Stuff and things

Didn't do much this morning. Played some bass and listened to some music. Then went to Andy's for 2:30pm to play some games and watch the rugby. Andy was still a bit under the weather after a wild night out to celebrate his 28th birthday* so Rob and I played some more Halo 3 and got another level out of the way. It was fun but a bit annoying in some parts where a tank killed us a ludicrous number of times. Then after Andy woke up a bit, we spent some time playing around in the Forge mode. We don't actually try and kill each other, we just play with things like the Banshees and teleporters and stuff like that.

We had already agreed that we were going to get a Chinese when Will came round, so we got a 4 person banquet. This amounted to rather a lot of food and so by the way the the rugby came round, we were all rather stuffed. It was pretty good though and the chicken and sweetcorn soup was really tasty.

So yeah, a good day overall.

Never been particularly impressed with Vauxhall cars, but the one I have always liked is the Calibra. Yeah, it's just a pretty Cavalier, but it looks amazing, even ten years after they stopped making them. They're cheap now, but that means that all the boy racers are buying them and ruining them with bodykits. My sister had one identical to the one in the picture, and it was a great car.

*Actually 30th but we pretend to believe him when he says 28th.

When tattoos go bad

Tattoos are funny things. Once they're done, that's it, it never goes away. I think it's odd to see tattoos on people who have had them a very long time, their skin ages and the tattoo looks more and more weird.

So, what the HELL is this going to look like when this guy gets old!? It's bad enough as it is, the poor woman looks like an ancient zombified version or something. The guy who did it has several pages of his work and to be fair some of it isn't too bad, if you like mutant skulls bursting out of people's stomachs at least. Just...weird.

Today should have been the day that the Halo 3 beta became available. And this was indeed the case, unless you were a Crackdown owner. It looks like it will be tomorrow now. Of course all the idiots who bought Crackdown JUST to play the Halo beta are all crying 'waaaaah not fair'. Personally I love Crackdown and think Halo 3 will probably be shite, just like Halo 2 was.

The picture is of a Steinberger bass. As you can see it's rather small and compact. Many years ago I had a copy of this made by Hohner, which I got in 1995. It was basically the same except it was a 5-string and made of wood instead of the graphite the Steinbergers are made from. I used it with an extra high B string instead of the low B usually found on 5-strings. It was a really good bass, very light and easy to play. It had a good sound, but the strings could be a little hard to find. However like an IDIOT I traded it for a hideous Westfield thing. The Hohner was a far superior bass, and all it needed was a good setup. It's one of those things I absolutely hate myself for doing. It was worth far more than I got for it.

One of my pet hates in work cropped up again today - people treating their work machine as if it was their own. I hate that, they download some stupid screensaver or game that screws up the OS and then blame the machine for being crap when we come to fix it. So we locked down the user rights and of course then people were upset that they couldn't download and install their favourite games/media players/file sharing software. I think I'm a bit of a tyrant as if I had my way, they wouldn't be able to change any settings at all, not even the colours or background. One machine I visited had all the colours set to various shades of luminous pink and bright green, it was absolutely vile. And yes, there was another laptop dropped recently, with a smashed screen.

Oh, and the Discovery had it's MOT today. It failed, quite badly. It needs extensive welding to the rear end, several brake pipes, and radius arm bushes. And a bush on one of the rear shocks. Wonderful. Just recently I was telling someone that it wasn't too expensive to run, consdering. Oh well, it's still in good shape for a Discovery less than a month away from it's 17th birthday.