McFilter

Still Here... Just Busy.

Blogging has been a bit light around here recently, hasn't it? Rather than continue not managing to write the assortment of posts about things I've been up to lately (a lot of which are a bit too far in the past really), I'm going to provide a quick summary post of recent events and such.

Work

This is what's been sucking in all of my time. Particularly all my time in front of a computer, when I could otherwise be blogging. As a result I'm on the verge of launching tedium, which is really cool. Life is a loop of chasing down final niggly details, dotting is and crossing ts... but it's all easy to keep track of under a tedium tag on my tedium account.

Of course, just to add to the fun, I need to work out how 34sp.com have broken the beta version by upgrading the version of Ruby on Rails on me (and which rolling back to the old version hasn't fixed...).

Toys

All this development has been the final straw for my five-year old laptop. It's been chugging along for a while now, and last month I finally relented and decided it was time for an upgrade. My new Toshiba M400 Tablet PC is very nice, although I think it needs a bit more than the 512MB of memory it comes with as standard. It's early days, but so far I like the pen-based interface. Using it like a normal laptop is obviously still best for most tasks, and typing on the keyboard is much faster than the handwriting recognition; but I've been impressed with how well that actually recognises what I write. I prefer the pen when playing around with things in a paint package, so I reckon it's a worthwhile addition to the system.

Fun

I'm not sure this should be classed as "fun", but we completed the London to Cambridge bike ride. It took a bit longer than in previous attempts, but we weren't in any hurry. Some more training runs would've been handy though - I was rather saddle-sore after fifty miles!

Then at the end of July it was time for the Folk Festival to take over the grounds of the local hall again. We only made it to the Thursday night (although we could hear plenty more of it in the house...) and got to see Chumbawamba in their current acoustic incarnation, and Nizlopi. Nizlopi were as energized and excellent as always, and Chumbawamba were surprisingly good - even if they didn't play Tubthumping (I got fed up of it when it was played to death in the charts, hence my not being particularly excited about seeing them, but by the end of their set was hoping to hear what it sounded like as an acoustic number!).

And the Sunday before last, we did make it to see the Black Box screening. It was great to see it at last, and was an enjoyable half-hour. If you happen upon it at the Edinburgh Fringe, or possibly at some green festival whose name I forget, then take a look.