A fun week

It's been an OK week in work. It was certainly made interesting by Steve being there. It was fun to hang out and chat but weird with it being in my very familiar workplace. Good though.

Yesterday evening it was burgers at Rob and Em's with Steve before we all headed to badminton. Thankfully the She-Hag was on holiday so it was really nice and relaxed.

Nice quiet evening today watching DS9 and chilling with an old Sharp PC-1350 I found the other day, one of those wide pocket computers of the early 80s that looks like a calculator on steroids. It needed new batteries so I picked some up and had a play. It can be used as a calculator or can be programmed in Basic, which is nice. These things tend to be a little collectible so it might be worth chucking it on the bay.

Tomorrow, epic Star Wars Bluray marathon (III, IV, V and VI) with guys from work then rugby on Sunday morning.

Put more clear coat on the bike frame, looks good, but needs more.

Turfed

Monday was a good day, welcoming Steve back from the USA to the UK with rugby first thing in the morning, and then introducing him to James for D&D in the evening. It was great fun.

In the afternoon, Rob and I played the Portal 2 co-op missions, although there was quite a lot more than we expected so we didn't finish them all. It was really good fun though. After our brains cried for mercy, we fired up Saints Row 2 and had some fun with the crazy cheats.

Other than that this week has been uneventful except for Steve starting work in my office today, a slightly surreal but welcome experience. Em and I took him on a mini tour around Ruthin at lunchtime to show him the places to get lunch and things.

Went to the gym yesterday evening and tonight, felt good for doing so as I was able to do the exercises normally at last. I think I'm finally getting over the cold although I still have a slight cough. I always do after a cold though. I sometimes wonder if that should worry me.

Gusty

Not much to report last week. Went to the gym on Friday evening after work for the first time in a while, although I had to turn down the effort level on the machines.

Yesterday was my Mum's birthday so did a few things and took her out for an Indian meal, which was good. King Prawn Passanda with peshwari naan, absolutely stunning.

Today walked up Moel Famau with Steve from work. Originally it was going to be a few but only us two could make it. It was a nice clear day although a bit overcast, and astonishingly windy. Once at the Jubilee tower the wind was ridiculous. Poor Sandy had his ears and lips fluttering in the wind. We met a woman with an adopted greyhound which was a brindle but with opposite colours to Sandy, which was nice. We took some pictures and admired the view before heading back down, encountering some nutter who was running up.

After that I watched some more DS9 and indulged myself in Hackers. I know why people hate it but it's a nice slice of the 90s and I always find it fun to try identify the various machines they use and laugh at attempts at referencing the technology of the era. But it's entertaining and has a stonking soundtrack, so why the hell not. I've always wanted a camouflage laptop thanks to this movie.

Day off tomorrow. Rugby, Portal 2 and D&D, what more could you ask for?

Managed to flog the Acer 7741g and the HP DV7 on Ebay, which is good. I think my triad of Alienware machines should satisfy my computing needs for a while now.

Still snot

Felt OK yesterday morning but by the evening felt pretty crappy again, which was frustrating as I'd been hoping to go to the gym as D&D wasn't on. Better today but still a bit snotted up.

Started Game of Thrones that Rob lent me on the weekend, think it's going to be quite a read.

Fox News can fuck off and so can all the ignorant bigoted fucks who think it's actual news.

Just found out today about the Silent Hill HD Collection that's coming out. I really enjoyed the first two games but this only has 2 and 3 and some other thing. Might be worth a look though.

Stupid virus

Yesterday was the beer festival in Denbigh, which I always go to to be sociable. It was a decent sized crowd this year with Jane and Wez up from Kent and their friends. I tasted several foul things that claimed to be drinks but did enjoy the curry and chilli that the cafe had. I found that chicken curry goes suprisingly well with nachoes instead of rice although the woman did give me an odd look. Afterwards had a Chinese with Andy and Maz and we had a look at some photos. By the end of the day it had taken it's toll and I was feeling pretty rough again.

Today has been quiet and unproductive, done little more than finish DS9 season 2 and start season 3. Still feeling fairly crappy but should be OK for work tomorrow, although not perhaps for the gym as I had hoped since there isn't any D&D.

Was thinking back to the days of analogue satellite TV in the very early 90s, when we had Sky but also a load of German channels including RTL. Two shows really stick out in my mind. Bitte Lachen which was basically You've Been Framed, and Tutti Frutti. That was a weird game show that involved lots of scantily dressed women who got their tits out for no apparent reason at certain points and two contestants that had to strip at the end if they lost. I still have no idea what the hell was going on even after reading the Wikipedia article. Very odd indeed.

Bleh again

Tuesday was the day of feeling rough witha dry cough. Wednesday was the day of fever and gritty eyeballs. Thursday was the day of snot. Friday was the day of coughing.

I felt much better this morning but was coughing nearly continuously so I didn't think that would be appreciated in work.

Bah. No idea where this came from. I've barely left my bed in three days, let alone the house.

Nearly finished the second season of DS9. Steadily improving, still a couple of stinkers in there but also some really good ones.

Urgh

Had two days of feeling like utter shite, snotting, sneezing and sweating. Wasn't able to do go into work, and did little else but read and consume bad comfort food.

D&D was fun on Monday, wasn't much of a combat go this time, but it did lead to Ed having some hilarious interactions with a barman.

A curious day

This morning it was off to Rob's armed with snacks to watch the rugby. It was frustrating, Wales really should have won. Bacon baps for half-time and I made the pleasing discovery that mango chutney goes well with bacon. Then it was several episodes of the latest Futurama series with snacks before I came home. The new episodes are kind of weird actually, funny, but they are going to some disturbing places...

Had a look at the back wheel on the Puch to make sure it was aligned properly but was put off taking it for an actual ride due to wind and rain.

I watched the latest episode of Torchwood on iPlayer but haven't done much else really, just chilled.

Was tempted to reinstall the Sims 3, which I haven't played since I sold the Acer laptop I used to run it on, but couldn't be arsed, even though it's fun to torture then. My favourite was to have one man having a happy and successful life, with a room containing some other people and a fridge, linked to the main house but sealed off with windows. They had nothing to do but eat and piss and shit themselves and watch the one having a good life. Or the house with a hydrophobic guy who had every room in his house linked by swimming pools, that was hilarious.

Just found my MP3 of the Monty on the Run theme tune on the C64. Rob Hubbard was a bloody genius when it came to getting sounds out of the SID chip.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93nIljXpqUY

The Glider Rider one isn't bad either:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSO6OapnO2I

Can't believe 9/11 was 10 years ago.

DNF

I downloaded the Duke Nukem Forever demo through Steam on the M17x and played it for about ten minutes before deciding it was shit and uninstalling it. It was good to give the machine a workout though. The fans spin up quite fast when it's under load but it's quite tolerable.

I put the first can of clearcoat on the bike. It looks OK but needs more, but there's another can in the post.

Went to the gym at lunchtime, which was ace as it was completely deserted.

Flumpd

A slow but not totally unproductive day. Went to the gym after work which went OK and I felt great afterwards. Still having trouble sorting my diet out but I think the gym is starting to have an effect. I wish that

a) I wasn't scared of treadmills
b) I could run

because there are more of them than any other machine. There was a guy running on one this evening and he made barely any noise at all, whereas if I try and run on one it's like an elephant clumping along. It's probably my weight but I don't know how some people run so lightly.

Finished DS9 season one this evening which came as a bit of a surprise as I didn't realise I was that close to the end. It was a lot better than I remembered it being. Yes there were some crap episodes but it picked up towards the end, and the last few were pretty good. It had a better start than TNG I reckon.

Fender are releasing a Kurt Cobain signature Jaguar. It looks quite cool I suppose if you like Jaguars (I'm not a fan) but it seems rather against the idealogy of Nirvana given how they destroyed guitars all the time and Kurt hated the being famous part of it all. What I'm more worried about is that it's being release in time for the 20th anniversary of Nevermind. WTF!!!!!

Not much else to report. The bike frame still looks good. I'm going to put the clearcoat on tomorrow and then it's a case of letting it dry for a good month or so, preferably longer. Still, that gives me the time to get a list of parts I need to make it into a fixed gear, basically a pair of wheels, crankset and chain really.

Noticed the Galaxy S had hit about 40% battery so checked how long it had been since it was charged and was slightly gobsmacked to see that it had been nearly five days. Amazing. The new battery usage page is great as it shows when things like the screen and wifi have been used and what the phone signal has been like.

Had a go on the 8-string bass. I absolutely love it. The doubled strings make such a nice sound, except perhaps the unwound octave G-string which is a little harsh. I've got quite adept at playing just the bass strings which means it can also sound like a normal bass. If I had lots of spare cash, I'd strip it down, give it a new finish, replace the pickups and electronics and put the spare Schaller 8-string bridge on it. I still have fond memories of seeing a Dean Rhapsody 12-string bass in Chester, same idea but two octave strings. It sounded astonishing and wasn't too hard to play. Sadly it was £475, no way could I justify that.

A slow day

Today was very slow and tedious. Went to the gym after work, which was good. I felt decent for going although food today wasn't bad. I noticed my heart rate seems to have lowered rather since I started going again although it's still high enough to be good.

The S/PDIF adapter came for the M15x. It's made by someone called Fanmusic which doesn't bode well. But it's got a sturdy metal case and has a USB B port on one end and an RCA connector on the other. Since the 360 is already using the optical input on my amp, it would have been a bit of a faff for the M15x to use optical too so this device is perfect. I can now finally retire the HP DV7 and stick it on Ebay although goodness knows what it's worth. The beefy graphics card in the M15x means that iPlayer and full-screen video plays smoothly. The HP wasn't bad but it struggled slightly if a lot happened at once.

