Geeky weekend

Friday evening was spent going to Wrexham to watch the rugby league game against Leeds. I'm not familiar with league but it's easier to follow and I actually found the game quite enjoyable. What was less enjoyable was the atmosphere of the crowd, it was much more akin to a football crowd and the chanting and thumping and general abuse directed at the referee and teams was not fun at all. It kind of put me off the whole league experience really.

Yesterday was a peculiar day, spent much of it with a frustrating and annoying pain in my chest which I couldn't identify. It had been building up a bit on Friday but got worse yesterday. I was naturally a bit concerned but all the guides said that if it was anything heart or lung related I would have other symptoms. So I hoped it was a pulled muscle or something and let it be, and today it has gone, so hopefully that's all it was.

Went to Mold to the music shops and picked up a bass effects unit. I've wanted one for ages and the one I bought was reasonably cheap. It's got some interesting sounds and can play drum loops too, which is ideal. I've hooked up all the basses to it and got some great sounds but the best was undoubtedly the fretless neck on the doubleneck. Absolutely awesome with a bit of overdrive and flanger.

The car journey also let me try out the new Shuffle - works as expected and the design makes it easier to use one handed without looking in the car, so that's perfect. Not sure what to do with the old one but if nothing else it can be used as a 1gb pendrive.

Today was spent watching yet more Battlestar Galactica and putting the black base coat on the experimental paint bass. The paint was so horrible that I had to take the body out to the shed to spray it as the fumes were unbearable and I had to leave it out there for some time before bringing it back into the house to dry. It looks OK so far, although the primer wasn't all that smooth even after going over it with wire wool to get rid of the worst parts. From what I read though a slightly rough finish works better with the chameleon paint so we'll see how it goes.

Also rebuilt my old Toughbook CF-M34, which I've had for a few years. It's a tiny little laptop but fully ruggedised. It has humble specs, being a PIII 400mhz with upgraded 256mb RAM and a 40gb hard drive. However, it is a surprisingly usable machine and is appealingly cute, if that makes sense. I put Windows 2000 on it as previous experiments with XP and Linux didn't work very well and 2000 is the one version that seems to allow everything to work.

Things like Firefox and other apps are surprisingly usable on it, and I finally got the touchscreen working after a lot of fiddling around with the drivers. The modern equivalent of the CF-M34 is the CF-18 and CF-19, which are about the same size but have tablet functionality. The older ones are becoming cheap but not quite cheap enough yet. I'd love to get one though - these rugged little machines are ideal for travelling.

Back to work tomorrow, hope it lets up a bit after last week, it was a bit of a nightmare to be honest.

Up to Carpe Jugulum in the Discworld reread. Enjoying them so far, it's been so long since I read most of them that there's new stuff each time.