Wedding trip

It was my nephew's wedding on Saturday, which was taking place in a Llanegryn on the west coast of Wales near Barmouth. I travelled down on Friday evening right after work and met up with the family for an Indian.

The B&B my sister had booked us into was in a place called Llwyngwril. It is on top of a hill and has incredible views over the village and the sea. You can see right across the bay to the peninsula and it's amazing how it reaches right across the skyline. Simply stunning. The B&B was great too, very quiet and peaceful and the hosts were very nice and friendly.

The wedding went OK with a good turnout. The church was very nice, clearly very old and nicely decorated. The vicar is Dutch, oddly, and can speak fluent Welsh, which leads to quite a peculiar accent. After that it was back to Llwyngwril for the reception, which was held in a pub. It was a really good day overall. At one point Amogharatna and I took a break and had a look at the beach, and it was a pretty amazing view. The whole area had a really nice atmosphere, and was very beautiful. Living in Wales can make it easy to forget how lovely the countryside can be.

Amogharatna wanted to run a half marathon while in the UK so we headed off early on Sunday to go to Leek where one was being held. It was a three hour drive but traffic was fine and we made it in good time. While he was running, I went over Blackshaw Moor to Buxton, and was treated to some amazing views over the countryside. Buxton seemed very nice and was very pretty. After that we headed off to the East Midlands Airport so Amogharatna could catch his flight home to Berlin, after which I drove home. It wasn't too bad, the M6 was a little busy but otherwise it was fairly painless. I did feel quite zoned out when I got home because of all the driving. I used a whole tank of petrol in three days.

Decided I needed a more portable machine and due to some fairly mediocre experiences with Atom based netbooks, picked up an Acer Ferrari One. The reason being that it is only a bit bigger than a netbook but has a much better spec, with a dual-core AMD CPU, full-size hard drive, discrete graphics, decent 11" screen and a decently sized keyboard. The downside is the Ferrari styling with a bright red lid and red highlights around the machine. I've seen much worse however. The default OS install was as I expected, loaded with crapware and an embarrassing F1 engine startup sound. Blew that away immediately with a fresh install of Windows 7 and I'm happy with the performance so far.

There was a thunderstorm on Friday morning so I shut everything down and left it all unplugged. When I got back last night I powered up the Atom based server. It came on OK but after about thirty seconds, the power supply expired with several loud flashes and bangs, which was a little startling to say the least. I just hope it hasn't taken out any of the other components with it.