So, what happened to me this weekend? Well, I got an unexpectedly early night on Friday – I watched Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, then retired to bed with a book. I didn’t get a lot of reading done, though, because while I remember retiring to bed, the next thing I recall is it being seven-thirty on Saturday morning, which was something of a shock to me.

Saturday afternoon, and coffee somehow turned into a quick drink, which turned into several more drinks with redscharlach, mrtreacle and elethe which was a good laugh, although I’d like to take a moment to echo other people’s amused remarks about plateaus and precipices.

Sunday anw, marysiak and I took a wander down to Merton Abbey Mills, since we hadn’t been down that way in ages. Somehow, I got talked into buying a walking stick/cane thing. I also managed to buy some of my favourite orange juice, that Sainsbury’s one that’s Fresh orange, with strawberry pulp. My local Sainsburys doesn’t stock it, which is really bloody annoying, as they could make an easy tenner a week off me from that alone if they did. (OK, it’s hardly going to keep them afloat, but still, I figure if I’m willing to buy four or five bottles of the stuff a week, there must be other people that like it well enough to make it worth them stocking it…) I have also investigated the price of flats in that development, and found them to be out of reach, I fear.

Then I got home, and I do seem to have been well and truly bitten by the urge to run a game again – I’ve started writing up the NPCs, which is ace, because it’s forcing me to stretch creative muscles I haven’t really used in the last year or so, and I’m quite happy with what I’m coming up with. Mind you, I’m pretty sure that half the interesting bits of the dozen or so I’ve already written up will never come to light, but it’s nice to know them anyway, and it does at least make me feel like I’m being properly creative again…

In other news, I should be seeing “The Black Rider” in early June, and it looks worryingly like I’m going to be going to Glastonbury this year as well. Haven’t quite made my mind up yet, as well, it involves camping, and I have Views on camping, but I’m certainly leaning that way. Other than davebushe and rockoctopus is there anyone else on my friends list going?

The topic’s come up a few times recently, my Mum has switched back into “Nag him about it at least twice every time I see him” mode, and my hairline is beginning to recede a bit. I don’t think it’s going to go much further than it already has, touch wood – my hairline pretty much resembles my Dad’s now, and his has been static for the last thirty-odd years. Still, I’m thinking about cutting my hair short, and I’ve got a family wedding coming up that would give me a decent excuse to do so. So, should I:

If you’ve go anything else to say, or just want to be particularly emphatic in your views, please leave a comment

Friday night in, it seems – the general consensus seems to be that no-one can be arsed with any of the clubs that are on tonight, so everyone is staying in. Conscience says “Go to the gym, you’ve only been twice this week”. Lazy bastardry says “Yes, but one of those times was last night. You can go tomorrow, or something.”

So barring the re-appearance of flatmates (and that’s not going to make massive difference, either), or a better offer in the next hour or two, I suspect I shall hunt out a DVD or two, and curl up with booze.

I bought my first RPG supplement in something like three years today. I don’t know if that’s good or bad.

Of course, I don’t think I’ll ever get any use out of the thing, but in so far as I have One True Game, White Wolf’s Mage is it, so I had to see how they’d packed it up. Haven’t read it yet, but a quick skim reveals that it is, at least, not awful, which is pretty good for an RPG supplement.

But now there’s a voice at the back of my head saying “Go on, run a Mage game. Just a small one. You can handle it.”

I’d like to note that I blame winterthing almost entirely for this. I suppose in fairness, I probably ought to blame davedevil as well, but he’s not exactly likely to be reading, unless it’s pointed out to him…

(Hypothetically, if I were to run a small game, say, once a fortnight, is there anyone in the London area who might be interested?)

So, after years of making “I’ll never be able to afford to buy property in London” noises, I finally did some actually investigating of possibilities. (Well, OK, what I actually did was say to my mother “Look, I don’t think I’ll be able to get anything, but if it makes you happy, then sure, go on ahead and ask some questions on my behalf.”)

It turns out that I probably can get a more-or-less affordable mortgage that would allow me to buy somewhere. In fact, as a quick look round property websites has just shown me, if I’d looked into this a bit earlier, I’d have had a good chance of being able to buy the (rather nice looking, from the photos) flat two doors down from where I currently live.

So, time get my finances in better order over the next few months…

Most of you can skip this quite safely, and I apologise for cluttering up your friends lists with it, but I’m hoping the IT bods in the audience can help me…

Well, despite my best efforts, it looks like my all in one network box just isn’t up to the job, even on a small house network like this – the port forwarding is shonky, and it falls over under anything that remotely resembles load.

So, boys and girls, I need product recommendations for the following:

An ADSL modem.
A router with built in firewall, DHCP and NAT.
A wireless hub.

If you can recommened me a different all in one box to the one I’m using (A Netgear DG824M), that you’ve used in anything resembling a serious manner, than that’s good too. My requirements aren’t vast, you understand – I wanted to hang a low-traffic server and network of a couple of personal PCs off the back of it, and be able to copy up to say, half a gig of data at a time from one machine to another without the whole thing grinding to a halt – I don’t even need the data to move fast, just to not kill the whole network. That’s all.

Suggestions for the nerd on a budget?

The other week, as part of that three questions meme, Andrew asked why I don’t write more comics. You can see the answer I gave him here, but it’s something I want to think on a bit more here, because I really haven’t written anything since last November, and other than that, I haven’t really written much at all in the last couple of years.

Introspective burblings

Except that, no, I really don’t. I think I broke the machine.

I’m going to be in Edinburgh from the 28th of May to the 1st of June – I’ve got wedding stuff to do on the Friday evening (the early part, at least, but I should be able to, ooh, go to the pub, or something radical like that) later on, and likewise on the Saturday, but the Sunday and Monday are more or less my own. Anything interesting going on?

(I may well need to sort out a couple of nights crashspace, since I think I only have a hotel for the Friday and Saturday nights, but I can sort that, or another hotel out later.)

Well, there was bmovie on Friday. That was good. I woke up in pain, which means I don’t need to feel guilty about missing the gym.

Then there was coffee on Saturday, or rather, a pitcher of “Woo-woo”. I am never ordering that again, no matter how many people want it. I’m used to barmen looking at me with expressions ranging from confusion to mild amusement, but not to having them laugh scornfully at me when I order drinks. I don’t think I like it. And after coffee, there was Colchester, to see The Last Dance and Bella Morte, who were both cracking, so thanks to marysiak for persuading me to go, and pixylatedpixie to driving us there and back, and providing us with somewhere to sleep before heading home at a more civilised hour of the morning.

Have resolved that I really must get around to seeing Devilish Presley live, too. Probably at one of their Shoreditch gigs over the summer, unless they play somewhere a bit more central. I have prejudices about the end of town, you see…

Shortly, I am off to the parental home for Sunday dinner. Unless I fall asleep first.