Got shat on

Work was unremarkable but productive.

After work I felt like doing some exercise so went to the gym. The weather was so horrible I knew I wouldn't do any at home. Was nearly killed by a lunatic in a Renault Laguna on a narrow road on the way home and then got up the track to find some lost idiot in a van had been up and ruined it at the top. Annoying.

Today is the first day in quite some time I've not had a fizzy sugar laden drink.

Went and checked the bike frame and found the swallows haven't gone yet. Fortunately my protection for the frame has worked, but one of them managed to shit on me as I went inside, little fucker.

Fired up GTAIV for the first time in a while since I had deleted anything to do with it a while back and thought I'd see how it was from the beginning. The answer: shit.

It's frustrating - the city and setting are good, and the car driving is great, but the characters and the attempt to make it gritty and realistic are such a dismal fail when there's still the funny radio stations and adverts. And the characters are shit. I hate Nico and his hypocritical angst over the people he killed in the past yet all the people who die in the missions don't matter, I hate his fucking cousin and the way he phones every 30 seconds to go and look at big American titties, I hate Brucie the steroid fucktard, and it's just. Not. Fun.

The Lost and Damned was even worse, taking part in the activities of a bunch of evil fucktard bikers with no redeeming features, bunch of wank. The Ballad of Gay Tony was a step towards GTA of old but wasn't enough to redeem itself.

Let's just say I can't wait for the next Saints Row game. I got far more enjoyment out of Saints Row 2 than I ever did out of GTAIV. It's stupid, crude, obnoxious and childish, and it is quite, quite brilliant.

Ignoble failure

Work wasn't too bad except for an incredibly frustrating afternoon doing crap. I have come to realise how much more I prefer to work with back-end systems rather than the desktop side. After nearly seven years I'm finding it a bit wearying.

It was my turn to be crap in D&D. I didn't kill anyone and I managed to roll a 20 and get a good look at a door. I saw that it was a good tough door, made of solid oak, nice and thick, with strong iron hinges, etc, and totally failed to notice the poison trap built into the door handle that crippled me for a round. Shortly after that I watched Rob the minotaur dive heroically into a building that was engulfed in flames to rescue some kids and take horrible damage and pain, only for me to realise too late that I was carrying a Robe of Defying Flames. Embarrassing. I was able to magically throw it over him, but even so...

I got my 10 metre DVI cable to hook the M15x up to the screen on the other end of the room, and it works fine. Digital signalling is nice, it either works or it doesn't, and if it works there is no loss of quality. Also the graphics card in the M15x handles iPlayer better so there's no juddering and things that could happen on the old HP. I just need the SPDIF audio adapter and cable and then it's good to go.

Today is the first day in ages I've eaten reasonably well except for some crisps in D&D, and I feel a LOT better for it. Hurrah.

So...many...colours

Went to the gym this morning. It wasn't a good session for some reason, felt like I was struggling the whole time, but did everything except the rower. Something wasn't right,not sure why. Hope I'm back to normal next time.

Finally put the colour coat on the bike frame. There was enough in the can to do three complete coats. I had a bad moment where I thought it had gone all patchy but that was only while it was starting to dry. After an hour or so it looked fine. Just need to let this coat dry for a while and then time for the clearcoat, which is when it should start to look really good. After that it'll need to dry for at least a month. I know flip paint is regarded as a bit chavvy, but I really like it.

"I'm the Doctor. Who are you?" "Bond. James Bond."

I was woken up at about 4am this morning by a weird dream that ended like a nightmare. It was a curious and interesting combination of Doctor Who, James Bond and Silent Hill. I don't remember much about it but Amy Pond, the Doctor and Bond (in Daniel Craig form) were working together to stop some evil plot by some Silent Hill-esque monstrosites. They looked like corpses wrapped in mouldy blankets, staying perfectly upright under the surface of the sea. I remember they were plotting world domination but not why or how. What woke me up was following Bond into the sea and experiencing the full horror of them. At one point there was a cow-sized sentient toad that used sign language to communicate, but I can't remember if it was evil or not. Fucking weird dream but really, really vivid. It took me ages to get back to sleep after it.

First thing this morning Amy and Huw came up to get apples and damsons. We found there were four trees that I'd forgotten about that were absolutely covered in damsons so we ended up with a ludicrous amount of them. The mutant apple tree also provided the usual bonkers amount of them. We managed to get this done before the rain hit.

After that I stripped down the M15x to install the Bluray drive. It wasn't as bad as I expected, but there were a lot of screws and layers. It's a much more complicated design than normal Dell laptops, but quite a sensible one and very solid. The drive is a sod to get to because it's a slot-loader and is hidden deep inside the chassis. I got it done eventually, and it works fine. Despite only having a lowly Core i3, the machine runs pretty well. I suppose I could pop an i5 or an i7 in there, but not much point really.

I was going to do the colour coat on the bike frame but I realised I hadn't put quite enough black on the rear part of the frame. Fortunately I had enough black left in the can to finish it off but need that to dry now.

After that, didn't really do much. Set up some more stuff on the M15x and watched some more DS9 and the latest Torchwood episode on iPlayer. It's got more interesting now but we'll see...

Bamps

Yesterday was unremarkable except for badminton where me, Rob and Em had two fantastic games and managed to ignore the hag except for her incessant babbling.

Today was not good. Despite sleeping well I felt very strangely tired and then I had to help shift three rack servers, eight astonishingly heavy drive trays and two full-size AS/400 units and their accompanying drive towers. Afterward I felt completely shattered and it only got worse during the afternoon. The plan to go to the gym went out of the window and I had a big lie down before heading to Rob and Em's to meet up with them and Rob and Caroline to go to the pub. However, with the realisation that it was a football night, we just ended up sitting around chatting which was very nice indeed.

Glad it's the weekend. I have no plans except to pick the apples tomorrow morning with Amy and then put the colour coat on the bike frame. Beyond that, no plans other than to get some work done on the M15x, get the necessary software on there and if I can summon up the patience, strip it down to get the Bluray drive in there.

Addicted

Work was OK today, had a slight catastrophe in the morning with a mail server after a test backup accidently chewed up all the bandwidth and caused some problems.

Was supposed to go to the gym but felt rough after work so I didn't, but did go and see my sister and niece as I had planned. We had a nice evening and ended up having a Chinese.

Not much else to report except the computer shuffle I mentioned means replacing the Acer 7741g and the HP DV7 with a second hand Alienware M15x. So yeah. It arrived today, just finished building it and getting it ready. Very nice. It's basically the same as the other two, just medium sized.

I h8 fuking swalowz

Work was OK, did some more on the backup system. AIX might have it's issues but the Logical Volume Manager is fucking ace, being able to add and remove disks, expand and mirror filesystems all while the system is running is so handy. I know Linux has an implementation of LVM but I've never really played with it. Should do at some point although I gather it's a bit different from the AIX version. And AGAIN I got asked about the bloody AS/400s! I don't know where the idea came from that I know all about the AS/400s but I don't! It's like a nightmare.

Bad day for food, I did well in work until I got home when I consumed Pot Noodle and wagon wheels. Watched some more DS9. So far it's been OK, not as bad as I remember the 1st season being.

Finished Feersum Endjinn. It's a bloody hard read to be honest, it gets very complicated and the dyslexic sections require a kind of mental gearchange when you encounter them. It's so worth it though at the end when it all comes together. I think this is the third or fourth time I've read it and I always nearly give up half way through.

I sprayed the bike frame with the black coat after smoothing down the primer and cleaning off the shit that the fucking swallows had thoughtfully deposited on it. Bloody things, surely they're old enough now to sod off out of the shed, but no, they have to flutter round and squawk at me like they own the place. Tossers. I had to make a sort of tent roof thing to stop them perching above where the frame is suspended.

The black paint wasn't as easy to apply as the primer for some reason so it was a bit of a faff, but it looks OK. Once it's dried for a few days I'll put the colour coat on. I hope it's going to be OK. Disposing of the frame, pretending it never happened and denying all knowledge of it and then having to edit out any reference to it from the blog would be a real pain.

Phone reborn

Spent the day at my Dad's just hanging out and watching the Tour of Spain cycling which was quite interesting as it was a time trial stage.

Finally got sick of the stupid non-standard firmware on the Galaxy S that had some really stupid quirks. I wiped it in favour of Darky's ROM 10.2, which is also non-standard but a lot better. It's based on Gingerbread. It definitely feels faster and the Gingerbread keyboard is a LOT better than the Samsung one. I was able to use an app to dump my text messages to an XML file on the SD card and then restore them when the upgrade was complete.

The bike frame seems to have dried nicely. Will perhaps put the black coat on tomorrow. I just hope the four swallows that are still living in there don't crap on it. The stupid things get all hysterical and flutter about when I go in there to check.

I for one welcome our robot unicorn overlords. The singularity approaches.

Work tomorrow, boo.

Primed

It's been a funny day really, one of achieving not much.

I did clean down the bike frame, strung it up and sprayed it in primer. Bloody hell bike frames are awkward to paint, all angles and tubes and things behind other things, but I got it done. It actually looks pretty decent, although I think there's some bits that will need smoothing out before I start putting the colour coats on.

Watched some more DS9, and then the latest available episode of Torchwood off iPlayer, which bizarrely had Nana Visitor in it who plays Major Kira in DS9, how odd. It was actually pretty good I thought. However, I'm fairly open minded but I thought the soft-porn scenes were a bit drawn out although I'm sure the outcry would have been less if he'd been shagging a woman.

I've got a nice big shiny head again (ahem) after my monthly head shave. It's always a nice sensation when it's freshly done although the increasing grey in the hair that comes off is a little depressing.

