Many things

It's been a good few weeks on the whole.

Work:

Back to normal after the Christmas break. Working on a new backup system which has gone sort of OK in fits and starts. It's always a bit of a faff getting it configured. The fun part was when it need to be reconfigured to stop it killing the network when backing up from a remote site. Otherwise it's been a bit of a curious time lately with the restructure that's going on - I won't hopefully be directly affected but the management is going to change considerably and because of that there's quite the atmosphere at the moment.

Games

After finishing Skyrim I've been playing Arkham Asylum on the PC using a 360 controller for a while, that's pretty good fun and in the last week or so I've been playing FTL. That is a really fun game and is quite immersive somehow despite the crude graphics. But the randomness of the game can be quite frustrating and unfair sometimes. Still, it's good fun and I really enjoy it. Rob has also lent me the latest Assassin's Creed game, Black Flag, but I haven't had a chance to sit down with it yet.

Misc

I've not been to archery recently as Rob and Em are away and I'm not too keen on going on my own so I've been spending the time doing other things including spending a fair bit of time with special person, which has been really nice.

The house has finally had the new bathroom finished. It looks pretty amazing now it's done and the new shower is quite striking and works very well. The tiles that were used are sort of stony ones and it looks great. There's also a fancy cabinet with a mirror on the front, which actually has a demister so it doesn't get steamed up which is pretty cool. Also the work to sort out the wiring throughout the house has started - the first stage is to replace all the existing sockets and wiring and add plenty more. Then at some point in the future the lighting will be done.

My Mum's car suffered a pretty catastrophic failure of the front suspension today after I drove it over a speedbump. The struts gave way and the springs came through and started rubbing on the tyres. We had to get the RAC to come and get it and take it to the garage in Denbigh that normally looks after it but with the flaky gearbox and smoky engine, I don't know if it's going to be worth fixing it. Also the whole reason I was driving it today was to take my Mum to have an eye test to see if she can keep her driver's license and she didn't think that it went very well so we might not need that car anyway.

Fortunately after the test we we heading to my Dad's house and the suspension only gave way when we were nearly there. Could have been worse - 70mph on the A55 would have been a bad time. After the Berlingo was gone, we had some lunch and my Dad brought us home in his wife's car, a nice Audi A4. It's got a 7-speed autobox which is ridiculously smooth.

Back to work tomorrow and still sorting out that backup system amongst other things. I'm on a training course next week in Manchester which should be interesting - Windows Server 2012. It's the first course I've been on in six years and when the opportunity came up I decided to do something more relevant and useful. There's also another course towards the end of March, which is VMware. I'm staying over in Manchester both times, which I'm less keen on though.

Fun fun. Life can be strange sometimes.