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It's now been a week since my last day at Wheel. But still, I was up there again today where I met my old boss for lunch (and ended up having one of my favourite pizzas). Afterwards, I wandered up to Tottenham Court Road to have a look at the notebook computers on offer - since leaving, I now only have a Libretto in the notebook department, and to be honest, it lacks a certain "punch" (although it's quite a fun machine to have). However, I think I've found the candidate most likely to succeed in the replacement stakes, and in any case, it's niiice. I'm keeping stumm (sp?) about the make and model till I actually buy one. All I need to do now is save up!
I've been adding to the ole DVD collection over the last week or two (actually, stuff I ordered ages ago finally turned up this week), notable highlights being the 3-disc Brazil box set, and the special edition Rocky Horror Picture Show. Plus quite a few others. I really should start hacking the DVD List again, but the lack of a decently-specified notebook makes it easier said than done (I like to hack in bed, hence the RJ45 port by my bedside lamp!).
So, what else have I done since the last update? Not a whole lot, admittedly. I've bought a few games, a bit of this and a bit of that. Nothing to get excited about. Since FreeBSD didn't work properly with my switch (I did some digging and found stuff along the lines of "we've no idea why this happens" and "it must be the switch-makers fault"), I finally installed a bare-bones linux distribution and built the 2.4.1 kernel, XFree86 4.01 and KDE 2.01. Amongst other things. All from scratch. XFree86 was a bugger, and so was KDE till I read that there was a certain order to how you should compile things. Oh well, at least my "Makefile" hacking skills are much improved 8). Anyway, the updated system works beautifully, and I can switch between windows (for games) and linux (for everything else) as easy as pie.
Windows - that reminds me 8). "The Typing of the Dead" is almost worth installing Windows for alone - it's Mavis Beacon meets the House of the Dead. It's basically a typing tutor, you play House of the Dead but instead of shooting them with a light gun (ala Arcade/Dreamcast version), you type the words/phrases that appear over each zombie/nasty. There's something very satisfying about typing "smeghead" whilst shooting limbs off a zombie. Believe you me, if you can't touch-type now, you'll be able to after a few goes of this baby!
I'm also currently playing "Giants - Citizen Kabuto" (which is ace) and "Sacrifice" (which is based around the Elton John song of the same name). Actually it's not, it's a lot better than that - kind of a meld of 3rd person shooter meets RTS - probably worth a punt if you're into that kind of thing.
I've decided that I'm going to write a computer game. A proper game with graphics, explosions and everything. I now find myself in the process of speccing everything out, but I'm guessing that development will be pretty slow on account of my general crapness, but it'll be fun to give it a shot. Watch this space!
That pretty-much brings me to the end of this update - I don't think there's much I've missed. The soldering's coming along and the memory I ordered from buy.com arrived (hah - suckers!)... but I've got plenty to do in between now and starting the new job on Monday. I'll try and keep you up to date, but I'm not promising anything 8)
Until later 8)