Random fun

Last week was OK in work, a bit stressful, but productive. Had to try some interesting techniques to replicate an AIX machine using the SAN, which didn't quite work but now I know what to do to make it work.

DnD on Tuesday was good fun, and Robert brought his girlfriend Chelsea to have a go. I think she enjoyed it, or she's pretty good at hiding it when she thinks we're all nutters.

Wednesday was good, day off to go to Alton Towers. The weather was not good. The forecast predicted rain between 11am and 3pm, and that's pretty much what we got. No rain until we'd pulled up in the car park and then it started. It wasn't too bad at first and we got on Rita and Thirteen easily enough. I'd never been on either and both were awesome. The acceleration in Rita is truly awesome, not least because it's so smooth. Thirteen is good too, although I won't say why on here.

The rain really kicked in at about 12:30, but fortunately we'd found a fish and chip place where we could eat undercover and watch the torrential downpour. The fish and chips were pretty good too, surprisingly. After that we went around the park doing the usual favourites. Air and Nemesis were just as good as I remember, although doing them in that order makes Air much better. The real star of the day though was the new Smiler. The theme is a little questionable but the coaster itself is mental. We went on it and then some of us went and did it again immediately afterward which made me feel a little strange for a while. The only real letdown of the day was the Nemesis Sub Terra thing, which is a nasty unpleasant scary experience and left us all somewhat traumatised.

The rest of the week was OK, had tea round at Rob and Em's on Friday evening but didn't feel up to going to the gym with Em. Instead I went yesterday, and had a good session with the place nearly to myself again. I've been really bad with eating and exercise recently so I need to get that in hand.

Today was a mixed bag. I didn't do much in the morning and then decided to play around with Duolingo on the MacBook Pro. Except the screen went black and wouldn't come back to life. I decided it was dead and took the SSD out so I could list it on Ebay. But when I came to take the picture of it, the screen worked again. By that time though I'd already wiped the SSD and since the MacBook is a complete shit to take apart, I couldn't be arsed doing any more faffing with it, so it's on Ebay anyway.

The SSD is being transferred into the M11x since it's a 256gb and it only had a 128gb one. Then I decided to test the Dell Studio laptop that Rob and Em were using, and that died a month or so ago with a garbled screen. To my surprise it powered up fine a week or so ago, so I left it running diagnostics, which it passed successfully, even though it got a little warm. Oh well. I can't think of a use for it so it'll go on Ebay too.

Due to iTunes becoming absoutely hideous to use in the latest versions, I installed Winamp. Pleasingly it still looks exactly the same as it always has done, and was a pleasant blast from the past.

Another little project is that I'm going to refinish the outer shells of my 3DS XL. I picked it up cheap because it was badly scratched, and I discovered that they are easy to remove. So the idea is to respray the shell with the chameleon paint I used on the double neck bass project. At least if it goes horribly wrong getting replacements should be easy enough.