Fattest weekend of all time

It's been a very, very fat weekend. Yesterday was one of the meetups with the people I used to work with which happens on a fairly regular basis and takes place in either Ruthin or Crewe. Last night it was Crewe so we headed over and stayed the night. It was a great evening, the usual vast amounts of snacks, followed by takeaway. There was the usual video games, with me being forced to play Fifa, and then we all played Lego Rock Band while watching night fall on The Rock in Gibraltar courtesy of a Skype link to our friend who is working there at the moment.

This morning we emerged and had a nice breakfast of croissants before heading back. I was a little tired so I had a lazy rest in bed finishing off The Eyre Affair. Then it was down into town to meet up with Rob and Em before heading off to meet up with the gang at the Semaphore for fat birthday food. Sunday night is the all you can eat buffet so it was another fat evening. Good food though, really, really enjoy it. The highlight is the satay sauce, it really is incredible.

Not much else to report except I went insane. The Alienware M11x impressed me so much I went out and got a refurb M17x to replace the Acer 7741g. It's a fucking beast. My old Inspiron 9400 was a big machine but the M17x is something else. It is absolutely enormous with a massive aluminium shell that weighs a ton. Part of the reason it's so big is to provide space for the insane cooling. I didn't really take much notice of the graphics setup in it when I ordered it as I was more interested in the CPU and screen, so I didn't realise it had dual 1gb ATI graphics cards running in Crossfire X. To try those out I installed the Mass Effect 2 demo. It looked very very nice, but was weird to play it on a keyboard and mouse (well, trackball) after playing it so much on the 360. But the M17x handled it perfectly at 1920x1200. I'm probably not going to use it for games so much, but it's nice to have the option. It's nice too how the M17x and the M11x have the same basic design, just scaled up and down. As an experiment I put the Mass Effect 2 demo on the M11x and that too coped pretty well, although it locked up at one point, not sure why.

After the accident last Friday I got a letter from the insurance company of the guy who hit me so I've told my own insurance about it. I'll see what they want to do about my car. I'm sure that it'll be a write-off but I'll see how much they want to give me for it. If I hadn't just had it serviced it wouldn't be such an issue...