That time of year again...

It's that time of year again. It must be hell working in retail for Christmas, when everyone suddenly behaves as though the apocalypse has arrived and cram into the shops, fight over parking spaces and generally behave rather opposite to what the whole thing is about.

Oh well.

Not much to report really. Last week wasn't great for exercise - slept badly the night before circuits and so I didn't end up going, although I did get to the gym on the Wednesday and Friday. I weighed myself and depressingly I've put on a kilo, although that wasn't too unexpected as it was The Time of Chocolate in the Office, and my diet was suffering accordingly.

On Saturday it was the surprised birthday of an old colleague of mine from my last job, which was good. He was completely unaware of it and it was a really good evening. I beat a hasty exit just as the disco was due to start, a whole room full of caterwauling drunken females was a little offputting. I nipped into a local pub where a guy I know was playing with his band. He sings and plays bass, and is pretty good. Not really a proper thing, just playing for a few people, and they were a guitarist down, but it was good.

On Sunday I just ended up lazing around and finishing off the first season of Stargate SG-1. It was OK, a bit rubbish in places, but I reminded myself how crap TNG was at first and tried to give it a fair trial. It picked up towards the end and I've now got the 2nd season off Steve and will see how that goes.

Last night was Andy's Xmas Eve-eve bash, which was good fun. Lots of food, chatter, games and various entertainment. I also took 20 minutes to pop over to see my sister and drop off her Christmas present, which was nice.

My mood has been a bit random recently. Some days feeling OK, other days feeling like complete shit and beating myself up again for no particular reason. Now that the vast majority of people I know are married or now have partners, it can get a little depressing and on bad days, I can feel like I'm being marginalised, although I know that's a daft thing to think. Not sure what the new year will bring, but the way it's going at the moment, something is going to have to give, and I don't know what the consequences will be.

Decided to reevaluate my computers. I've come to the conclusion that having a stupidly powerful gaming laptop (Alienware M17x R2) is rather pointless if you never actually use it for games, and its not exactly portable either. Since I'm intrigued by them, I found a good deal on Ebay for a Surface Pro, so I'm going to see if that will be suitable for general use once it arrives. I thought about Android tablets, but truth be told, I've gone off Android a bit. I don't mind it on my phone, but it doesn't feel like something you can do proper work on, whereas the Surface can be a tablet, but then you can hook up a monitor and keyboard and it's suddenly a proper computer.

If the Surface Pro does work out, I'll stick the M17x on Ebay while it's still hopefully got some value. I'm going to keep the Asus G73, which admittedly also a gaming laptop, but it's not quite so OTT as the Alienware. Randomly I found out that it has four memory slots, so it can have a fuckton of RAM in it too. If the M17x does go, I'll put it's 16gb RAM and 256gb SSD into the G73. The idea with the G73 is to use it to run virtual machines - I need to try and learn more about Windows Server and Active Directory, amongst other things.