when they replace the pipe.

A couple of years ago I got four Italia bass necks off Ebay with the intention of using them in projects - perhaps new doublenecks. However I never did, and when I realised I had a box they would fit in, I put them on Ebay again. They went for £80, so I made quite a profit on them.

Semi-human

Bit of a weird day in work, varied between feeling reasonably OK and not OK, but got through it. Still feel a bit bunged up. When I went to blow my nose yesterday it seemed like I was manifesting ectoplasm because it seemed there was no way it was all coming from my head. Disgusting. Still happening a bit today but nowhere near as bad.

Not much to report. Made the interesting discovery that Green Giant do creamed sweetcorn, something I didn't think you could get over here. Very nice anyway, I made a salady chickeny thing for supper and it made it much nicer.

Finally in the mood to look forward to the new year, with varying optimism.

Fuck it, I'm tired, got a headache, going to bed.

Human again...

Woke up today feeling a bit bunged up still but otherwise back to normal. Didn't do much except have a bit more of a tidy up and listed four Italia bass necks on Ebay that I've had for a couple of years but never did anything with. There's 8 people watching the auction after only a couple of hours so that's a good sign. I'm considering selling off my basses too and putting the cash towards getting a really decent one.

After finishing the three Hunger Games books I watched the movie today. It was actually pretty good at capturing the imagery and things from the books, but it felt like a LOT of stuff was missed out. But I think that was inevitable given how the books are written but I think it's still a good movie by itself.

I picked up a double-DVD which was two movies from the 80s that I remember fondly, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and The Three Amigos. I watched Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and was pleasantly surprised at how well it still came across.

Was feeling a bit despondent before and dwelling too much on things that happened in 2012 but never mind. Lots of things to look forward to this year, new D&D sessions, etc. So it can't all be bad. Also need to stop dwelling on the past and look to the future more.

Cascading droplets

I didn't go into work today, which turned out to be a good decision as I spent much of the day sneezing loudly, not fun.

Did however finish the Hunger Games trilogy. It's been a while since a series of books drew me in like that, and I powered through the third one like anything having no idea what was coming. Very good indeed.

Despite the day of snot and sneezing, do feel somewhat better today, so hopefully will be OK again for Monday. Coughing a bit but not as badly as I'd expected at this point. I hope this is one of those rare colds where I don't get my usual month-long cough afterwards.

2013 can only get better from now

New Year's Eve was really good fun at Rob and Em's. The usual gang was there along with some visitors from down south, Jake and Laura and of course Jane, Wes and little Xander. Although the word 'little' is used advisedly as he looks much older than his 10 months. The evening was really good, lots of excellent company and conversation and typical food and then Jools Hollands Hootenany. Although was rather shocked to find out it was filmed in November, but I suppose it makes sense. Bit weird if you were there when they filmed it and then watched it on the actual night so you could count down with yourself.

The only slight downer for me on that evening was a general feeling of being unwell which had been building up since the afternoon, and so I didn't drink, although I was offered the couch to stay over.

This led to feeling bloody awful on the 1st January, so I've spent the first three days of 2013 in bed feeling sorry for myself, kept going only by dwindling supplies of chocolate, pizza and the Hunger Games books on my Kindle. I've finished the first book and well into the second one now. I'm really enjoying them and can see how they get the praise they do. Rob is right when he says they are epically better than Twilight and fucking 50 Shades.

Also found this blog by a guy who is watching and reviewing the whole of Star Trek TNG, which is quite interesting. It's odd to find that episodes I once regarded as good when I first saw them years ago turn out to be rather shit. Once he points out that Geordi LaForge is a downright creepy fucker at times, you can't help but notice. Also I still think without Patrick Stewart, TNG wouldn't have lasted more than a couple of seasons.

Due to feeling like utter shit, I've failed to do anything regarding my unwritten resolutions, which are sell more crap on Ebay, tidy up the house, eat more sensibly and get more exercise. I've felt progressively better today but I'm not sure if I should go into work tomorrow as I think I'm still snotting a bit and my throat is tickling, which implies a cough is on the way.

Bleh.