Dear Diary...
This is my diary. How things are. Or something. Please note that the diary is archived month by month, so feel free to click the links for the archives.
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Friday 3rd February - Everything Stops For Tea
Well, it did for me at lunch time today anyway. All this week and all next week we've got a special little installation happening near one of the galleries in one of the builings, namely called the Holden Tea Room. Effectively it's like taking a trip back in time to when tea rooms were the place to go with lovely cups of tea, lots of dainty little sandwiches and cakes and all that sort of thing. Of course for someone like me who's actually braved the queues to get to Betty's Tea Rooms, you can well imagine that something like this would go down a treat with people.
And - it has. I'm so pleased for all of those involved, because you can see the sheer unbridled joy it's bringing to people's faces when they visit and have a lovely time there. I have to say that I've walked past it at work during the week and thought "ooh, it looks rather lovely" and been tempted to go in, but normally take some lunch in with me to work. Well today was the exception and so I thought "why not?" and off I went on my lunch break there. And I was pleasantly surprised to see that I was not only able to be served and get in, but sit on one of the comfy sofas and relax there with the two birds in the little aviary for company.
I had a rather nice coronation chicken-like sandwich on some lovely soft giraffe bread (well seeing as Sainsbury's have renamed it, so shall I) which really was flavoursome and full of a good plentiful supply of chicken. Add to that their cake and coffee deal for a mere £2.50, with a properly nice cup of coffee and a gorgeous slice of lemon cake as well. In fact the only difficulty I had was deciding what cake to have, such was the rather nice taste all round really. I have to say that it was well worth the money and I felt rather special to sit there and relax with a spot of lunch, early 20th century style. If you get chance, you absolutely must go. End of.
So with that making the day seem much more lovely, the evening was also a relaxing and yet enjoyable one but for different reasons. First off after the food shopping at Tesco and making myself some fish and chips for tea, it was time to catch up with the episodes of Pointless that I'd recorded over the week. One round was Premier League footballers and the countries that they play for, and in each pass I got all of them and correctly guessed the lowest score in each too - so that was pretty neat. Kind of made me wish I was on that round and earning some money into the bargain.
I also spent some time playing some more Commodore 64 games and testing them before putting another few more on eBay for sale. One game I really did enjoy back then and did tonight was Activision's Toy Bizarre, which really does have you scrambling around with some platform action attempting to get the toys and balloons in the toy factory. It's pretty fast paced and you have to be careful where you jump - as jumping without any gaps upwards means you almost inevitably float along into a toy that's waiting for you to lose a life. Ouch. But nonetheless, pretty good fun all round really.
I also played the Activision Decathlon, which for its introductory tune has a version of Leo Arnaud's "Bugler's Dream" (make that tune of the day) to get you in the mood. Just like the classic Atari 2600 version, it's joystick waggling all the way and I'm sure that the 400 metres was never this tiring when you played it on the Atari, but still, a true classic of its genre that. On the Atari the trackball meant high scores were tons easier to get, but on stick, you really had to waggle like mad. I can still get 1000 points plus in most of the field events though, so I've not lost it just yet!
Thursday 2nd February - Fit and Fetching
Had a pretty busy day today at work, as I'm normally on a Thursday the first line of response to any calls that come in. Usually I like to put in a response very quickly and try and contact the staff or student member as soon as possible, so that they know the call is being dealt with appropriately, only seems the right and fair thing to do to me. I did also manage to solve a problem we had with a piece of software no longer running - it had a licence file and a dongle that the software checks against to make sure it can run, but for some reason the software wasn't allowing anything to run correctly.
I spoke to the software vendor, and they told me that they could regenerate the licence file to sort the issue. However, what we didn't know at the time was that their licence generation system had gone a little bit wrong, and so was generating the files, but actually sending me corrupted ones. Finally on the fourth attempt they fixed things at their end, the new software licence file was correct, and the software was able to run correctly and without issues. Must admit I felt quite pleased to be able to get that one all done and dusted, and made me feel better because of it.
I got home and straight away went to work on the Wii Fit, doing a pretty good job of beating my record on rhythm boxing for the ten minute bout, and also doing rather neat on the advanced step as well as the six minute hula hoop. I am trying to push myself a bit now and at some point I'll have to get Wii Fit Plus, as there's more workouts and aerobic games on there which might be useful - especially as it carries over all your saved stuff from the original so you don't have to unlock everything again (hurrah to that!) - maybe might be worth me looking when I'm out and about tomorrow?
