Archive for the 'Me' Category
2 commentsHappy New Year!
So yeah, this is one of of those “catch up” posts for the new year that everybody seems to be doing. It seems my last post all about me was over two months ago when I moved into my new flat. Slackness.
What has happened since then you ask?
- I went to Prague – lovely city. Weather wasn’t great and we attempted to visit the Jewish Cemetery on the Sabbath (skills). Lost Ian a couple of times, drank Bekerovka and developed a taste for Mojitos.
- My sister visited for a weekend – we climbed Arthur’s Seat, went to the Samhuinn Halloween thing and general did touristy stuff
- Met a Girl
- Spent Christmas at home with the family. Got lots of shiny things including socks, chocolate and booze.
- Listened to a lot of Girls Aloud
- Spent Hogmanay in the Opal Lounge with friends – terrible food, but they compensated us with an extravagant amount of free Moet, wine and cocktails
- Played far too much Scrabulous on the all-encompassing world destroyer that is Facebook
- Went to Edinburgh Zoo for the first time – Honey Badgers rock! (so do penguins)
- Played Crysis (omg shiny), BioShock, Halo 3 on the 360 and just bought the RockStar back catalogue on Steam
- Assisted in the making of Tapas and had a great evening eating said Tapas accompanied by Mojitos
So I all moved into my new place. The move was pretty painless, mainly thanks to the help of my Mum and Dad who came up for the weekend. My Dad drove a van we had hired and we got everything shifted fin two trips. Got my ADSL from Be activated within about four days and after some firmware updating shenanigans with the modem I’m all up and rocking. I did manage to trash my desktop PC in the moving process though, so I’m taking it as an excuse to upgrade to an uber-rig. I’m getting a dual core Pentium and 2 gigs of RAM (which is crazy cheap at the moment). Check out some quick snaps I took of my new place on flickr.
I have a new flat! Kerry and I have amicably decided to split up and so for the last month or so I’ve been looking for a new place. I finally found a nice play on Causewayside in the Newington area of Edinburgh. It’s a good bright flat in a decent area of town and has been refurbished recently with new fittings. I’ll be properly moving all my stuff in two weeks but in the mean time I’ve got to buy all that fun stuff like: duvet, cushions, decent curtains etc. I’ve never lived on my own before, it’ll be nice to do whatever I want, whenever I want!
I went for a nice ride along the canal this afternoon. Behold my route using the fancy new Google Maps embedding:
tags: cycle, googlemaps
It was my birthday yesterday, as the title suggests I’m now the ripe old age of 26. To celebrate we went out for an (always awesome) curry at Kushi’s with Ian and Neil. Good food and good company.
I have a laptop! A venerable IBM T23 with 512MB RAM clocked at a mighty 1133Mhz. I got it off ebay, something which lots of people have since said is usually a really, really bad idea. Apart from a crack on the back it does the job and is built like a tank. It came with an apparently legal install of Windows XP but I’ve installed ubuntu linux alongside it. So far I haven’t needed to boot into Windows for anything, all my hardware is supported in ubuntu. The install process was also incredibly smooth. You boot from a live CD and then the installer runs from inside the live CD version of linux. You can then muck around with the gnome default games (blackjack etc) whilst the installer is completing! I did have some strange issue with lilo not installing the first time, but I ran it again and it worked fine.
The PCMCIA wi-fi card that came with my laptop was pretty crappy and didn’t seem to be supported in linux. I shelled out a whole £10 for a new one that I knew was supported and it has been working fine. I also had to replace the battery as the charge only held for 20 mins, the seller freely admitted the battery wasn’t tested (ebay speak for broken) so it was to be expected. Ubuntu is the most user friendly linux distribution I’ve every installed. They obviously have actual people thinking about usability and being friendly to less experienced users. I’ve since ubuntu-orised my server box at home as well. It makes sense to just run one distribution.