Listed my Acer 7741g on Ebay since I don't use or need it any more, and it's a bit of a waste having it sat around not doing anything. The HP I use to play music, Blurays and other media might go too, since I could probably run the display and amp from my normal machine, just need long cables.

Just realised the new WTC building has made quite a bit of progress, interesting to see.

A curious day

The weather today was stupid, bright sunshine and torrential rain in 10 minute intervals, basically all day. Went to the gym with Andy which was good. After that basically fooled around with computers and watched some more DS9.

Made chilli which came out really well this time. Mmmm.

Not much else to report. Having another shuffle around with computers, tired of so many machines lying around doing different things. Listed some more stuff on Ebay.

Ronan Goldacre

Using Saints Row 2 to visualise what my character for The Call of Cthulhu looks like.

Circulation...dropping

The Alienware M17x R2 isn't the most practical 'laptop' to use in bed. The battery life is rather crap and it's so heavy that you risk cutting the blood supply to your legs. It's an epic machine though. I have no complaints at all. It has the best screen I have ever seen on anything.

I should have just got one of these instead of faffing about with Acers and suchlike for so long that were never quite right. The M11x is brilliant too, and it's nice that the two share the same design. Perhaps I should find the medium sized M15x to round out the set, or perhaps not given the cost of these things. I can only imagine what the new M18x must be like, absolutely monstrous since in photos it makes the M17x look small.

Mind you I can see why people call Alienwares obnoxious and tasteless but I think with the lights switched off they look pretty decent, although a backlit keyboard is surprisingly useful.

I forgot it was a bank holiday weekend until yesterday afternoon which was nice.

Gym this morning, then I need to find some primer for the bike frame and clean it up ready for painting. No idea for the rest of the weekend.

Started watching DS9 from the beginning since I haven't seen it in YEARS and the DVDs are so cheap now. I know the first couple of seasons were a bit shaky but it got a lot better later on.

Crisis point

Work reached crisis point and I have been instructed to work solely on the backup system to sort out the troubles with it. At least now I can concentrate on one thing and not go mad trying to do both that and desktop support.

Watched Unknown this evening. It's a pretty decent movie, long, but interesting. Also the added bonus of it being set in Berlin meant lots of fun seeing places I knew, and even a pretty cool car chase. I always said W124 Mercs were tough...

Haven't done much else.

Conflict

Went to the gym, then ate shit, so cancelled it out. Went to visit my sister afterward. Strange but nice having her living so much closer.

After that came home and thought about the character for the alternate game we are setting up for Monday evenings, Call of Cthulhu. I chose to be a parapyschologist as it sounded cool, and named him Ronan Goldacre after picking random names from book covers.

I always enjoy the process of building a character in video games that let you do it, like Saints Row 2, Mass Effect, etc, so this feels quite similar. Probably some form of escapism it would be wise not to look into too much.

Rediscovered Piece of Mind by Iron Maiden in the car today, what a fucking EPIC album.

A fun evening

Work was meh.

I was planning on going to the gym after work, but instead I finished sanding the bike except for a few little bits, set up the washer jets on the 306 properly, finally set up a new playlist in iTunes for my iPods, having got bored of all the stuff on them, listened to and played bass along to the Offspring for the first time in ages, and did some long exposure stuff with the camera when it got dark.

It's the first time in AGES where an evening where nothing was going on has flown past and didn't feel like it had been wasted.

These two songs by the Offspring are two of my favourites by them:

Amazed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVTlH3NOdaM
Gone Away: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EO5cEta01Dw&feature=related

Depressing moment of the day: Finding my belt and being unable to remember the last time I actually needed it.

Tired for no reason

Tired but I did fuck all today. Watched a couple of movies and listened to some of the commentary in Portal 2, which is really interesting.

Work tomorrow. Not looking forward to it. I need a holiday, but can't take one without causing hassle and confusion due to covering the backup system and Unix servers and high workload in general. Anyway, holidays seem to be pretty lonely these days, it appears that being single and not fascinated by pubs and alcohol are a definite handicap.

It came as a rather depressing realisation that the reason I get such good battery life from my Galaxy S is because it sits idle for the vast majority of the time. Same goes for my annual leave in work, I have so little reason to use it these days.

Realised from pictures at the BBQ yesterday just how much of a fat fuck I am at the moment. Hate it but hate my lack of motivation more.

Full of meat

Haha.

Today was Em's parents BBQ that happens about this time of year, but this time it was special since they have both just retired. It was the usual excellent food and stuff but this time the extended family were there so there was a bewildering amount of relatives and kids running around. A great day though.

Overtime yesterday was OK. Weird to be in the office so late. I got in just before 7pm. My side of things, the AIX and backup servers behaved fine, the others, not so much. It was 1:20am before I got home. I was so tired.

Otherwise it's been quiet. I started sanding the bike down and managed to get a huge blister on my thumb when sanding over the glue from one of the stickers generated an unexpectedly large amount of heat. I've done the forks and half the rest of it.

Trains are fun

It was a half day in work today. The morning wasn't good.

In the afternoon, me and a woman from work took in a great big circle of geocaches around Llangollen and Corwen, which was brilliant. We got 15 in total and chased the steam train from Llangollen to Carrog. Really good fun.

Feeling really drained at the moment, no energy or motivation, just feeling under the weather and hating every damn minute I spend in the office right now. I'm sure work is mostly why I'm feeling so shit and it probably doesn't help that I've got fuck all to come home to.

D&D is still fun

Work was OK today, although one of those days where everything I did seemed to be tinged with failure. What should have been a simple fix on a laptop turned into two hours of agony.

D&D was good fun again today. This time we were approaching a farm and there was a woman being chased by evil soldiers. Naturally we attempted a rescue.

The word 'rescue' is used advisedly because while trying to knock out the first group of soldiers, Ed managed to launch a pretty solid attack at the woman we were trying to rescue, throwing her through the air and leaving her in a twitching bleeding heap. Rob managed to heal her from the point of death, just in time for a wolf to grab her by the throat and throw her around a bit, once again leaving her at the point of death requiring yet more healing.

Then another, larger, group of soldiers appeared, and this time Ed managed to launch a cloud of daggers at the poor woman, leaving her again nearly dead. Fortunately nothing else happened to her and once the rest of the soldiers had been despatched, we were able to heal her and talk to her. It took some persuading and many apologies from Ed and nearly accidentally paying her for sexual favours before she trusted us enough, and then she went and hid in a neighbours house.

Again it was all good fun.

ANR0379W A server database deadlock situation has been encountered: Lock request will be denied to resolve this deadlock.

Today was fairly decent. This morning I lazed around until heading into Denbigh to go to the gym with Andy. Sunday midday is definitely the time to go, we had the whole place to ourselves for most of it. It was hard though and according to the machine there my last workout was March. I honestly didn't think it had been that long. I felt good afterwards though. Need to get back into the habit of going.

After that I watched some movies and played with the bikes a bit. I oiled the chain and things on the Puch and the mountain bike and tweaked the saddle and handlebar heights on both. I hadn't ridden the mountain bike in ages and it felt quite strange after the Puch, and I hadn't quite realised how much smaller the wheels were. I want to build the strength up in my legs as at the moment I think any hill would bring me to an embarrassing halt on the bike, especially the Puch with the higher gearing.

Other than that it's been fairly peaceful today. Still awaiting payment on Ebay item, frustrating.

ANR0195W: Attempting to remove extraneous database entries for volume [volume name]

A better day. Spent the morning with my Dad consuming home made scones for breakfast and chips for lunch and in the meantime dismantling my cousin's old bike down to the frame. It had already donated the wheels to the Puch. While pulling it apart we found the bearings in the fork and the bottom bracket were absolutely fucked so it'll need some of those and other parts. I have a cunning plan but don't want to say much yet in case it goes horribly wrong.

I wish I could weld.

After that it was off to the pub to watch rugby. It was quite enjoyable and Wales won, which was nice.

The rest of the day was spent not doing much, completed Portal 2 for the second time and played around on the 360 a bit more.

I went to the shed to get something out of the freezer and heard a noise like something out of a horror film. My blood froze for a couple of seconds before I remembered the swallows that were nesting in there. The babies had hatched and were sticking their heads up out of the nest for food.

ANS0326E: This node has exceeded its maximum number of mount points

If I see that error message again, I might actually cry. I've spent two weeks trying to stop it with no success because I just haven't got the time to delve into it properly.

I would normally say thank fuck it's Friday but all that means is another evening contemplating my mind state. I got some strings for the Westfield Strat but wasn't able to summon up the energy to put them on it.

It occurred to me while having a Yorkie for breakfast that my inability to stick to exercise and relapse into eating shit food is perhaps some form of subsconscious self punishment. There must be some reason why I can't do it. Perhaps that's why I always drive shit cars too, because deep down I don't feel I deserve anything better and why I manage to fuck up my finances all the time. It's a curious feeling to realise your mental state might not be as normal or as stable as you thought.

Put a bunch of old Game Boy stuff on Ebay and got £26 for it. Oh well, gets it out of the house at least. Plenty more to go on there when I can get the energy to do it. I think I need an impartial observer to come up and go through all the shite I've got and make me get rid of it all. That bit in Fight Club where Tyler Durden says that the the things you own, own you, keeps cropping up in my head. I think it's got to the point where it would actually be easier to take the stuff I need out of the house and trash anything left behind and then put it back.

Fooled around in Saints Row 2 for lack of anything better to do and found that while making your character into a big fat transvestite or drag queen makes the cut-scenes amusing, somehow a respectable businessman in a suit is much funnier for some reason. Especially with the pimp cane shotgun.

Rob lent me a Kasabian album which I hadn't heard. Very good stuff.

