Hiatus
October 31st, 2004
[page swims into focus]
Hmmmm …lost you there for a while. I’ve had a bit of a break from the site – not planned, by the way – but now it’s time to get back in the groove. After all, I’d feel bad about letting a whole calendar month go by without making a single post.
So, what have I been up to?
Lets start with the painting. A weak attempt to decorate what we’ll call the ‘geek’ room has been woefully persecuted, with barely two coats of white and a sanded skirt to show for my efforts. This lack of progress has had the unforeseen but significant side effect of making the space I usually perform computer related activities in rather less amenable than usual to computer related activities.
Then there are the new sofa’s. Feather-filled, they are supremely comfy, and (for Poppa sofa, at least) deep enough to accomodate a pair of couch potatoes side-by-side, lengthways. Nice. The upshot is a very agreeable and altogether magnetic environment in which to watch, say, a likeable Scotsman-come-Jedi motorbike across the Ukraine (Sky 1, Monday 9pm).
As if these weren’t distraction enough, further Star Wars related shenanigans (this time X-box mediated) have occupied a further precious slice of brain time. Thanks to the excellent Star Wars Battlefront I now know how it feels to crush the Rebel scum beneath the feet of my mighty AT-AT (cue Imperial march). Although I still can’t quite bring myself to head-shot Ewoks with the sniper rifle…
And then the return of Cryptonomicon, a simply superb novel by Neal Stephenson, didn’t help matters. 900 pages of re-reading took about a fortnight, and my positioning of it as my favourite book (which was starting to feel a little embarrasing) is now altogether reaffirmed. All three parts of Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle are now coming my way, and the fact that I have broken my self-imposed rule about hardbacks (annoyingly heavy to carry around, wrist-achingly awkward to hold) is measure enough about how hyped I am about these books.
So that’s more-or-less what’s been displacing the web work. Regular service to resume shortly.