The Love In My Heart came over later on, and I made us some spaghetti carbonara for tea. It's so much nicer when you've got some fresh spaghetti, and kudos to Tesco for realising that their packs are better split into two so that it makes two handy portions that'll feed two nicely. It doesn't take too long to get together all the components and make it lovely, and I always add some more bacon lardons to make it a little more meaty as well, something which The Love heartily approves of - almost as much as she does of the soaps that are usually on as they were tonight!
I had recorded Top of the Pops from 1977 on my Humax recorder box, so set to watch that whilst we set off on a game of Scrabble. It's amazing how many songs from then you actually remember but you forget the names or the artists, so it was good to see that they had their exposure a tad there. It was then on with Paul Weller's "Studio 150" album as the game continued, and some good moves came about. The Love played QUIP in the top middle (blank used as U) for 42 points, and I made FETCH (also making EVENT) at the top left corner for 56 points, and later on near the end had the remaining letters to make FETCHING down from the top (blank used as G) to score 45 points there, rather handy that.
Tune of the day is Paul Weller's version of "All Along The Watchtower". Whilst it might not be Dylan or Hendrix, at least Paul has some respect for the original song and gives it some well earned justice with the way he performs it on guitar with some strong backing from a choir in parts, all very listenable and shows when an artist actually takes the time out to listen to the original that in fact you really can put a different spin on some songs - well at least sometimes anyway.
Wednesday 1st February - I'm Selling On eBay...
Today certainly felt like it was a busy but ultimately very worthwhile day indeed. I spent some time today working on a desktop PC that needed a hard disk changing and then re-imaging, and it's one of those machines which has some weird graphics card inserted into it. The reason is pure and simple: the card controls a daughter controller which fires up a Wacom monitor/tablet. The tablet side doesn't work on Windows 7 and the graphics card is actually very old - a Trident 9397 type card, actually. However, when we first imaged it a while ago for Windows 7 I actually pulled the drivers off a Windows XP CD, which amazingly worked - and so did the same trick again for that.
We also had a conference on for the student representatives in the building I'm in today, and was asked to help out with a few things to do with that - mainly with ensuring that one of our loan laptops could connect wirelessly, talk to one of the projectors in the main theatre, but also then be set up so it would effectively show on screen anything with a particular hash tag. I got that set up easily enough and I sent a test tweet with tag from my own Twitter account - and a couple of minutes later there it was, on screen. I made the browser window full screen and that added nicely to the display, so all was very well with the world there.
I went home via Mum's tonight, as Mum wanted me to drop off a couple of things for her that she wanted me to print out - a holiday confirmation for one, and then also I needed to drop off my sister's birthday card for tomorrow as she and Mum were heading out for the day, so made sense that she could have it in the morning and all that. I had a cuppa at Mum's and she was asking me about the possibility of going to Haworth in the future. Thankfully I'd done my research and had the answers there and then and informed her how doable it all was, so that she could at least go with us sometime, which'd be lovely.
I got back home and had a bit of a session putting up plenty of my old Commodore 64 games on eBay that I simply don't play anymore. All the stuff I really want to keep that I do play occasionally I am keeping, but the biggest time consumer was testing them to make sure that they all work, after all what's the point of buying something and then finding out that it doesn't play ball whatsoever? I had done some extensive testing over the last few days which meant that I had a bit of time creating around thirty three listings for games (added to some I did this morning) and so there's now thirty eight in total up for grabs.
Hopefully someone will find something that they've been after for a while or even a little more obscure something they'd want and it'll find a good home. Certainly a lot of the last batch did - a fair few went abroad, one as far as Australia, and it's good to see that they're all arriving safe and sound and that it's been a positive experience. I've been very careful to ensure that the postage charges are fair - padded envelopes I can easily get very cheap, so no point charging for those, and my digital scales mean I can weigh everything spot on and ensure that the postage charge is correctly reflected accordingly - a plus point I definitely think.
All this selling on eBay made me think of a Weird Al Yankovic song "eBay" which is going to be tune of the day - in effect it's a parody of "I Want It That Way" by the Backstreet Boys, but with the words changed to reflect the popular auction site, with the chorus line ending in "I bought it on eBay" and working rather well to suit. It's at times like this you have to bow to his genius: finding the words to fit another song and then singing it really sincerely and with a proper band. I so enjoyed seeing him live in London - that was well worth the trip!