End of the year

Well, this is it for 2011. It's been an eventful year, that's for sure.

Personally it's been fairly quiet really due to the pressure in work, not much time for holidays. Of course the big event was Steve coming back. The circumstances were sad but it's been great to have him here. I missed visiting Berlin again after April due to putting money into sorting out finances, but there have been other trips that made up for it, especially the one to Kent the other weekend.

Entering 2012 with some optimism though - by March I should be well on the way to being debt-free, so I can start some serious saving and getting things sorted out. I'm 34 in May, which makes me feel old, but at the same time, not that old. Strange feeling really.

Today has been lazy but have made some currywurst sauce for the bash at Rob and Em's tonight, which should be OK. I don't think it's come out as well as the last time I made it but I'm sure it'll be OK once dumped on good hearty German sausage.

Ever since seeing the film Hackers many years ago in college, I've wanted a camo laptop. It's not that it was a good film, but it had a certain style to it which was appealing at the time and now still is, looking back with nostalgia.

So this was the inspiration for repainting the Precision M90 I've been working on. It was working but was very battered and scratched. I had some red and blue spray paint left over from years back which still worked, so I pulled it apart and gave it a new paint job. It's not really camo since I didn't use anything to block the paint so it's more blended but it looks OK, a lot better than it did before. Once the paint was dry, I put it back together today.

It still works although I'm missing one screw for the display bezel and have one long one left over, probably mixed up somewhere. And I lost the rubber bumpers that go around the screen and hide the screws. It's only got 1gb RAM and a 60gb hard drive, those being the spare parts I had lying around but it's enough to get it going. With a 512mb Quadro graphics card and a 1920x1200 screen, it could be a pretty killer machine with some upgrades, but since I don't have the funds to spare at the moment, it'll have to wait. Also it still needs a PSU and a battery. After I got it running I was going to sell it but I guess now it's got the paint job it's probably not all that saleable any more. Oh well.

Going to eat pizza in a minute and then it'll be time to head off to Denbigh for the festivities, can't wait.