Totally Two Towered Out...
Good evening everybody! We had a nice, fun, not-quite-relaxing weekend. I can't particularly remember Saturday morning, probably because there wasn't much of it; I got up at about eleven. We fossicked and fiddled for a while (none of that sniggering I hear, thank you) until we eventually left for Hornsby to get some shopping out of the way. We shopped, we returned, we got changed and then I took Vickie out for dinner and The Two Towers. Nice dinner at the Blu Water Grill, although the service left something to be desired. After dinner, we met up with Mandi, and after a minor panic with cash and tickets, we got seats close the front, but thankfully not too close that we had to crane our necks. It was great. If you haven't seen it, do so right now. I don't care if you're reading this at work and you have a deadline to meet within two hours; get up out of your seat, go to the nearest cinema and watch it. It's that good.
Sunday was an interesting day - as I was rather burned out, Vickie had suggested that Sunday be an Away from Computer Day. From when I got up in the morning to when I went to sleep in the evening, I did not turn on my PC once, and neither did Vickie turn hers on. We got quite a bit of housework done, so it was a worthwhile, productive day, and I'm glad of it. I'll probably do it again. Sometime soon. Ish. (Withdrawal symptoms? Boy, you should have seen me; arms wrapped around my PC, hissing at Vickie, "You can't take me away from my precioussssssss...")
Dan dropped over on Monday evening to pick up his HERO System rulebook; he wound up staying and chatting for a couple of hours, while we showed him Neverwinter Nights and various movie trailers. I also finished The Butlerian Jihad. I will say this about Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson's Dune prequel novels - they may be a tad commercial, but they have good characters, and they're well paced, something that at times you couldn't say about Frank Herbert's original novel.
On Tuesday, I started in on the third book Vickie gave me for Christmas: The Spirit of Peace, a selection of quotes and anecdotes from the Dalai Lama. I'm not sure whether they were translated or whether the Dalai Lama actually wrote them in English, but it's gloriously well presented on large gloss paper with lots of gorgeous photographs of Buddhist temples, monasteries and monks (mainly Indian), not to mention the Dalai Lama himself. As I got a little bored later in the evening (after washing up and folding laundry, of course), I gave Nick a call, and he popped over for a couple of hours, most of which was spent playing the Halo campaign co-operatively.
This evening, I got in an hour ago after leaving Mum and Dad's. Dad is in England at the moment, seeing to the details of Grandad's effects. I popped over and gave Mum a hand by washing the dogs (who were, needless to say, thrilled to see me until I started running the laundry sink tap); I also showed Mum and Trish where some of the more fun documentaries on the Fellowship Of The Ring Special Extended Edition DVDs were (you know, the ones with Billy Boyd and Dominic Monaghan having a ball - doesn't Dominic do a pretty good job of impersonating his fellow actors?). I also finished The Spirit of Peace on the way to Pymble to pick up the car from Vickie, so I'd better get stuck into another book to ensure the Activity Monitor isn't full of blank entries. I got Blackwood Farm, an Anne Rice Vampire Chronicles novel for Christmas, but I've been sort of putting it off - I read up to The Tale of the Body Thief several years ago, and I was getting annoyed at her pacing (or lack thereof) within the first few chapters of The Vampire Lestat. Still, this one might be somewhat better. Hopefully...
What's up next? Well, Nick's mentioned doing something gaming related on Friday night. We're popping over Dan and Leslie's on Saturday evening; we're going to be taking care of Emily and Gabrielle while they wander off to see a movie (probably The Two Towers). It's Dan's birthday on Saturday, you see.
My aunt Trish has finally decided to go ahead with getting her PC upgraded. I'll probably be buying the parts on Friday; if so, they'll likely arrive on Monday, and I'll spend Tuesday and Wednesday evenings next week getting it all set up. I managed to get another solid quote out of Adelong Computers, and I'm getting Vickie and I a PC case fan each in with it. I'll also be taking Trish's old kit away, which we'll probably use in the PC we've been building for Vickie's eldest granddaughter in Melbourne. Young Brook's family is doing it tough at the moment, so a new PC is a bit out of the question. The problem is that young Brook needs one for her schooling. With the parts I get from Trish, plus what's been cannibalised from our various upgrades over the past few years, we'll be putting together a P3-500 with over 256 megabytes of PC100 RAM, a 20 Gigabyte hard disk drive, a TNT2 Ultra graphics card, a SoundBlaster AWE64 sound card, a 15" monitor and running my old, legitimate copy of Windows 2000 Professional (latest Service Pack and all, of course). With OpenOffice on there, we should be able to get all the basics covered off, and I might scavenge my stock of older games for good stuff to install. The only problem is how to get it all down to Melbourne. I suppose we could drive down sometime - hoping, of course, that Madam Lash can stand the strain...
Speaking of Madam Lash, she's nearing this year's rego, so we're going to have to get her in for a service soon. We want to ensure she's in tip-top condition when Jillian arrives, so that'll be sometime in the next week or two.
And finally tonight, is there anyone out there who could make use of a generic four-port-plus-uplink 100 megabit Ethernet hub? I can't use it with our cable modem, as I was planning to (you have to have a 10/100 megabit hub for that), so I want to flog it. As I bought it for $125, I'm willing to part with it (barely used) for $60. Anyone interested?