Feeling catastrophically tired, but at the same time I don't think I'm going to sleep easily.

Meh

I've given up worrying about work, it's not doing me any good. Just going to do what I can.

Went to see my sister after work, who has recently moved to the town after splitting up from her husband. She's got a really nice cottage in the middle of town, which is freshly done up and is pretty sizable and the rent is good. We had a nice evening watching shit TV and went and got chips from the good fish& chip shop. My neice gave me a guitar she's had under her bed since she was 14 or so. Turned out to be a Westfield Strat copy, which is actually pretty good although needs new strings. Timing couldn't be more perfect since I've decided that the Telecaster copy I built doesn't work as the parts never really gelled together. That was really nice of her.

Not much else. Been waking up too early and not getting back to sleep so feeling qutie tired in the evenigns.

Eye improving, hopefully it should be back to normal tomorrow.

Such fun

Today was OK. Foot back to normal but my right eye is playing up, watering all the time. It doesn't hurt, just keeps making me look weepy which was embarrassing when I was complaining to a user about my workload delaying the job I had to do for him and it looked like I was getting over-emotional about it. Not sure he believed me when I tried to explain my eye was playing up.

This evening was fun. Went to Andy and Maz's and had FISH PIE which was actually really nice. I fixed the Enter key back onto their laptop and lent the first two Discworld books to Andy. After that we played with phones - Maz has the new Galaxy S II and we found that it was possible to make the talking dog and cat apps talk to each other, which while fun, led to a horrendous feedback loop of screeching despair that sounded like something from a horror movie overlaid with our hysterical laughter. It was funny but rather disturbing.

Not much else to report except fuck the riots, it's utter bullshit.

D&D is fun

Work = productive but still not nice.

D&D was absolutely fucking hilarious this evening. After the battle with the dragon we found ourselves stranded in its cavern with no way out except an apparently bottomless pit. This wasn't such an issue as there was a magic table that made food and a magic cask that made ale. So the suggestion was mooted that we simply stay in the cave and eat, drink, and shit down the bottomless pit for the reset of eternity.

But sadly this idea was not to be, and after some intense, fruitless discussion, we sold all our story points to persuade the DM to allow the most sensible idea we had to go ahead. This was to fashion the dead dragon's skin into parachutes to get down the bottomless pit. It wasn't actually bottomless and after a long trip down a river which involved much swimming, cursing and wishing we'd brought the magic table as a kind of food producing raft, we finally reached the outside world.

Naturally we set up camp, and of course people had to keep watch. First watch was Rob, who noticed some crows in a tree that were staring at the camp. Some arcana from Ed and I showed that they were enchanted, so we decided to attack them. Ed, somehow, managed to use a shock staff he has that never works, and rolled a 20 on his attack that instantly decimated the crows and caused a gigantic lightning storm and fire.

Second watch was Ed, who saw two evil guys coming to find out what the fuck was going on. We managed to capture them and intimidate them for information. The first one, cunningly named A by us, was a hapless 17 year old, who promptly shat himself and blabbed everything in fear of Ed's terrifying intimidation dice roll. The other, B, was 27 and a bit more tough to break but he talked as well after being threatened with a dagger. After a prolonged discussion as to what we were going to do with them afterwards, we decided to knock them out. B was knocked out quite easily but Ed managed somehow to smash the poor crying 17 year old's head in, splattering his brains everywhere.

Somewhat dumbfounded by this, our initial guilt was quickly forgotten as we tried to work out what to do with the body. Cannibalism was quickly dismissed, then we wondered about the possiblity of using the body as a kind of puppet to scare the other guy more once he woke up, or fashioning his internal organs into some sort of message saying sorry he was dead and leave us alone. Eventually we just left in the dead of night, and found a farm where the next adventure begins, hopefully next week.

It's impossible to explain just how fucking funny this all was, and we reduced the poor DM to confusion and dumfoundedness several times as he tried desperately to incorporate our bizarre ideas into his story.

Fuck all that shit in London. However it all started, now they're just being a bunch of cunts.

Not feeling good and it's not all down to work. Just feeling a bit like the odd-one out at the moment, the odd number that makes things a little awkward. It's my own fault but I can't think what the fuck to do about it.

Crippled, nearly

It's been a funny old week. My damned foot has been playing up a lot and prevented me from playing badminton on Thursday, and I was really hoping to take the Puch out for another ride.

Work has been shit. It was implied the other day that I was prioritising the wrong things. I wasn't happy about that at all, since it was beyond my control. And if anyone asks me yet again about the fucking AS/400s...well, I'll probably just say again that I know nothing about them, but in my head I'll be screaming obscenities.

Yesterday evening was brilliant, went out with the gang for a meal in the Brookhouse Mill, which was typically excellent, and had lots of entertanining conversation. Most memorable was me mishearing something that Rob P said which led to a long and convoluted discussion about the role of fluffers in pr0n movies, sounds weird but it was bloody funny and wildly inappropriate for the setting.

Last night my foot felt perfectly fine, or very nearly, and then this morning it was so bad I couldn't put it on the ground. Spent the day not doing much and taking ibuprofen, and again now it feels OK again. I wish I knew what was wrong with it.

Tired now, bed beckons.

I have an idea building in my head about something I could do with the remains of my cousin's old bike after it donated it's wheels to the Puch, but not sure if it would work.

Game over boys

Mind is blank, nothing worth saying at all.

Epic meh.

Rotund

A slow day.

Really liking the DSi XL. The big screens and general chunkiness make it worthwhile. The giant pixels take some getting used to though.

Realised I have reaches the age where not being married and having kids is not usual. If I have that instinct I haven't found it yet. I worry that I'm missing out ob something but then again I'm told quite often that I should be grateful to be single.

Dentist this morning to repair chipped tooth. Painless but weird to not have that sharp edge against my tongue any more.

Why does the bloody dog come upstairs and onsist on sleeping on my bed and then get all fretful and growly when I move around. Stupid dog.

Typos vecause of iPod touch.

Give it a Puch

This morning I took the Puch up to a quiet road to test it out. It goes very well. I had to tweak the rear wheel, the front derailleur and lift the saddle slightly but it feels really stable and fast. The gearing is going to take a little getting used to with only 10 gears which are higher than the mountain bike, but it has a fairly usable range. I only realised today that by putting the smaller 700c wheels on it the gearing would have changed. The brakes are pretty awful but my Dad reckons a set of double pull calipers would make them much better and I think the new brake blocks need to bed in properly. It's probably the most uncool bike of all time but I like it so far.

Haven't done much else really, made a nice batch of chilli and put some aside for work, watched the latest Torchwood episode and played some Dragon Age. Just got to a huge new area so I stopped as I didn't want to start things and then turn it off.

I woke up with a pain in my foot which has been getting steadily worse, very annoying. It's done this before but not in the same spot. It's so bad now I've retired early to bed with the DS.

A fun day

Today went to my Dad's and my cousin Pauline was down. We basically spent the day pulling the Puch to bits and making it work again, aided by Pauline's commentary.

First we decided there was no point keeping the 27" wheels due to there being hardly any tyres available. Fortunately my Dad had an old Raleigh with 700c wheels that also had 5 gears on the back and the wheels fitted onto it OK and the brakes were adjustable to reach the rims. Disaster loomed when the gears wouldn't select properly though, until I worked out how to adjust the derailleur. The problem then was that the rather fat tyres didn't fit through the brakes so it was a pain to get the wheels on and off. So we went out and got some new tyres and inner tubes and some fresh brake blocks. Once they were all fitted and the brakes and the gearing lubricated, it all worked OK. So it all came together. The only thing I really think it needs now is a quick-release front wheel really, otherwise it's fine. It feels quite different from a mountain bike but in a good way.

Other than that we chilled, ate scones for breakfast and chips for lunch. All good.

Found the talk radio stations from GTA III and San Andreas with Lazlo, which I always really enjoyed. Pretty fun to listen to.

Weird dreams

Well, I've had some fucked-up dreams recently. Two nights in a row I distinctly remembering smashing up my phone, once intentionally, once by accident. Hope it's not an omen - I really like the Galaxy S. I need to treat it to an updated ROM though, the one on it isn't factory and has a couple of bugs.

Then I had a dream where someone was coming at me to attack me. I had my camera in my hand and holding it by the lense, I smacked him across the face. He went down, but the camera broke apart and inside it was all flesh and blood. Disturbing. You could probably read a lot into that, but let's not. I mean I love the Nikon but not like that, haha.

Today wasn't bad, job count sensible, backups running, and it was generally OK.

In the evening had a proper look at the Puch (Pook? Poosh?). It's actually purple and gold, very classy and retro. I think it looks fantastic as I've always liked the look of racers even if I've never really owned one, just something about the shape of the frame and the skinny tyres.

It's only got 10 gears but has Shimano Positron shifters which is apparently one of the first attempts to make indexed ones, so that's interesting. Perhaps most intriguingly, the brakes appear to have plenty of adjustment, meaning I could perhaps replace the nearly obsolete 27" wheels with the slightly smaller modern 700c wheels to allow a much wider range of tyres to fit. It also it looks like there's enough clearance to put some slightly more chunky tyres to make it a bit more versatile - cyclocross ones would be ideal. Anyway, taking it to my Dad's tomorrow to check it out properly and hopefully get it rideable again.

Then went to the pub and had a nice long chat with Andy, Rob and Em although Em went a bit early due to tiredness, but it was nice to hang out. It's good that it's become a regular thing as it's so nice to hang out as a group and brings the work week to a nice close.

Picked up a couple more games for the DSi. The first Trauma Center as I thought it would be easier on the bigger XL screens and the second Professor Layton game since I enjoyed the first one so much. Just need to find the time to play them though since I've still got Dragon Age to get through.

