Touchy feely

New Year's Eve was good fun. It was once again round at Rob and Em's, and the usual crowd were in attendance. It was a really good evening, lots of food and conversation. If I hadn't been ill, I would have been tempted to have a drink, but I was still feeling a bit crappy. The most hardcore thing I drank was some Lemsip, after Em said they had some of the apple and cinnamon one, which is really nice.

There was a ridiculous amount of food, highlights being Robert and Chelsea's home made pies and and flapjacks, and Rob and Caroline's stuffing roll and epic cake. For some reason everyone brpight cheese, so there was a truly insane amount of that. There was also the mysterious Partty Cannon brought by Steve. It wasn't very clear what it did, so everyone was quite wary when he let it off. In the end it made a hell of a bang and threw tissue paper all over the place.

Didn't do much yesterday. Had a quiet philosophical day trying to think of the things that are making me unhappy at the moment and what, if anything, I can do about them. Not sure if I made any progress though.

The Surface Pro finally turned up. I've rebuilt it with a fresh install and installed some of the updates, although the 8.1 update will have to run overnight as it's a 3.5gb download. So far I quite like it. It's pretty fast and responsive and I like the way that it has enough power to do the usual PC things as well as being a tabletty thing. The battery life remains to be seen however, as it's the pre-Haswell proessor in this model. The touch cover is interesting. The flat keys work better than you'd expect, but your fingers definitely feel it after a while. It's actually pretty worn and has a US layout though, so might look into another one, or the type cover with a proper keyboard. Of course there is also the onscreen keyboard, but that obviously has even less give. I hope I don't get too used to the touchscreen and start prodding at other machines that don't have one. One thing is that it didn't come with the pen, but it's standard Wacom technology, and I found that the pen from my Galaxy Note works fine with it.

The question of whether it has enough power to becpme my primary machine remains to be answered, but I think it does. The aim is to keep the Surface and the Asus G73, which will be fitted with more RAM to become a virtualisation behemoth. That's the idea anyway. I need to get back into this sort of thing again. In fact, that could be said about many things, including interacting with people...think that is something I really need to get working on again.

Still feeling a bit crappy overall, but there is definite improvement. My back is aching, partly because I think I pulled it with all the cooughing, and the other day I had to take a server to another site, and I had to carry it up tp the first floor because the lift was broken. Hopefully I will be better by the weekend so I can start exercising again.