riddlermarc

We finally got round to hosting our house-warming party last night and it was a roaring success. People turned up from 7.30pm and the last ones to leave did so after 3am.

Big surprises were Chris and Colin turning up, haven’t seen them for ages and it was really cool to catch up
It was really good to see Richard, Hannah, Gray and Donna too - it was definitely an evening for some good catching up with old friends!

Probably the best event of the night was the “Let’s compare JD and Jim Beam Black” blind drinking test. Max and I started it off by trying to identify them blindly, then other people thought it would be a good idea to try it too and the rest, as they say, is history.

I think Richard had had nearly enough by this point

The obligatory foetus shot:

See the rest of the photos on my Flickr page.

Trying to install Visual Studio 2005 and it won’t even start the installer:

Does Vista support 16-bit applications, I thought it didn’t? Hooray for Linux, as soon as our party is over tonight I’m wiping this bad boy and going home to Linux (the only reason I’m keeping Vista on it right now is that I’m using WMP as the jukebox for tonight - load up all xxxGb of mp3s and hit shuffle

Shocking stuff, you’d have thought a recent MS product would work with a recent OS :/

I ordered myself a new laptop at the start of the week, it wasn’t supposed to be delivered until near the end of April but it came yesterday

It’s a Dell Vostro 1700, 17″ widescreen with an 8600m GT 256Mb graphics card,2Gb ram, 250Gb hd, built-in webcam etc. You’d be amazed what you can get for your money these days, the Vostro’s start from £179 but mine was a little over £300 as I upgraded the graphics card etc.

I have some share money coming in as soon as I get my account sorted, that’s the only real way I could afford to get it..

Photos to come as/when I can take some. Oh yes, speaking of photos - I bought a new camera too, a Fuji F40FD, which is soooo much better than our old Casio jobbie. Now we can actually take pictures usig the zoom AND have a working flash too

We went on a day out to Marwell today, pretty much my whole family from Basingstoke as well as H’s Nan.. it was an excellent day out

It was bitterly cold, more than once we had hailstones but we stil enjoyed it! We didn’t leave until the park was closing at 5pm, even by then we had missed out some bits

Steve getting excited in the Snake House:

Some distinctly lazy camel!

Sam and H’s Nan watching something whilst chomping on a banana..

All in, an excellent day out and probably worth going again when it’s warmer and a little less manic in our group of 12

Microsoft said Hyper-V beta for Windows Server 2008 is feature complete. Included in the list of operating systems supported are Windows Server 2003 SP2, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1, Windows Vista SP1 (x86), and Windows XP SP3 (x86)

How the hell can they release  this and not support Red Hat, CentOS or even Solaris? They are trying to force you down a MS one way street - we run ESX at work, I think with a mixture of 2003 Server/Red Hat and Solaris VMs and there is no way in hell I could see we’d even consider switching, Hyper-V has missed the boat big time it seems :/

Well, I don’t know (but assume) it’s because I have halved my steroids intake since last Saturday and have been watching my snacking a little, I have lost a half a stone and an inch from my waist!

I can just about squeeze into my jeans I used to wear, give it another couple of weeks or so and they’ll be fine (hopefully).

If only proper dieting was that easy

I sat on the bed and had a quick strum earlier, it felt really weird and the relevant muscles (fingers/arms/shoulders) cried out with the recent non-use!

It was pretty depressing, I couldn’t remember hardly anything I used to be able to play - even Fade To Blacck had… faded to black

Oh well, hopefully time will help and it will give me something to do other than sitting around watching TV