Normality restored

Friday was an OK day in work, and I had already decided in the morning that I wanted chips for lunch. I casually mentioned this to Emma, and somehow this snowballed into getting chips for 13 people. To keep track of it I created a spreadsheet to calculate what people owed, what they had paid and what change. Despite the large and complicated order, the chippy handled it well and everyone got what they wanted, although I did get a combined pitying and annoyed look from a guy who had to wait for his chips while they sorted out our one with me ticking them off against a printout of the spreadsheet. Someone asked me to create a proper template of the spreadsheet for future use, although I hope it doesn't become a regular thing.

Succeeded in getting an image of the whining hard drive, and after a bit of tweaking I actually got it to boot up in VirtualBox. I was surprised by this as NT 4 was picky about hardware and it had gone from a PII to a virtualised Core i3. Curiously I had to set VirtualBox to give it an IDE hard drive, despite the real server having a SCSI controller that was a model that VirtualBox was able to emulate. The next step is to see if we can get it transferred into the VMware environment.

Also got a Raspberry Pi, after a guy in work bought one and got bored of it. Not entirely sure what for yet, but it's a fun little thing. Fortunately I had a HDMI to DVI cable so I could use it with a monitor. So far I've booted up the Debian port Rasbian, and RISC OS, which was pretty freaky. I tried powering it from the USB port of another computer since I didn't have a spare socket handy, and that seems to work fine, so that's good.

It snowed again last night but it was warm enough that it just turned into slush, and then it rained like anything. The compressed snow outside the house was lethally slippy this morning. I took a trip into town to drop an Ebay parcel off, then came home and got the water running again which was a big relief after a week of flushing the toilet with a bucket and no shower or washing machine.

Then I went into lazy mode and watched some Star Trek TNG and had a go on Lego Lord of the Rings that Steve lent me. The last time I played a Lego game was probably the original Star Wars on the PS2, but it felt instantly familiar, except they actually have the voice acting in this one. My OCD about collecting all the studs possible kicked in as well so it might take a while. It does seem rather odd though because there's this nicely sculpted organic looking landscape with Lego fixtures dotted all over it and the characters themselves - just seems a bit odd. I can't remember if the Star Wars game was the same but because it was in a sci-fi environment it was probably a lot less jarring. The 360 is still running OK after the thermal paste adventures the other day, so that's good.

I didn't intend to start a rewatch of TNG until I could do it while exercising, but I remembered how crappy the first season was so thought I might as well get it out of the way. I suppose I could just watch the good episodes but I don't like not watching the whole thing.

Then had a shower for the first time in days, which was great, and then made macaroni cheese. I substituted stinky blue cheese for the cheddar, which came out OK but could have been stronger I think. Certainly very edible though.

Keep fluctuating between bouts of crappy eating and laziness and being motivated to clear out the house of all my shit, eat well and exercise. I think now that the weather has settled down I can hopefully get back into the healthy eating I was starting out on a couple of weeks ago. Also looking into things like circuit training and going back to the gym and trying to get a routine going. Yes, yes, tried and failed before, but in an attempt to help the motivation I have decided that I want to lose at least a stone before my 35th birthday in May. I'm not sure what my current weight is but probably hovering around 15 stone which seems to have been fairly steady for a couple of years now.