Grumps

Last Thursday we went to badminton for the first time in a while. It was OK, except one of the women there got very crotchety about people getting onto the court and started to use physical violence, which was a bit crappy. We were also a bit weighed down by the food we'd eaten at Steve's, which was a BBQ in the sunshine.

Friday was a quiet one. Saturday was a good day. First thing was an eye test at Asda in Llandudno, which went well. It was a little surreal though to be sitting there having an eye test with the constant beep-beep-beep of the cash registers. They had an interesting machine there which the woman said would show me a little house. It came up, completely out of focus and then instantly went into perfect focus, and from that they got an idea of what my prescription was. Then went through the normal tests. I've ordered some glasses from there anyway.

After that, it was hanging out with my Dad. He's just bought a nice new bike, a Specialized Sirrus Elite Disc, which is a complete break from the old-school drop bar bikes he normally rides. It's really nice, and has hydraulic disc brakes, which are pretty scary in their stopping power. We also went to look around some places in case they had a bike that might suit me. I wasn't really looking, but after I looked at the drivetrain on my road bike yesterday, it's completely shot. I thought I heard it creaking on the last ride.

In the evening it was over to Rob and Em's for a BBQ, which was good. Al and Becky were up from down south, so it was a nice long evening of chat and food. It went on longer than we though, suddenly it was nearly midnight.

Sunday was a day of not much at all apart from deciding the road bike is fucked and I need a new one. Andy and I are planning on doing the Tour Bach version of the Tour de Mon at the start of September so I need one pretty sharpish. Not quite sure what to do though really, whether to go used or new or what. Either way it's going to eat into my savings until payday, bah. A cyclocross bike would make sense for the versatility but I don't think I can stretch that far in good conscience, since most of them seem expensive.

Today was an annoying day, and I was due to meet Andy and Rob after work for running, but on the way there I just couldn't cope with the idea of it and came home to do some tidying and list some stuff on Ebay to try and raise bike funds. But now I wish I had gone running, since the 5k is on this coming Sunday. Oh well. I need to try and get used to the treadmill at the gym too, to get ready for winter.

Latest geeky project was to install ESXi on one of the old broken Latitude E4300s I had lying around. It's got two hard drives in it for a total of about 820gb storage, although memory is tight at just 4gb, but it's enough to play around with virtualisation on it. So far it's got a Windows Server 2012 VM on it. This came about because I discovered the old Optiplex I was using for the same purpose didn't have a VT-x CPU, so it couldn't run 64-bit guests. I have a feeling I probably knew this way back when, but forgot. Oh well. It'll be interesting to see how the E4300 copes, but this time I installed ESXi on a flash drive, so if necessary I can take that and the hard drives and hook them up to a completely different machine and it should just fire up exactly the same.