I have Friday and Monday off. Whee! :). Some bike riding, tidying and chilling may follow. Possibly also kayaking on a river on Sunday.

A cat update : both cats are unsurprisingly still happy little kitties. Maisie has especially come even more out of her shell and is much more playful with toys and also happier to whinge. She's still a bit of a vommy cat and doesn't like being held, but things are good.

Cairo is as adorable/annoying as usual, and late night games of fetch are quite common.

The litter tray has been changed from a standard big tray to the space age covered tray with the door removed (they don't like the door). I have also taken the opportunity to move from hideously expensive cat litter to cheapo cat litter, on the grounds that the covered tray mostly stops it from being kicked onto the floor. Unfortunately Cairo does like rolling in dusty litter, but at least they're both using it.

The only downside is that the tray is a pain to clean. The designer who created it has obviously never kept pets, or expects everyone to use litter that does not clump at all. This, I submit, is a fantasy scenario.

Finally got round to installing Windows 7 last night. It installed without hassle apart from not supporting the Adaptec 29160 SCSI card (got drivers off Vista installation) and needing to download Audigy drivers. Correctly detected and set up all four monitors (aside from getting the refresh rate wrong on the non plug and play one).

Pondering going back to the era of dual boot and dual booting it with OpenBSD.

In other interesting techie links :

Redhat fucks up security. Discussion ensues. OpenBSD users gloat a little.

It comes to something when it's easier to configure Windows to ask your permission when applications are installed, than to get Linux to do the same thing.

You thought reasoning about signals was bad, reasoning about a total breakdown of normal functioning is even worse - from OldNewThing, the Microsoft blog about the workarounds they do to keep shitty software (including their own, no doubt) working.

Also need to revamp my backup strategy. I have a DDS4 tape drive I've not used much, and also last night found that all my photographs pre 2008 appear only to be stored on my OS/2 system using an elderly 80GB(?) HPFS disk. Eeep. Backup tonight, methinks..

gold, frankincense and phwoar! Advert for manchester arndale

What the fuck? It doesnt even rhyme with myrrh!

This week, I am mostly having : surprise dinner.

This happens when you're asked how much food is in your freezer and realise it's in the region of twenty meals or so. Furthermore, not all of it (actually, none of it, but it's easier to guess in some cases) is labelled.

Chick pea, sweet potato and spinach curry on Friday actually turned out to be African Peanut Stew. Last night I thought was some form of vegan chilli and was, I think either a vegan roast or casseroley type thing of some kind. Pretty certain tonight is meat chilli..

Who knows what the rest of the week will bring?

(actually, at least one day is going to be meat burgers with a type of melty vegan cheese I hope is not that disgusting. Despite the fact I'm not that keen on meat substitutes - either have meat, or don't, I'm pondering trying to create a good veggie burger using wheat protein)

Weekend included very muddy biking on Sunday (cleaning my mountain bike really is a pain in the arse), and drinkies and a meal with T on Saturday. Much silly and moderately serious discussion was had.

Part of Sunday was spent doing a bit more Google Maps/Earth-ing. After lots of speculation about Afghanistan and politics and suchlike it was diverting to do some geography of both Afghanistan and all the surrounding Stanstannystans. It's no surprise things are a nightmare there and that security is a major hassle, purely based on the geography..

A fair bit of the rest of the weekend (apart from some tidying, pub on Friday night) was spent with shiny shiny Oblivion. I succumbed to a second hand 8800GTX - AMD are currently experiencing driver issues with their new cards so I'm waiting until things settle down before I upgrade properly.

Oblivion on a 7600GT wasn't really bad - I was running at 800x600 or 1024x768 on medium quality. On an 8800GTX it's at maximum quality at 1600x1200 - having heather covering much of the scenery and enhanced lighting is definitely lovely. The quests are continually inventive : what at first glance seems to be a simple fetch quest, turns out to be a betrayal and manhunt of the protaganist!

Some people have been rather sniffy about Oblivion from a role playing point of view, calling it a 'hiking simulator'. It really is a fantastic hiking simulator, and whilst perhaps the story is nothing exceptional and the role playing is lacking (there's no real character class limitations - you can cast magic with full armour on, there's not much customisation based on the character's class, race etc) the implementation is technically brilliant and quite inventive.

It still doesn't grab in the same way as Planescape:Torment does, but then again, not much does..

During unexpected drinkies after finding out a friend's son was having a birthday. More drinkies Thursday after the bi social, as another friend has hidden their birthday till the last minute and I tend to forget dates.

Anyway, it is commonly known in mythology that muses help in the creation of great works. These are beautiful and inspiring goddesses who drive the artist to create their masterpiece..

However, to extend the idea a bit further, what if - in addition to the classical muses, the artists who aren't quite as good get a correspondingly lesser muse.

Then consider just what horror is lurking in the corner when certain popular songwriters are 'composing' ;)

You have a pastie, you have chutney or pickle. Said chutney or pickle will not open with use of hands or tea towel and there is no jar opener in the house.

Can't be bothered trying to heat the lid, what do you do?

That's right! You open up your rucksack and pull out your Sealskinz ultragrip waterproof gloves. It works.

Shiny, shiny kitchen cupboard of capaciousness! :)

Friday night was spent putting the legs on the kitchen cupboard and tidying before the pub.
Saturday I put the doors on it and started to fill it up. Curry and drinkies that night.
Sunday - more tidying and chucking all the unsightly plastic storage into the shed now the items are in Shiny Larder Cupboard. Tidied under the stairs. Tidied and organised parts of bedroom.

It's all coming together nicely - next on the list are a pan hanging rack (possibly a circular one), a laundry rack hanging from the ceiling and shelves on the wall for speakers in the kitchen.

Also read crap books and had fun with Google Maps and the Internet looking at Scottish islands and other bits of the UK.

This week heralds kayaking, computer fettling, drinkies and other stuff.

Today, I have been tidying and relaxing by reading about Scottish islands. This has led on to finding a new British explorer.

There are many outstanding British explorers - those who push the limits like Ranulph Fiennes, those who take part in splendid travelogues like Michael Palin and then... there's Stuart 'Captain Calamity' Hill..

Very briefly played Vampire the Masquerade : Redemption last night (cheap ebay purchase) - the Xplosiv 1.1 patched release works fine in Vista x64, incidentally.

After the intro shows a crusader being injured and cared for in a church, you are thrust into the action to slay two monsters attacking a nun, barely being able to drag yourself out of bed and sinking to the floor after defeating them.

The next morning, the nun casually mentions that the silver mine is infested with monsters and you have two conversation choices :

1) I'll go tomorrow and slay them all!
2) I'd love to, but perhaps in a month or two when I'm better.

As an amazing player, you are probably expected to chose 1). I chose the more realistic 2). The nun told me 'month or two? more like a year!'.

*ert* *ert* *railroad alert*

Enter the deacon or similar. 'The church is not safe. Tomorrow you will go into the silver mines and fight the monsters therein' (and undoubtedly get bitten by a vampire providing the whole point of the game).

Gee, thanks, railroad man..