Back to the future

I’m in the mood for a bit of a catch up blog, so I’ll work in reverse chronological order.

I’m currently feeling moderately please with myself. I’d noticed that my laptop was running a bit slow since the last time I reinstalled everything, so I had a bit of a poke around and found that the transfer mode on the primary IDE drive had dropped down to PIO mode rather than Ultra DMA. It had probably happened when I’d had a problem with everything freezing for no apparent reason. A bit of googling found an article with a registry key to reset, followed by a quick reboot and hurrah – it’s now running as it should be.

I also had a brain wave of filling a dvd with about half of my music library so I can play it through the surround set up downstairs so I can listen in comfort. My collection splits neatly into electronica and rock/soul stuff, and it’s always a good idea to have a backup in any case.

Jan’s in the middle of rearranging things, so that the former dining room will be properly arranged as an art work room. The round dining table actually fits quite neatly into the kitchen and it will do until we get the necessary circular tuit to redesign everything to make better use of the space.

Yesterday was a trip out to the cinema for me and Jamie to see Casino Royale. It’s an excellent film – gone are the borderline sci-fi gadgets and cheesy quips, and they are replaced by Bond as an authentic cold hearted bastard. If I have any complaints about it, it’s that we don’t see quite enough of the classic Aston Martin for my tastes, but it’s a nice touch to have it there in the first place. Well worth seeing if you prefer the early Sean Connery Bond movies to the neatly coiffed era of Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan.

Friday night was double booked with things to do. We don’t go out for ages, and then we get two invites at once. We started off by celebrating Shullie’s birthday in The Sheaf View pub in Healy. I really must go back there when I’m not driving so I can properly sample some of the beers on offer rather than settling for a few trial sips.

From there, it was a short trip through the back streets to Andrew and Lizzie’s new house for a house warming celebration. Their house is a lovely conversion of an old terraced house, with four floors, five bedrooms and a basement flat for banishing teenagers to. It was a good opportunity to catch up with some people that I haven’t seen for far too long, and I must also mention the chilli bhajis which were superbly spicy.

Right, now to go and dissemble things so we can swap the desk and the sideboard …