Weekend

It's been a fairly busy week. Yesterday it was the Rhuddlan badminton club meal, which was in a Chinese restaurant this time. The food there is excellent, so that was good. I've pretty much undone the exercise I've done this week in one go as I had sweet and sour crispy chicken followed by a huge piece of chocolate fudge cake. Then today was an epic fail too as it was chips again for lunch, second Friday in a row and once again the fire alarm got stuck on during the midday test so again it was seething hoardes of confusion.

Not sure what I'm doing this weekend, everyone seems to be off doing things so I'll probably take the chance to see my Dad tomorrow and get some more tidying out of the way.

Got the latest Eisbrecher album, Sunde, which is really good. Well, if you like that sort of thing at least. I really liked their first two albums, and this is just as good. It's also quite appropriate for the hulking beast of German engineering that is the Pimpmobile II. Any album that includes a track that starts 'This...is...DEUTSCH' followed by a Speak & Spell croaking 'That is right' is worth a listen in my book.

Otherwise things are much the same. The 6 string bass is really cool, much easier to play than I expected and sounds quite decent. It's very solidly built but I don't like the electronics so I might swap them out at some point, and perhaps the pickups too. Q-tuner pickups are very interesting and look like nothing else with the huge coils visible through the transparent shell, but they are quite pricey.

I found an old ZX81 underneath a load of old cables. It's been around for a while, think I got it at a radio rally for £1. I'm pretty sure it actually worked last time I tried it. It's amazing how minimalist it is, yet it kick-started the computing revolution in the UK, and they sold 1.5 million of them. I find it quite impressive what people managed to get out of it though. It was slightly tempting to dig out a power supply and leads and see if it still works but instead I downloaded an emulator that is pretty much perfect, to the point where you can even emulate the dodgy TV signals.

Spent half an hour or so dismantling BlackBerrys while doing helpdesk calls. One was savaged by a dog and had a cracked case and screen while two others had dodgy trackballs. I got one working by moving the good trackball from the damaged one to the better of the other two and managed to clean out the other trackball, so I ended up with two good ones that might be suitable for reissue.