Halfway to 70...

Thursday and Friday were good days in work. The LTO5 upgrade has been a success and I'm now making it migrate data from the LTO3 tapes onto the new ones. Can be a bit of a chore but it'll get there. Friday was also a giant cake fest as there was an ICT bake off for charity, which was great. Em's coffee cupcakes were the highlight for me - just the right ratio of cake and cream, delicious.

At present badminton has been banned on Thursday due to the condition of the floor - we can't play on it any more. Last week we just went to Steve's for food and hung out and chatted.

Yesterday was my 35th birthday. I'm a bit concerned about this - time seems to be slipping away and I'm not really sure how to feel about it. Oh well. I wish I'd reached the state of mind I'm now ten years ago - I think I'd have achieved a and experienced a lot more, but who knows, perhaps it wouldn't have worked out well.

Today I took some more crap to the tip - yet more old computers and some other stuff. I think they tolerate me there, but they must think it's a bit odd. Fortunately they haven't questioned it yet, but the honest truth is that I'm a geek with a slight hoarding tendency. I wasn't sure what do do with a curious machine called an IBM Power Series 600, but in the end I kept it. It's a smallish but very heavy PowerPC based workstation, designed to run AIX or Windows NT. The thing is, there is no information at all on the Internet about it. The only reference I can find is some guy who was trying to run Debian on it, and a very brief mention in a 1994 copy of Infoworld. I'm wondering if it might be a prototype or something. The other one I didn't chuck was an IBM Thinkpad 860. Again, this is a PowerPC based machine that ran AIX. They are rare because they were incredibly expensive when new. I'm still going to get rid of these machines but perhaps see if a museum would want them or something.

In the evening it was off to the Radhuni in Denbigh for food, a wonderful Indian place. There were 10 of us there, which was good, and about the right number of peopel. I had the Tava with Pania, as recommended by Em, so it's basically a cheese curry. The cheese is in cubes like tofu, and has an incredibly delicious sauce. After that we went to the pub for a bit.

I'm not sure what to do about cars. Due to the need to move things, I'm definitely after something not much smaller than the Accord, but more economical. The obvious solution was a diesel Mondeo or Vectra, and some of the nice common rail diesels are getting quite affordable now. But having read up on the nightmare these engines can be, I'm not so sure. The Mondeo TDCI can suffer injector failure, and they are £250 a pop, and the Vectra can suffer fuel-pump failures. I think the solution would be an older Vectra with the DTI engine which is simpler and more reliable.

The Accord is still going OK in the meantime though, and unless I'm reading the gauge wrong, I think the fuel economy might be a bit better since the exhaust was fixed. The ABS light still comes and goes though, and when I turned on the headlights to come home tonight, the right bulb went. It's simultaneously a lovely and infuriating car.