Slackville

So I’m doing one of those ‘update’ posts which is never a good thing. I should be maintaining the flow of awesome olly information, not just forgetting to blog and doing it all at once…

I played and finished Half-Life 2: Episode 1, which was just more of the same goodness really. As it was a smaller package I felt a lot more involved in the plot and the gameplay just seemed a bit tighter than Half-Life 2. The addition of the ‘commentary’ points (just like a DVD) was a neat touch for game geeks and adds some extra replay value. Still playing lots of Battlefield 2 which is just awesome fun, and the RPG style ‘levelling up’ makes you not want to stop. I also picked up a copy of Splinter Cell 3 which is very slick so far, plot is a little contrived, but good sneaky fun.

Went down to Kerry’s parents in Selkirk for the common riding a couple of weeks ago and that was a good laugh. There are some photos in my super-hip flickr stream. Just got back from my sister’s graduation ceremony in Durham but that’s another story (as the Rev W Awdry would say).

On the work front we’re having fun attempting to roll out VOIP in the office. Totally not helped by the face that there are no good SIP soft-phones for OS X. We’ve had to use SJPhone which is free and has all the features but looks like a 1st year CS student’s test Java swing app. Not the best thing to put in front of the boss and say “teh futar is here!”.

I’m still punishing myself by coming home and doing even more web dev outside of work. Work on the re-design of this site is progressing, honestly. I might even have it done some time next week. I’m jumping on the Microformat band wagon and integrating hReview into my ‘review’ blog posts plus lots of other goodies. A while ago I took the plunge and modernised my last design of npht.com (the older style is visible on the education site) which had always been a stop-gap measure. I’m much happier with this version, it is much more flexible, I’ve integrated wordpress better and it leaves lots of room for expansion.

Oh yeah, I’m now 25. The big quarter century. Thanks to everyone who congratulated me and sent cards etc. I got some nice goodies and a pile of DVDs in the HMV sale.

Some other events:

• Google Sightseeing has been accepted into the 9rules network
• I got new Etnies from schuh on ebay
• I’m addicited to Fenchurch t-shirts
• I placed a test order with super cheap Hong Kong spectacle makers Optical4Less
• I discovered Facebook
• I’ve started using Google Calendar
• I bought my first mp3 from the iTunes store: Beastie Boys – Three MC’s And One DJ (Live Video Version)
• Kerry and I bought a ‘Jack Lalanne Power Juicer Express’ off ebay and Kerry is now juicing everything in sight

I promise, this will be the last of the ‘update’ posts…