Tired now. It's been a long but good day overall.

The day just got better

Today wasn't great in work, quite a bit going on and I felt quite down through most of it.

Then just before the end, Andy texted me to say to go to his for an inpromptu BBQ in St Asaph, so that was great fun. It was nice to sit out in the sunshine eating stuff. Then I remembered Rob's Mum had offered me an old bike that was in her garage so I headed over and picked that up. It's a Puch Maxima in a very retro brown and gold colour scheme. It's in pretty good nick considering it hasn't been used in over 15 years and probably only needs tyres and even they might be salvageable.

When putting the seats down to put the Puch in the 306 I found astonishing amounts of rubbish from sweet wrappers to pistachio shells, and also £1.50! Hurrah. It is a mess though, will have to moan at the previous owner tomorrow.

Got a weird game for the DS called The World Ends With You. It's fun but it's got complex fights where you have to control two characters at the same time, one on each screen. Weird, but fun. One of the best games on the DS apparently so we'll see on that one.

Bye Focus

Well, the Focus went today, for a pittance really but hey. The people came from Wrexham to buy it and again I had to go and get them after they got lost. In this case they were in a slammed Audi A3 with huge wheels so it would never have got up the track anyway. But it's gone, and now I can relax.

Pong by Eisenfunk. I find this oddly fascinating, not quite sure why.

Not much else. Tired now.

Epic Struggle

So, in D&D tonight we encountered a dragon. At first it went really well and we absolutely kicked it's arse for a couple of rounds and then it came back and did some damage, but finally it died. Not before it kicked one of the party into a bottomless canyon.

Fun.

Work = meh. Had a tiredy headache most of the day and still feel a bit rough and also full of the snacks and pizza that seem to be a D&D prerequisite.

Mega update

Last week it was over to Gibraltar to hang out with Simon. Getting up at 3am was quite grim as the weather was horrible. It was bad enough trying to manage a torch, the umbrella and a bag with my shoes in it, let along coping with the wind turning the umbrella inside out. The drive there was pretty ghastly too, but once there, everything went OK.

Gibraltar airport is pretty minimal, and since I didn't have any bags, I was out of the airport in about five minutes. I had to get a bus into the town but the bus had to wait to cross the runway and it was bloody hot. But finally I found Simon and we went to a Spanish themed place to eat. This was large because Simon miscalculated the size of the tapas portions, but it was delicious. After that we went on a dolphin spotting trip, which was ace. It was run to be on a boat and we saw loads of dolphins. In the evening everything caught up with me and I got really tired.

Tuesday morning we got the cable car up to the top of the Rock which had astonishing views over the town and across to Spain. We also encountered the apes, which are kind of cute and interesting and have a interesting history. We made our way back down the Rock and saw various things including St Michael's cave, and the World War II tunnels. After that we chilled out before going to a really good steak place called Gaucho's.

On Wednesday we went shopping along Main Street and then had a rest while watching some TV, and then headed over to have a look at Spain. This involved crossing the runway which was pretty cool and happened to take place just when the traffic chaos begins - every evening the roads clog up and policemen have to direct traffic around. It was pretty cool to see La Linea and after we had a nice food in a Spanish restaurant we went to see a fair that was set up right next to the border. This was pretty cool because there weren't any other British people there.

On Thursday it was time to go back so I walked over to the airport and managed to ignore the huge massive queue for check-in because I only had hand luggage. The flight back was pretty uneventful but I saw a big city with a distinctive airport and wondered if it was Madrid. When I went and have a looked at Google Maps at home, it was indeed Madrid, which was pretty cool. Gibraltar is an interesting place and I'm glad I've seen it. A weird little British outpost that feels like the UK in many ways except it's hot and they drive on the other side of the road.

The rest of Thursday was spent relaxing. Friday was back into work which was a little worrying and a bit of a culture shock but not bad really. Friday evening was spent at the Prosperity in Rhuddlan for Rob's birthday, which was ace. Good food, good conversation and general banter.
Saturday was spent in Crewe for another meetup with my old workmates, which was good fun and this time we actually managed to moderate the amount of food there so that was good. Back this morning and all I've done very little except watch the second episode of the new Torchwood series and the Fifth Element.

I'm gigantically fat as it's basically been a solid week of pigging out. Ifeel absolutely horrible at the moment.

Lazy weekend

It's been a bloody lazy weekend. Have achieved absolutely fuck all except for watching some movies (if that counts). Also failed to either watch the new Torchwood episode or play Dragon Age, both of which I'd intended to. Bit of a lonely weekend really. It rained massively all day today.

Played bass properly for the first time in a while after being distracted by the Telecaster. The 6-string is such a monster but I love playing it even though the pickups are crap, the selector pot is broken and the strings are dead. I wish 6-string pickups were cheaper and more readily available.

Dentist the other day. Nothing up except I've chipped a bit off one of my lower front teeth which they say needs to be repaired so have to go back for that. Also my usual biannual bollocking about flossing.

Need to be up at 3am to get to Manchester for Gibraltar flight, but can't sleep, argh.

Payday tomorrow. It looks like the buyer of the Focus on Ebay has had the account suspended due to irregularities, so guessing that won't go ahead now. Fuck's sake, I REALLY needed that cash.

X-Fusion. I like it. Although again, can't quite work out why. Normally that style of vocal pisses me off.

End of a long week

It's been a long week. Today was OK, got some stuff done, and was able to leave work with a clear conscience for next week.

Spent yesterday evening watching the Terminator and this evening started Terminator 2. I love those films. Also have an urge to watch Flight of the Navigator for some reason.

Set iPlayer to download the new Torchwood series, should be interesting. I think the first two series were OK but it could be so bad on occasional. Third series was really good.

Put a new bridge on the Telecaster with compensated saddles to try and make it intonate better, still needs tweaking.

Tired of being the shape I am and feeling so unfit. Hate it.

A few lines

Work was OK. The AIX server has proven to be reliable and powerful although perhaps 8gb RAM might not be enough when it goes live but it can take 64gb so that's OK.

Got the strimmer running tonight with a piece of a pair of tights taking place of the lost air filter. Did a bit so I could trim down a bush that was getting out of hand. Damn that sounds bad.

I then spent a bit of time playing Mercenary, a game that I absolutely adored on my old Amstrad CPC because it present a fully explorable city in 3D. The graphics are bare minimalist wireframe but the game is brilliantly put together with several ways to complete it. There's a modern replica of the game and the sequels called MDDClone which is excellent. I still like playing it today and I'm still amazed at how they got the game to run so fluidly on that old Amstrad. Very cool.

Tired now. Been fat this evening. I think my mind is fundamentally broken when it comes to being healthy.

This is terrible really but I find it oddly compelling. I know it is metal techno because the scary voice says so.

I just remembered how I told a friend in primary school when I was probably 10 or so that one day I would build a robot and he said I never would. So far he's been right but it's a shame I've got no idea how to prove him wrong. Oh well.

Take that worm

Work was OK. My build of am AIX blade was successful as the Oracle guy was able to do his thimg with only a little tweaking.

After that it was over to Degazio for DnD whivh was ace and really funny. my character was finally released and instantly let loose with his flatulent powers and saved the day. Would write more but doing it on the Kindle so it is taking forever.

A Soggy Quest for Doritos

Went out this morning to the car boots as I hadn't been for a while. The only thing that was at all interesting was a Peugeot racing bike but it looked quite knackered and would have been an arse to get home as it didn't have quick release wheels and I don't really need another bike. Would have been nice to have a matching Peugeot bike and car though.

After that got the ingredients for chilli and came home. Except I realised I'd forgotten to get nachos and to me, chilli is meaningless without nachos. So I went back to town to get some. I timed this badly. By the time I hit the outskirts, it was raining. When I got into town itself, the rain was insane. At one point I stopped at a junction and had a moment of panic because the whole road was covered in flowing water which made me think the car hadn't actually stopped. It took three shops to find some Doritos. On the way home it stopped raining again, like it never had. How weird.

Made chilli, consumed it and put some into pots for work. It was really nice. Spent the rest of the afternoon faffing around on bass, doing some more stuff in Dragon Age and reading. My Telecaster copy is in trouble and needs a new bridge which is frustrating. I've found myself using it rather more than I used to. Also had a look at the strings on the Ashbory and the G-string snapped all over the place, having gone all hard and weird. Fortunately had spares. Strings are easy to put on, just tie a knot in each end but then getting it tuned is a pain in the arse. I must look into some of the Pahoehoe strings for it as they are apparently much better than the silicone ones that come it as standard.

Reading a book by Stephen King called Under the Dome which seems to be a rip off of the Simpsons movie to some degree but I'm not sure which came first.

So far have done about 280 miles in the 306 and it's still got well over half a tank, which is great. Less great is the acceleration. It's not too bad but after the rev-happy Focus, the diesel is a bit of a culture shock. Shifting down a gear and booting it in the Focus would cause the car to leap forward, in the 306 it just makes a lot of noise and doesn't achieve much.

Oh well. I'm quite enjoying the more relaxed driving style and once it's actually up to speed it does cruise nicely. Airbag light still off, yay. Found the splash guard in the driver's side front arch is misaligned so there's a big gap - need to sort that before the track gets muddy again.

Fringe

Friday wasn't too bad but not very productive.

Today has been nice so far. Spent the day at my Dad's. We had scones with home-made strawberry jam from someone in work and then chilled for the rest of the day. I did some stuff on the 306. The bonnet was really badly faded orange so I got some T-cut on it and that made it shiny and look better but it still doesn't quite match the rest of it, and it's still rusted out at the front - not sure what can be done about the except replacing it. Also fixed the flashing airbag light by disconnecting and reconnecting the sensor under the driver's seat, which was nice. It's still going OK and I'm adapting back to how the diesel drives. Also noticed a light on the right side of the instruments that lit up when the ignition is turned on. I wasn't sure what it meant so I looked in the manual and it looks like it has ABS, hurrah.

