It's been a week of ups and downs. Work has been rather meh due to the ongoing issues from the penetration testing.

Monday evening was running, which was hard. It was stupidly hot and I went there intending to do 12 laps of the track which is nearly a 5k, but I ended up doing 7. Not great, but I lived with it.

Tuesday was DnD at Rob G's place. Em joined us for lasagne before heading off, and it was a really good evening. Had an unexpected encounter with another jelly beast, which was eventually dispatched after a fierce battle.

Wednesday was running class. This time they took us around a road course, which was two 13 minute runs with a 2 minute walk in the middle. The first 13 minutes were fine but I found the last 13 minutes a struggle, spending at least half of it convinced I was going to puke.

Yesterday and today have been uneventful.

In a somewhat rash move I picked up an elderly MacBook Pro a few days ago. It's a mid-2007 17" model with a 2.4ghz Core 2 Duo, 2gb RAM, a 120gb hard drive and the troublesome Nvidia 8600gt graphics chip. Other than a few cosmetic dings and some minor pressure marks on the screen, it works fine. I'm intending to put a spare faster 250gb hard drive in it, and hopefully upgrade the RAM, although it has a curious limit of 6gb.

I also really want to replace the thermal paste and clean the fans out to make sure the graphics chip is kept as cool as possible. However, like the white MacBook I experimented with a couple of years ago, I find that MacBooks get their solidity from being bizarrely designed with lots of different weird screws. Also at the moment it's running Lion, which apparently is a bit rubbish, so I want to put Mountain Lion on it which is apparently better.

It's weird to use a Mac again after so much time. My reasoning for finding a MacBook was that I've been getting increasingly hacked off with Linux. It's great for servers, but on the desktop it's a clusterfuck of different GUIs, audio systems, etc. I keep reading that people really rate Mac OS X for Unixy stuff, so I thought I'd give it a go. I do like the feel of the MBP though, I always thought the original models looked a lot nicer than the unibody models that followed them.