Earlier in the week I watched Stickmen. It's a New Zealand movie and was released in 2001. I somehow completely missed it until now. It was a pretty cool movie. I did spend a bit of time laughing at the NZ accent. It's been a while since I've really heard it (I don't get many chances to be exposed to it over here and neither Paul or myself have a pronounced accent any more).

I also watched Conan the Barbarian. I honestly can't remember the last time I watched it but it  must be over 15 years ago easily. It's still a fun movie and very quotable. It seems the UK DVD is cut (in one obvious place at least), but it's not as bad as Commando - so I don't feel the need to import a copy from the US.

To add the challenge, I was moving to a much smaller machine (500GB HDD down to 16GB storage) so I couldn't just move everything across and worry about it later (dealing with the subsequent downtime when the machine was switched off) as it simply wouldn't fit. There were a couple of big sites as well as backups and files I was storing temporarily (some from 2007, temporarily indeed) for which I needed to find a solution. 

Ultimately, the solution became taking some sites offline and a judicious use of rm (and occasional sprinkling of rm -rf), but I managed to get it all moved over. I also noticed that Linode had just opened in a London datacenter. So I moved my VPS from Newark to there at the same time. It's much more responsive when working on the server now.

It was my birthday yesterday. It passed fairly quietly although I still had fun. I was given a PSP Go, which is really awesome. So far I've been playing Final Fantasy VII and GTA:Liberty City Stories. It took a bit of work to get the wifi working on it (it could see the router fine but would either timeout or complain the signal was too weak), but it turned out I needed to re-enable 802.11b on my router - which I had turned off previously because we weren't using it. I got myself a book (Effective STL) and the 9 Limited Collectors Edition on Bluray. After work I ended up eating chinese food, having a couple of drinks, playing some Rock Band and watching Jaws (still a cool movie). Paul worked his bakery magic and made a very tasty cake. All told a really good day. Many thanks for all the birthday wishes.

Update: As I may not have been clear, Paul actually baked the cake himself, he didn't purchase it from a shop.

This is longer than I had planned, but I don't want to spend the time reformatting the images so it'll have to do. I'm planning on doing some more framing soon. I just wish framing wasn't so damned expensive. I'm using an online place to do the framing, they seem to be pretty good (in terms of quality, price and turnaround time). You measure up what you need and they build it to order. It's been fun putting these together when I've had a few moments spare. I've created a Prints set on flickr, so you can see larger versions there if you like.

I started up Battlefield: Bad Company as I'm interested in playing the sequel when it comes out next month and missed the original game when it was released. Not bad so far. I've also got BioShock 2 arriving this week which I'm reasonably excited about. All I need to do now is invent that time machine so I actually can get through all of this; lots of new releases over the coming months and not enough spare time.

I've finally got some of the prints I've been collecting over the years framed. I'll post some pictures once a few more have arrived. It's something I've been talking about doing for about 5 years and it's nice to finally have some movement there.

I'm playing Mass Effect 2 currently. It's really impressive. I have some complaints about some of the story choices and new gameplay mechanics, but nothing really major. I'm having a blast saving the galaxy again. The import feature is probably my favourite thing they've done, as being able to continue my story that reflects my choices is pretty amazing. It feels like I'm nearing the end though.

Recently I've watched Moon.  A very nice movie - even after I had most of the major plot points spoiled. Sam Rockwell does a really good job in it (especially considering the bulk of the movie is just him and Kevin Spacey's disembodied voice). I also watched Blue Harvest and Something, Something, Something, Dark Side. I haven't really watched any Family Guy in the past, it came on after I stopped watching TV, but I really enjoyed those. I might have to pick up some of the episode box sets.

I spent the bulk of the weekend preparing my Mass Effect character for import into Mass Effect 2 next weekend. I now have a level 58 Shepard who has finished all the assignments and made all the decisions I want to carry across. Unfortunately I didn't make it to level 60, but I'm not going to run through the entire game to that degree again just to do 2 more levels. After that I started a new game in order to get a few more achievements (including the level 60 achievement). I don't intend to be as rigorous with this play-through though and odds are I wont finish it before ME2 arrives. The level 58 play-through is my canonical Shepard for ME2 anyway.

Rest of photos here.

I went for walk this afternoon with the D90 down to the Douglas Promenade and took some pictures. It was nice to get out of the house after all the bad weather we've had.

The rest of the photos I took can be found in my Douglas set on Flickr.

<Alan sits down to start work for the year>

It's actually been snowing since I took this picture, so it's even worse now.  Might grab another picture later.