Fun weekend

A good weekend.

Yesterday it was Rob and Caroline's housewarming BBQ, which was good fun. Plenty of food and gossip, and the discovery that nothing is more important than 'It's mealworm time!' Their new house is pretty cool, an old farm house that has been extended and done up. Lots of land with a field that has a very good view over the vale. We went up there to watch the sunset. What should have been a solemn, thoughtful moment was marred by donkey impressions, farting and for some reason Airplane quotes. Still, it was nice to watch the sun go down.

Had a go on Dead Space yesterday and today. It's a game that I've been playing for some time. I like the atmosphere, in particular the way it has no HUD, instead integrating health and other status indicators into your character's suit, and the menus and things are holographic projections. It also has a fairly interesting storyline, but it is a very intense gaming experience so I find it a bit of a struggle. It's frustrating because I'm enjoying exploring the ship and building up the storyline, but the game mechanic demands that you dismember the mutant enemies by shooting off their limbs, rather than just blast away until they stop moving. I'm fairly desensitised to hideous creatures in games (Silent Hill has a lot to answer for) but the dismemberment thing lost its novelty some time ago. So I tend to only play it in short bursts every few months. Completed the fourth chapter today so I think that means I'm about half way through.

Took the bike out which went OK. A couple more issues now - the handlebars seem to have developed a squeak, and I found that the rear numberplate light appears to have fallen apart and lost its bulb somehow. Also, I've now lost the second of the two keys I had made when the original snapped. Not sure how, I think it was between doing some work on it and taking the dog for a walk. Fortunately I still have the snapped one so I can get some more made, but why I'm so crap with these keys I don't know. Oh well. It's not surprising that the bike is having issues since I have to take it up and down the track and even at low speeds it probably puts it through more stress than it was designed for. Oh, and the odometer should have rolled over to 13,000 miles the other day. It rolled over all right but the 2 didn't change - so it's back to 12,000. It's time to look into a complete replacement speedo I think, even if that means faffing about with the DVLA as the mileage will revert to 00000 again.

Other than that it's been a lazy day. Had a play with a Toshiba laptop that Rob and Caroline found in their house when they moved in. It's a 486DX 75mhz with 16mb RAM and a 500mb hard drive. It must have been quite a high end model when new as it has a TFT screen and most unusually, a SCSI port. The only laptops I've ever seen with SCSI are Apple PowerBooks and the rare Tadpole Unix laptops. Unfortunately the Toshiba has a faulty hard drive but I'm sure I have one that will fit, or could possibly use a Compact Flash card instead with an adapter.