Glasgow and uber geekery

So it was up to Glasgow last weekend. The drive up was pretty much clear traffic all the way and we had no problems finding where we were meant to be going. Rob drove until about half way and then I took over. We did get slightly lost in Glasgow after I accelerated past a junction a little too enthusiastically and we had to take the scenic route over the river. After that we took a nice tour around Buchanan Street and the surrounding area before heading back to the hotel for a nap and to get changed.

The bash was pretty good, almost everyone doing the whole 30's themed thing. There was live music including a woman singing and playing a ukulele while being backed by a double bass, and the band that Laura's new husband plays in, which was pretty cool. It was interesting to see all the people there and there was quite a mix.

The next day was spent hanging out with Ed, Kat and Will at Loch Lomond. There is a touristy place there with shops and things, and we took a cruise out onto the loch which was interesting, although cold, and then went around the new acquarium. That was good but the cost was pretty high and we saw a lot of people going in and then leaving when they saw the price of admission. The evening was spent having a rather nice Indian meal and then finding an interesting underground bar where Rob endeared himself to the owner and got us all a free round of schnapps. Win.

After all this the drive back was reasonably OK. It wasn't quite as clear as the drive up but there were only a couple of minor delays on the M6 and the M56. We had the Hitch-hikers's Guide to the Galaxy playing all the way there and back and the 12th episode ended just as we were approaching Rhuallt Hill, so that worked out pretty well.

The week has been very busy and tiring in work, so I've not really done much in the evenings. Yesterday evening and today have been spent in an orgy of geekness. First I played around with the old Freescape games (Driller, Total Eclipse, Castle Master). I first played these on an Amstrad CPC where the frame rate is less than 1 per second. This really got on my nerves for a while so I got hold of the PC versions. These didn't run under XP but did run under Dosbox, and are much more playable. I also got the 3D Construction Kit. Again I had this on the Amstrad and it kept me occupied, creating all sorts of interesting worlds.

Today was spent with Rob and Em, and Jane and Wes who were visiting. We went to see the Wolverine movie, which was OK, and then pizza and desert in Pizza Hut. The pizza was OK but they cocked up the order so we got a free large one, so can't complain. After that it was back to Rob's for a game fest.

After I came home, I embarked upon a quest to update the BIOS of a Dell Mini 9. If it was running XP this is dead easy, if it's running Ubuntu, not so much. There were various ways of making a pendrive bootable and using the DOS update utility, but they were all too crappy and annoying so I tried to find an alternate solution. Eventually I found an ancient 300mb laptop hard drive that had a copy of Windows 95 installed on it. This was hooked up to a USB to IDE adapter, which allowed the update to be copied to it. The Mini 9 was then able to boot to a DOS prompt from the old disk and then run the update. Quite a palaver but worth doing as it fixes a lot of quirks with the original BIOS version.

I'm 31 tomorrow. 30 is an age I can cope with...31 I'm not sure about...