Found that there's only 9 geocaches in Gibraltar, would be nice to get as many of those as I can when I go. Would be cool to say that I've got all the caches possible in a country.

It's been warm today. Had Magnums earlier, very welcome. I looked into D&D sets of dice because it would be nice to have my own set but found there's a bewildering amount of varieties out there.

There is some utter garbage on TV these days, don't see the point of it.

I found a USB controller than can run FORTY-EIGHT servos. Again, insanely cool but no idea what I could do with it.

Argh

Yesterday = unremarkable.

Not a good day today in a couple of ways. Work was meh, spent far too long on a laptop fix this morning but the afternoon was OK.

Found that my sister is splitting up from her husband and moving to near me if she can find a house, and a friend and his wife had to have their dog put down. Sad.

Focus sold for not much but it did sell. Buyer is in Oxfordshire which seems a long way to come for a banger, but hey.

Tired. It was a long session of badminton but good fun.

I nearly, very nearly, sent an e-mail with a horrible typo in it. Instead of 'County Hall' I'd accidentally typed 'Cunty Hall.'

Flustered day

This morning had a hospital appointment for my eyes after my eye test last October. The new optician I went to was concerned about my binocular vision issues and a touch of cateract. The people I saw at the hospital agreed that I am catastrophically short sighted and my eyes do have trouble working together, but because I've been dealing with it my whole life, it's not an issue. They also told me not to buy a 3DS and were astonished that I was able to see Avatar in 3D, but thinking about it, I did have to concentrate to see the effect. So, fuck 3D in all it's forms. The cataract has been there all my life and isn't an issue either unless it gets bigger and blocks my vision. So all in all a bit pointless.

Since they didn't end up giving me eye drops I was able to head back into work and get some more stuff done.

I took the dog for a walk in the evening which almost looked like we were going to get very wet but fortunately the rain held off. Then had a nasty incident - I was driving up the track and saw two things in one of the ruts, but realised too late they were baby birds. One was crushed utterly by the car, but the other was still fluttering around. This was bad enough, but I was shocked to see yet another one that had been squashed but had been there a while, probably since this morning.

Not sure what to do, I put the one that was still alive in a box and took it up to the house and then Google told me that's the last thing you should do. It seemed OK and lively so after it had shat twice in the box I put it back where I found it, and it seemed happy enough and started tweeting loudly and I could hear other birds tweeting like it. Then on the way back up to the house another slightly bigger one fluttered out in front of the car, causing an emergency stop. I chased it off the track and it fluttered into a tree.

Feel really guilty about the squashed ones, it's so rare to encounter anything on the track I tend to drive it in autopilot.

Good weekend and car

Saturday was fairly quiet but in the evening went out with everyone for a meal to celebrate Andy basically getting the best mark possible in his degree, a huge achievement. We went to a place called the Groes outside Conwy which I hadn't been to before. It was really good, very nice place with good food.

Sunday morning, Rob, Em and I went for a bike ride along a public footpath type thing which was really good. It was odd because it gave me a new view of the valley and it was so peaceful and quiet. The bike held up well although I need to tweak the handlebars a little. It's heavy to lift over stiles too.

Work was OK today. Well, no, it wasn't, but I'm trying not to let things to to me or I'll just make myself miserable. It was supposed to be D&D tonight but it was cancelled, boo.

Got new car. Peugeot 306 1.9 normally aspirated diesel from a guy in work. I was expecting to hate it after the relative luxury of the Focus but it's actually really nice to drive. The brakes are probably the weirdest thing but otherwise it's fine. The Focus is on Ebay with 6 people watching it. I like diesels, I've always preferred the way they drive, but I can never quite define why.

I booked a flight to Gibralter to hang out with Simon on the 18th July. It's the only chance I'll get before he comes back so to hell with it. My Dad has said he'll run me to the airport, which is really nice of him. Flight was only £86, not bad at all given it's only two weeks off as well.

Servos are really cool and I've discovered now you can get a USB controller that will run 6-8 of them at once from a PC. Amazing but I haven't a clue what I could do with such a thing.

You fat fuck

After I was late into work, breakfast consisted of chocolate and Coke from the vending machine, lunch was chips and chicken curry from the chippy and supper was shredded chicken in honey and garlic sauce from the Chinese. Not counting about 2.5 litres of Coke.

Critical mass has been reached after someone pointed out my stomach. Enough.

Work not helping. Dreaming about it, stress and poor diet has made my face erupt.

Argh.

Bleh

Work = exhausting.

Didn't do anything this evening.

Noinch

Spent the last two days in work building a new AIX server to run Oracle. Rather a challenge as it was on blade hardware which I'd never had to deal with before and added a whole lot more to consider. Got there on the end though and it wqs very educational. There's a couple of P510 machines on Ebay, tempting as it would be nice to have a machine that could run AIX well so I could practice at home. My old one is OK but limiting and can't run the new version.

Have walked the dog and did a bit of running yesterday and today. Spoilt it yesterday as I got an Indian on a whim (ooer) but it was very nice. Got caught in the rain yesterday but it was warm enough that I didn't really mind.

Not much else to report. Had a little go on DA:O but didn't achieve much. Last time I played it, I had just finished a prettu epic quest, so not sure what to do now.

Fun but lazy

Yesterday morning was spent watching a couple of episodes of the Walking Dead before heading to Rob and Caroline's for the swingball tournament and BBQ. Sadly there wasn't actually a swingball set available so we ate some food, chatted a lot, admired a cute mini horse and then everyone played Trivial Pursuit, which was actually really good fun.

Today haven't done much really, watched some more Walking Dead, only one episode of the first season to go now. So far really enjoyed it. I was hoping to get a bit more Dragon Age done today but didn't get around to it.

Work tomorrow, argh.

Fucking Friday

After the week of shite in work which I know is not going to improve next week, I came home, ate some chilli and watched Transformers, something I could go 'Oooh, shiny' at but otherwise ignore.

Reading an odd book on the Kindle that Steve gave me about vampires.

This might possibly rank as one of the best things I have ever heard:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqlMtNV-b5A&

Stressed

Work not fun. Loads of shit come in and I have to cope with that and nursemaid the backup system through its tantrums. Not had a good day. My face has erupted in loads of pimples, usually a sure sign of stress in my case.

This evening no badminton as we all felt poo. However, we put Em's plan of potato wedges and Nutella into full effect. Oh yeah, that works. It works so well.

I came home and watched the first episode of The Walking Dead - pretty good. Should be interesting to see how that carries on. I've heard good things about it.

Repainted the bits of the car I had tried to strip so at least it's now all black again. Not looking good, but who cares. Developments on that front, will update on that later.

Tired.

Focused

The car passed the MOT with nothing required but an indicator lense. I was so surprised when the garage phoned and told me that I actually said 'Are you sure?'

The paint however is a total, utter catastrophe and must come off. Sadly it's so thick it hasn't dried fully so attempts to sand it off failed. I've come up with two options.

1) Get a hardcore paint stripper, clean it off and try to make it acceptable.
2) Get a new car.

I'm actually leaning towards option 2 because with 12 months MOT, even in the state it's in, I could probably get something for the Focus and put that towards something else that doesn't have the stupid shaking above 40mph that seems to be a complete mystery. Ideally I'd like another Focus but a diesel estate, which having looked around a little, might actually be doable. There's a 51 reg one in mid-Wales for just £499, although it does have 336,000 miles on it, hah. Oh well. The benefit of getting another Focus, particularly an LX, means I'd be able to transfer things like the stereo and brand new tyres from the existing one.

Not much else to report. Feeling better this week after not feeling 100% all last week.

Good day

I woke up this morning with a massive craving for chilli with nachos for some reason. I couldn't stop thinking about it so after a bit of a lie in, I went into town and got the stuff. I made a big batch of it using an adapted recipe I found on the BBC website. I left out the kidney beans because I think they're unnecessary and added a big slab of dark chocolate. I had it on top of some Doritos and covered in cheese and sour cream.

In the evening with to see Senna with Andy and Maz. We were hoping to go to Nando's as neither Andy or I have ever been but there was queue out of the door. So we went to the Fuxion all you can eat place. The food is good there, but it got a bit busy and noisy and it's always seemed a little industrial to me, a bit like a the kitchens in the Cities of the Asmov books that feed thousands of people at a time.

The film was good. Formula 1 isn't something I'm hugely interested in but it was a really well done insight into Senna's life and career. It was weird seeing all the races and rivalries and all that stuff when you know the film is heading towards the inevitable conclusion.

Car MOT tomorrow. The paint still looks shite but I think I can live with it, and Maz suggested that the worst of the runs could be polished down a bit.

Bollocks

I painted the car. It looks OK.

If you're standing half a mile away, looking in the other direction.

I think I'm going to have to put a Rat Look sticker on it and pretend the streaks, runs, bubbles and stuck insects were on purpose.

Or scrap it.

Oh well.

Busy week

Wednesday last week was getting the driveshaft put on the car. Still no change. Going to leave it now until it has had the MOT done which is due soon.

Thursday was usual badminton fun. Fairly interesting evening due to loads of people for a change.

Over the weekend I was at my cousin Pauline's place. I drove up on Friday then on Saturday we spent the day in Blackpool which was interesting as I'd never been there before. Sunday we had pizza for lunch and lazed about until I came home in torrential rain and heavy traffic, not good.

