Well, it’s hardly breaking news now given that I’ve been back nearly two weeks, but I’m back home and finally decided to sum up what’s gone on so far. It’s been a pretty cool first two weeks back and should make for a fun (if depressingly gloomy and wet!) summer. I’ve been and done a few things since I’ve been back, although admittedly spent a lot of time at home either trying to get things to work, breaking them, or just playing Eve! Sad? Moi? Anyway, I’ll try and put this in more or less the order it should be in…

New Bits and Bobs

New Laptop! (well, kinda…) – I finally got myself an IBM T41, picked up for a steal at £200. So most of my time since I got back has been spent playing on that. I installed a Hitachi GST 160Gb hard drive in it (and shocked myself at quite how easy changing the hard drive is in one of these – big change to the old PowerBook!) and went all out with putting Kubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) on it. The original drive that came with it had a legit Windows copy pre-loaded, but no disc, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a copy of Windows I’ll hardly use so I decided to stick Linux on there.

This is actually the first time that I’ll be running a machine booting only Linux, although I doubt it’s going to be too much of a struggle, seeing as I’ve been using it by and large as my main Operating System for quite a while. My only concern beforehand was how I was going to be able to abuse having an x86 Laptop by running Eve on it, but it appears WINE has solved that problem for me… .

The laptop itself runs great, and I’ve been hugely impressed by 7.04, although I haven’t yet tried the normal Ubuntu version. Everything seems to work fine, although, admittedly, I’m more than likely using restricted drivers (although I haven’t double checked) – the honest reason being that, at the end of the day, I have a lot of stuff to do on here that for work meaning being able to use things like YouTube fully and read different files and, in short, ‘Just Work’, and if that means using restricted drivers on my laptop for now then, I guess, so be it. Oh, and I hate freedom… obviously…

Either way, despite restricted drivers, I have to say I’ve been very happy with the laptop so far, and I’ve pretty much managed to get Eve running on it, although I think the lower specs of the machine are making it more difficult than it needs to be (my desktop runs it fine).

New Big-Ass Monitor – I sort of went a little bit wild with my ‘coming-home-spending’ this time and in addition to the laptop went and bought myself a rather tasty 22″ Flatscreen from Belinea. Simply put, it’s the balls. And, it’s perfectly positioned to let me watch movies easily from my bed, and probably even manage to play Eve in bed (* UNTESTED) – the possibilities are endless!

Oh! It also clears up my deskspace a little bit (leaving me with more space for random crap).

Monkey: Journey to the West

[WIKIPEDIA]I went to see this last week when it was on at the Palace Theatre as part of the Manchester International Festival. To be fair, when I went in to seeing it, I really didn’t know much more about it than Damon Albarn was involved with it and that the artwork looked cool – probably not the usual yardstick avid theatre-goers would use, but then I’m hardly an avid theatre-goer… Still, it seems it paid off. It was a lot stranger than I had imagined it would be (in a good way) and the stunts being performed were super impressive. I simply couldn’t do it justice by trying to describe it more than that, but would truly recommend anyone to go and see it if it’s on near you. Highly entertaining.

LUGRadio Live 2007

Something I wanted to go to last year but didn’t manage it, I made it this year and had a blast. Full Write-up Here.

And that’s pretty much it really. Besides that there’s been quite a lot of Eve playing, a fair amount of alcohol, and tonight is cheese and ale night, the somewhat ritualistic gathering of a few friends to… well… eat cheese and drink ale. Oh yes.