Not only…

… is it 2007 but it’s bloody February. I haven’t been totally silent on the Blog I did retrospectively add some gig reviews (still a few to do) but no real post since the 25th of Dec.

So what have I been up to? Well two weeks at home doing nothing but eating and drinking and a little Wii play (that has two “i”s OK?). It was great craic saw loads of people Philip, Ken, Judith, Aoife, Leo, Erin(Aw..), Grainne, Sean(my flatmate), Al, Alison, The Raj and many others and they all have a standing invite to London (especially Ken and Al). I got to see Alec Empire do a DJ set and one of The Frames’ legendary new year’s eve gigs.

I only needed to take 3 days off for the fortnight but what I dind’t know is that holiday years are Jan to Jan not April to April so they actually came off this year’s allowance, ah well 🙂 I also learned what I’ll be doing for Easter, Dad is flying the family to South Africa for a week which should be cool. There will be loads of photos (the police may need them to identify the bodies, a week together I haven’t lived with these people for over a year).

Sarah came back to London with me as she had three weeks off and was going to get some work. She didn’t but it was a great 3 weeks. We went to see Al Murray’s chat show be filmed, saw Simple Kid live, had dinner in Garlic and Shots (for our 4 year anniversary), saw a Bollywood film(3 HOURS!!!) and just generally hung out. For her last day though she put up with a lot as I’ve moved and she helped us.

With Alex buying a house and Sean deciding he wanted out (whatever) Rich and I could only find one replacement (his mate Matt) so the three of us moved east. We’re closer to everyone’s work (I’m half an hour on the bus and may get a bike which is apparently 15mins). It’s a lovely flat(I will get photos onto Flickr), the block/area it’s in aint so nice. No nearby(walking distance) supermarket so shopping needs to be more strategic but shouldn’t be a problem. We’re near the East India DLR station which makes travel into the city easy enough and my cinema is (again apparently) a half hour walk away, going to test that tomorrow probably.

Works being fine organising a few things and wondering over the logistics of a trip to Canadia in Septmeber. I have (including that one) 4 in three weeks (BA festival overlaps with one in Nottingham) but it’d be great to go haven’t been to canuck land for a long time now.

Also after the incident in late November where “I woz robbed” work replaced my work Dell 410 with a 420. A nice piece of kit(light, 12 inch screen etc) but I persuaded them to buy me a MacBook. That was here when I got back so I’m well happy. It’s such a nice toy and runs our Real Time Monitor extremely smooothly so it’s perfect and runs OSX how could you complain.

I now have a new fascination. Ages ago I mentioned ScummVM which I used to play Beneath A Steel Sky and is compatible with other Lucas Arts point ‘n’ click adventures(like the Monkey Islands and Maniac Mansion) and I had Flight Of The Amazon Queen to play on it but this week I found Abandonia which I stumble upon and DOSBox. Now using both of these resources (and Google) I can play old DOS games on my MacBook like Discworld and many others. They also led me to working downloadable versions of the first two Monkey Island games which I can now play with ScummVM. I’ve started Secret of monkey Island and Discworld and they are both great craic, funny as hell and Discworld has the added extras of Eric Idle as Rincewind’s voice and Tony Robinson as various characters. I’m close to the end of Act 1 of Discworld and Monkey Island. I know Al will be interested in all of this so just waiting on an email/comment from him 😀 I have 18 games and I know he’ll want at least 10 of them (Sam & Max ;-))

Iin other news The Alchemist Cafe has moved. We ponied up and bought a .com and we are now http://www.alchemistcafedublin.com and with a WordPress back end. Thanks Al especially over the alchemSIt screw up 😕 I am dyslexic KO?

Well nothing else to say (OK I probably do but can’t remember) I will post again next week. Off to Sheep On Drugs Saturday with Philip and Rich with more meeting for pints before it.

Link Of The Day:
LHC@home. Use BOINC, SETI@home, climateprediction.net etc? well attach yourself to this project. I work on this too now.

Later days,
Halo.