Last night it was supposed to be the biweekly D&D but Rob forgot the character sheets so we played Munchkin and Zombies!!! instead. The first game of Munchkin was great but the second less so, but Zombies was great fun. So it was a good evening anyway, and as usual vast quantities of snacks.

Tonight it was setting up a laptop for someone and then having a lazy evening at long last. Watched a bit of Futurama movies and made some odd bass noises before playing a little Dragon age and sleep.

Fat, oh so fat

Not a good day for food. Lunch wasn't too great, a bacon and cheese turnover thing, and then some chocolate. Then went to my Dad's this evening as it's his birthday to drop off presents. He and his wife had already had a big lunch so I went out and got a chinese to eat at theirs, plus there was more chocolate.

Interesting article:

http://www.cringely.com/2011/06/iclouds-real-purpose-is-to-kill-windows/

I feel quite alarmed by all this shit going on. The idea that computers become locked down terminals accessing a cloud service instead of a general purpose tool has been a worrying one for some time, and since everyone follows Apples lead for some reason, this could be the thing that finally makes it happen. Not sure I agree with the idea that consumers have been leading IT for the last decade - maybe at home, but not in the business market.

I can't see it happening quickly in the business market - there's always so much legacy stuff to support and businesses like to know (or should do) exactly where their data is, but for home users, maybe. It's a scary thought to think that the traditional general purpose computer might become a niche market, like it was when they first came out.

Fucking Apple. Back when Steve Jobs came back and saved the company with the iMac, I was happy that the Mac survived. Now that he's turned Apple into something more evil than Microsoft could ever hope to be. I wish he'd never bothered and left it to die. I mean the Mac was always non-standard and locked down to a degree but now it's much worse with the iOS platform.

That bloody cloud. You'd think that people would think twice about sending their data into the great unknown with all the Sony shit that went on recently.

But at the same time I can see the other side of it. A lot of people don't know or want to know about operating systems, data security, or any of that. They'd quite happily put their data on Apple's servers if it meant they didn't have to worry about updates, backups or whatever. So I don't know. Perhaps the cloud and normal computers can co-exist.

Hectic day

Hectic day in work, rushed around all day doing stuff.

Tried to get a Nokia C3-01 to connect to a PC again. Fail. It's a piece of shit. Connects fine to my Windows 7 laptop but not to anything running XP, which is a bit of a sod when the user wants to download site photos from the thing. I haven't felt good about Nokia since the masterpiece that was the E90, and now...I don't know what it is but I can't stand them any more. Just using the dismal C3-01 makes me feel sick. I think it's because the diabolical N97 ruined Nokia for ever for me and then when it sold out to Microsoft...well.

After trying to get used to the Unity interface, I've sadly decided that Ubuntu has jumped the shark. Unity is slow, confusing, inconsistent and unfriendly. So I'm trying out Mint, which is one of the many forks of Ubuntu but is sticking to a more traditional Gnome interface. I'm currently installing it on the Acer 7741g which I was supposed to be selling but haven't got around to yet.

Feeling catastrophically tired this evening, not sure why. I did some more sanding of the car which left me aching like I'd done an upper body workout, which in a way I suppose it is.

Busy week. Tomorrow it's my Dad's birthday so I'm heading over there after work. Wednesday the car is finally having the driveshaft fitted, Thursday is badminton and then Friday I'm driving up to Kirkham to spend the weekend with my cousin.

Just had a good blast on Dragon Age. I keep sitting down to play it for a few minutes but then get drawn in and suddenly it's two hours later.

A random day

First thing went out to the car boot which was a bit meh, didn't see anything interesting although it was quite large for the overcast weather. Then went to a large geocache I know to drop off the remaining travelbugs.

Came home and went mad with sandpaper on the car. The paint is now largely flatted except for a couple of bits but I ran out of sandpaper. I left the roof alone though as it's the only bit of the car which wasn't scratched, dented or the wrong colour. I did nearly all of it by hand except the left doors and the tailgate but then I borrowed a neighbour's sander and that was much easier. Tired and achy now as it took bloody ages. Got a big tin of Hammerite ready, just need a half decent day to get the paint on. Could be a while though. Oh well. I find it fascinating that as soon as the car gets wet it looks perfectly normal again. This could all go horribly wrong of course.

Haven't done much else today except watch Blade Runner all the way through for the first time ever. Pretty good I thought, ending wasn't what I expected it to be. Good though.

Fun days

Thursday was a fairly meh day in work and then I had to take my Mum to her writing thing over the weekend.

Friday was OK in work, did some more work on the backup system and discovered one of the onsite tapes was corrupted so will need to be restored from the offsite copy. Bah. Had an unfortunate encounter with a Golf on a single track road, had to go into the hedge to avoid a collision with broke the glass in the left mirror and scratched up that side of the car. Also noticed that the dented arch was rusting where the paint had flaked off so wire-wooled it and slapped some Hammerite on there, but the only Hammerite I had was white. After that met up with the gang for a couple of drinks, which was nice.

Today walked the dog in the morning but it was VERY hot. Then went to Rob and Em's for some BBQ food and snacks and rugby but had to leave after a couple of hours as the dog was at home alone. After that, went out and did a couple of geocaches as I had some travelbugs to move on but the ones I found were too small. Will have to do that tomorrow instead. Hope the weather keeps nice.

After the fuss about the so-called sex scene in Mass Effect, Bioware seems to have gone quite insane in Dragon Age. I found a brothel in it that allows your character to select someone of either gender and several species to have sex with. No nudity (but only barely) but well, it's quite suggestive. Still enjoying it as a game, think it's going to be a long haul through it though.

Meh

OK day in work but once again the server 'lost' some files that I had to restore, this time nearly a gigs worth. I wish people would just admit it when they fuck up and delete stuff by accident.

Did more unicycle. I can get about 10 feet now (three rotations) reasonably consistently, so getting a little better. While looking them up found it is possible to buy a unicycle with a 36" wheel and a disk brake for £615, or with a titanium frame for £999. Impressive.

Played some more Dragon Age. Completed the bit I was stuck on which was great, but then some stuff didn't quite work out but never mind. Picked up a rather interesting new party member.

Not much else to report. For the first time I think I've got a non paying bidder on Ebay, annoying. Especially as I could use the cash...

I've had a message from a geocacher about a travelbug I've had too long, guess I'll have to do some caching this weekend to move it on...ooops.

Nearly finished Lost in a Good Book. I really like the Thursday Next books. I think I read the first three or four of them when they first came out, and I really enjoyed them at the time so I don't know how I came to ignore them ever since. Strange.

Megafun

Yesterday was spent initially at my Dad's. I took the unicycle over and we took it apart, changed the shit stock tyre for a nice BMX one and attacked it with wire wool to clean it up and get rid of some of the surface rust on it. After that we just chilled until I headed over to meet Rob to play D&D in Wrexham. It was really good fun. Although I didn't get a chance to use my character, I got to play Kat's and rolled a natural 20 at a critical point which killed two monsters at once and saved the day. Ace. Also their stories of the unfortunate mule that was eaten by a panther which was then killed by setting their tent on fire was absolutely hilarious, never mind the current unfortunate situation in the mines. Too long to go into here but damn it was funny.

Work was busy today but productive. Did a very early start to get some stuff done which was nice as I got some flexi built up. This evening took the dog for a walk, fell off the unicycle some more (but can get several feet reasonably often now) and watched the first part of the recent two-parter Doctor Who. Hadn't heard good things about it but it was quite fun. Then I played some more Dragon Age. I'd got to a bit on Sunday where I was a bit lost and not sure what I was supposed to be doing, then suddenly it clicked and then I was kicking arse and taking names. Great fun.

Damn you, weather

The plans for a bike ride this morning were thwarted by dreadful wind and rain. Frustratingly by the afternoon it had calmed down rather a lot but at least I was able to take the dog for a walk.

Didn't do much else today except continue with Dragon Age. I had to switch it to Casual mode as playing it in Normal requires micromanagement of your entire team to a frustrating degree or they die pretty quickly and my screams of rage were making my throat hurt. Really starting to enjoy it now, especially as I'm starting to get the hang of how the plot is hanging together and how to handle the equipment and stuff. I wasn't sure if it would be my thing as I prefer sci-fi settings over fantasy but it's got me hooked at the moment.

It keeps reminding me of Fable II but in comparison, Fable II seems childish and dumbed down, let alone the abomination that was Fable III. I heard that there were complaints that Dragon Age II was dumbed down in comparison but I'll wait and see on that one.

Wood Fest!

Went to the wood fest with Rob and Em and Rob and Caroline. I'd never been before and it was great, really enjoyed it. Apart from all the wood stuff there was loads of craft things and food fair type things going on so it was great. We saw loads of cool stuff.

Got some nice pickle and some cheese that only I liked called Sticky Toffee Heaven, basically a combination of cheese and sticky toffee pudding. It was gorgeous. Lunch consisted of a rather good burger from a burger stand, but it was proper burger with really nice buns.

Not done much else today except play Dragon Age again. Getting into it now and getting the hang of it. Found you can remove the entire team's clothing and make them run around in underwear which makes cutscenes hilarious but not so practical when they get ambushed. So far my character is being nice to people although I'm not sure if it keeps track like Mass Effect.

Also got some new strings for my guitar. I've been playing it a fair bit recently even though it only had four strings and they were knackered. Think it needs a good setup though as some of the strings are buzzing. Also I made the mistake of putting a classic type bridge on it with the three saddles so it makes intonating it more difficult.

Whimsical error messages annoy me sometimes, for example:

'Hold your clicks a moment please, Flickr has the hiccups.'

Oh fuck off, if it's broken, say it's broken. Grr.

Dragon Age: Underpants

A fairly OK day in work.

