Clickety Clack

Well, it's been a good couple of weeks. Work has been hectic as always but I've been a bit more successful in not letting it get to me as much.

The car is still going fine and has had a couple more things done that have made it needed. The main thing was two new rear tyres as the ones on it were a bit shit. The fronts aren't a great make, but have plenty of tread. It also had a new seal to stop a slight gearbox leak and new transmission fluid.

In other news it was Rob T's birthday meal the weekend before last, which was at a local Italian that is very good. I had got him a book for his birthday about the science of cocktails, which he likes. I'd also got him a random card I found which was a copy of an old map of Montgomeryshire because I know he likes maps. It turned out that it's from the same series that they have framed ones of already so that was a nice coincidence.

My fascination with mechanical keyboards continues. I've been using the Ducky Mini in work to see what it was like, and it is pretty good - I definitely type more accurately on it, although the 60% layout can be a little awkward with systems that use menus or F-keys a lot. I also got hold of an interesting old portable machine called a Dolch Pac 64 which is one of those cool lunchbox style portable computers. It's an old Pentium MMX based system that has network analysis and sniffer software on it. But the main thing is that it has Cherry MX Blue keyswitches. As fun as it was revisiting Windows 98, my plan is to rip out the Baby AT motherboard and swap it out for something more modern and make it into a portable server type thing.

I'm typing this on a HP laptop that my Dad's wife gave me. She replaced it with an iPad and was going to chuck it as the battery had died. But apart from the battery it's fully functional. It has a nice keyboard, nice 11" screen and some sort of AMD CPU. I've put 8gb RAM in it and have decided to try Linux Mint on it. It's pretty nice actually and I might put an SSD in it and use it as a test machine. Not sure if I'll keep Linux on it or try Windows 10 on it which is due out today.

We've had a couple of sessions of DnD recently, which have been good fun. They defeated my creatures infesting the sewer they tried to 'sneak' through and I've got a week to prepare for the next challenge.

I've been trying to sort my eating out with limited success. The positive thing is that I've introduced vegetables into my work and home meals which has worked well, but I'm still struggling with the snacking side of things. My knee has also played up again this past weekend after I squatted down to do something and stood up again. It's not as bad as the last time as it's already getting much better, but it's a bit of a warning sign. Still...small changes are the way to go rather than trying to do it all at once.

I've not been to archery again for a while which is bad so I'm hoping to go this coming Sunday. Between wanting to spent time with special person and Rob and Em being busy, it's just not panned out as I'd hoped really. Oh well.