Came home to find the driveshaft for the Focus had turned up, bloody heavy thing.

Got two 250gb hard drives for the M17x which are now installed and running in RAID0 to give a combined drive of about 485gb. I did think about larger ones but I don't need that much space. These are 7200rpm drives. SSDs or hybrid drives would have been nice too but considerably more expensive.

I thought I'd have to use a Linux CD or something to clone the original drive onto the new volume but investigation showed the best way to do it was with Windows itself. It has an option to create a system image onto an external hard drive and then create a bootable DVD which you can use to restore the image back onto the new drive. Then use Disk Management to expand the partition to fill the space and done. Rather impressed as it was easy and reasonably quick given there was 50gb of data to transfer.

Played some more DA. It's taking a while to adapt to it as it's quite a complex game. There was a memorable incident when I was exploring a dungeon with two companions and picked up an item of armour. I then accidentally unequipped everything else, which left my character standing in his underpants which was hilarious. The way the dialogue works is taking some time to get used to. Unlike Mass Effect, your character doesn't speak, which is odd when everyone else does. So far though, quite enjoying it. Looking forward to seeing how it develops as I think it's a big game and I've only done a little bit of it.

Not much

Work was OK. Had my PA which went fine and we installed an update to the backup system.

Badminton tonight was OK. Had salad again and played OK. Shame the hag was there and the numbers meant we had to play with her twice.

Got Dragon Age Origins. So far it's a little like Mass Effect but more complicated. I was able to create a reasonable replica of my original Shepard in it but only had time for a little play on it.

Three wheels

Got a takeaway on the way home and ate it in front of Futurama. Then felt fat and disgusting so decided to take the bike out for a very quick ride to test it. It worked fine although the handlebars shifted in the stem so I had to sort that. I think I've done it but not quite sure if it's right. Also fell off the unicycle a few times. I think it needs a new tyre and/or inner tube as it loses air pretty quickly and the tyre on it looks cheap and crappy.

Still feel crappy and fat. Damned bad food. I remember when Rob made that salad a couple of weeks ago, felt great after that.

Went mad last night and shaved my whole head except eyebrows. Felt really strange and the double-takes from everyone in work got tiring quite quickly. Oh well.

Even more meh

Two fairly average days in work. Did get annoyed over something this afternoon but after I took the dog for a walk I felt better.

Really not much to report this evening. Didn't achieve much.

Ultra bleh

What a pointless day. The weather was crap for most of it with high winds and spurious rain. Didn't feel particularly inclined to do anything, so I didn't. All I did was wash the car, get shit food and eat it in front of Futurama again. Always feel shit and worthless after doing that.

Wish I could get motivated to exercise properly and stop being a wimp about the weather stopping me doing it too. Annoying.

Sold the first of the laptops I got to fix up, made a fairly decent profit on it, hurrah.

Tired now. Not looking forward to work.

Installed Ubuntu 11.04 in a VM. I always thought the interface had got pretty good so why they had to change it for that stupid Unity interface, I don't know. It's rubbish and makes no sense.

I love this, but not sure why:

Miranda - Gnocchi.

Argh, no updates

Forgot to update this week for some reason. Beginning of the week was fairly unspectacular.

Thursday was badminton. Despite the successful salad experiment of the previous week we had more Currywurst, which was a mistake.

Friday was the funeral of my grandfather-in-law. He died a little while back. He was 96 with very severe Alzheimers so it was a bit of a relief in the end. I only met him a few times and he never remembered me after the first couple of times. He seemed like a really nice guy though and I wish I'd had a chance to know him before the dementia got so bad. In the evening met up for a few drinks with Rob, Em, Andy and Maz, which was great even if it was a fairly early night.

Today was spent at my Dad's. We did loads of work on the bike. Got the tyres seated on the rims properly at last and rebuilt the handlebars with a new adjustable stem, a new bar, and new ergonomic handgrips. Also replaced the brake blocks with nicer ones. I never realised before just how fiddly it is to get the blocks angled correctly though. The new brake blocks allow you to change the pads without removing the whole lot though, so once it's set up, that's it. We were going to put the newer side-pull brakes on it but that would have meant all new levers and cables too so it got too expensive. Anyway, it feels great to ride now and if the weather isn't completely horrible tomorrow I'll take it out and try it out properly.

Saw a Boardman CX Team bike in Halfords which is meant for cyclocross. It is my perfect bike. Built like a road bike but with bigger tyres and has drop bars with four brake levers with shifters built into them. Absolutely stunning in every way. Shame it's £899. Here:

http://www.boardmanbikes.com/cx/cx_team.html

It's fun tinkering with bikes. I can see how people spend time building them up from parts and tweaking them.

Took the car to have the rear tyre looked at. As I suspected it did have a puncture. Sadly they also told me that my left front tyre was nearing the limit and the right one also had a gash in it. As much as I like the Toyo tyres it seems that they are too soft and fragile for what my car has to put up with. So they had to be replaced. They did the tracking too and found the back end was totally out of alignment, presumably due to the crash on the 29th. So that's all sorted and it does drive better. Still needs a driveshaft to stop the shaking at 45mph+ though. Damned thing.

In one of those moods where I can't get motivated to do anything except listen to music and piss about on the Internet.

Eurovision apathy

Rob came up with the idea of watching the Eurovision in a big group a couple of weeks ago. The idea was that everyone would select a country and then dress appropriately and bring food and stuff.

It was a really good evening. The actual contest itself was fairly underwhelming but it was really good fun watching it and commenting on the daft voting. There was loads of good food and drink and general banter.

I had already bagsied Germany (surprise) and decided I would bring Currywurst. I assumed the sausage would be easy enough but I wasn't sure about the sauce. It's one of those things where there isn't a definitive recipe as the point of Currywurst is to make it with whatever's handy. I tried one of the recipes and it came out really well, tasted pretty authentic, even if I had to miss out two of the ingredients as I didn't have them.

Today has been a fairly uninteresting day. I did however go to the car boot in Rhyl for the first time in ages but it was fairly tedious and crap as it was raining. I went to Halfords to get a new saddle for my bike as they had a huge retro leather one with actual springs on the bottom, which is ace and really comfortable. Still need to sort out the handlebars though.

After that I drove around aimlessly for a bit so the odometer and trip counter on the car would read 1234567890 so I could take a photo. Then went home and completed my renegade Shepard in ME2 before playing a bit of Portal 2 and watching some more Futurama. Slightly alarmed by Mass Effect 3 spoilers being around already when it's not due for release until next year so I need to be careful about those.

Running the M17x on battery. Fairly pointless, I don't know why they bothered putting a battery in it. It might be laptop shaped but it really isn't a laptop. It lasts about an hour on battery doing not much at all, so if you actually used the quad-core or the dual graphics cards it would probably last about 10 minutes. They might as well have put a third hard drive bay in instead so you could have RAID 5.

So far really happy with the machine though, the only thing I would like to do when funds allow is take out the single 160gb drive and replace it with two larger ones and run it in RAID0. God knows why it only has the one tiny drive, can only imagine it was refurbed because there was some issue with the original drive(s).

Rocket powered badminton

Thursday night badminton was great. We decided last week that we keep eating the wrong food which makes us play badly, so this time Rob and Em made a nice light salad. It made a massive difference and also due to the numbers, we didn't have to play with the Hideous One at all.

Friday was a fairly average day. Work wasn't too bad and had a nice lazy evening sorting out the M17x and playing a bit more renegade ME2.

The Galaxy S has proven worthy. The battery life is really good, tons better than the HTC Magic. I'd imagine it would suffer if lots of games and things were run on it but it survived three days with 30% of the battery left, and was used for more than the normal amount of voice calls and usual texting and fiddling. Also it even came with a spare battery, nice.

Picked up a new handlebar for the bike on Thursday evening, just waiting for new stem to arrive now.

Headache and squits

Not a bad day in work. Not much had gone on while I was off. We've all had upgraded BlackBerrys in work. Not too soon either, the trackball in mine has already failed twice, even though I've tried to keep it clean. The new one has a trackpad instead so no moving parts.

The Galaxy S got a lot of use today as I was talking to the insurance people and the garage and my Dad. It held up pretty well, although it seemed to struggle more in areas of low signal than the old HTC did.

Car is being picked up by insurance preferred garage next Wednesday. Liability is still being worked out. They have asked the other insurance company to get Enterprise to call me but I don't know if I want to risk arranging a hire car until the liability issue is decided. If I still had the motorbike it wouldn't be an issue, bloody typical.

Had a headache most of the day and felt a bit crappy and now this evening I've had major squits. Not good, and not sure why.

Played a bit more of my renegade Shepard in ME2 who is nearly at the end. I like renegade Shepard, he might be a complete arse to basically everyone but at least he's consistent and is usually being a bastard for a reason. ME3 has been delayed. Oh well.

10 years since Douglas Adams died. I always remember it because it's the day after my birthday.

33 today

Birthday today. Since I did so much over the weekend I had no plans today except to do nothing at all useful.

So far all I've pretty much done today is sit around eating chocolate and watching Futurama, so I consider it a job well done.

My Dad got me a new wallet to replace my ancient FCUK one which I've had since about 2001. This led me to clear it out of all the crap that was in it. However some of it had memories so I put it all into a scanner to have a record of it. I suppose I don't need several Berlin public transport tickets, or tickets for the New York, Washington or Boston Metros and there were loads of receipts and tickets for places in many places on holiday.

Also set up the phone I got to replace the HTC which arrived today. I ended up getting a Samsung Galaxy S as it got really good reviews and supposedly has better battery life than the HTC Desire which was the other one I was considering. So far it's really good. It was used but looks pretty much like new.

Finished watching Band of Brothers, which is a hugely impressive series, really good.

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...