It was an absolutely beautiful weekend here. Temperatures hit around 24 degrees (Edit: I lied, it apparently hit 25 degrees, if I am to believe the headline I saw whilst walking through town today, which went something like "ISLAND BAKES IN 25 DEGREE WEATHER"... I'm not kidding - just wait until you hear the one about the missing cellphone and £50, you've gotta love this place). I spent the bulk of the weekend stuck inside playing catch up though. I've been foolishly focusing on work almost exclusively for the past 6 weeks. This caused my mental health to degrade to the point where, whenever I wasn't working, doing as little as possible was all I felt up to. That started a snowball effect of little tasks which finally caught up with me.
My coping mechanism for stress has been broken for a while now. This means that when I'm stressed out, I tend to ignore things and prefer to focus exclusively on the [probably misidentified] primary source of the stress - and my ability to focus is severely diminished. This results in a feedback loop where I get more stressed out because I'm not solving the problem. I'm also having major issues 'switching off' when I'm not working. This makes doing things in the evenings/weekends difficult and even if I take actually time off, I often end up constantly thinking about work and come back just as worn out as when I left. I don't want to complain about it too much though. It's all my fault. Basically, I'm broken at the moment and this was my punishment :)
I was mainly preparing paperwork for my accountant - Sorting bills, receipts and invoices. It's tax season apparently and they're bugging me for things. I had to organise my budget (which I'd also ignored for 6 weeks :/ ), this is doubly important at the moment as I'm preparing to move my consultancy business from a Sole Trader arrangement to a Limited Company. This has some tax advantages and other benefits but the down side is I'll end up being on a roughly 3 month payment cycle. So I was preparing stuff for that as well. I was also trying to pay my tax bill, but that had it's own challenges simply getting access to their online services. Suffice it to say, I got locked out and had to call them today. Now I'm bouncing off daily transfer limits with my bank. Not even paying tax is easy these days :(
I've got a new phone (Nokia N900) and spent a bit of time customising that. I have historically always had retro game ring tones on my phones (the last one was the Leisure Suit Larry theme - the jazz version from Larry 7). The N900 has a lot more customisation options, so I've gone with a Space Quest theme. The N900 has multiple desktops available, so I created a few seamless backgrounds. The one I ended up sticking with was an EGA background from Space Quest 2. It looked suitably retro enough. The VGA backgrounds generally looked more like low resolution/badly resampled backgrounds - although a couple did look pretty cool. For my ring tone, I recorded the theme from SQ3 as produced by the PCjr 3 voice track (I recorded a straight PC speaker version too, but I liked the bass line in the PCjr version better - it was less shrill and felt more ring-tone-y).
Here's a video I recorded of it (first time uploading to Youtube!). Apologies for the crap video quality, I was out of focus it seems and I don't have time to re-record it. I had to use my Nikon D90 as the Screencast recording software I have on the N900 doesn't record UI animation, which was the whole point of having it seamless.
I made it outside for a while on Sunday afternoon. Went for a walk around Douglas and took a couple of pictures with the N900. It was astonishingly nice out. I really enjoyed it. I snapped a few pictures (5 I think) in order to test out the camera on the N900. You can see the rest in the Mobile Uploads set on Flickr if you're interested. I didn't do any manipulation to these, they're straight out of the phone.
Douglas, Isle of Man - Trying out the camera on the N900
I did manage to do a bit of gaming on Friday night and Sunday evening. I played some Mass Effect 2 and did the Kasumi recruitment/loyalty mission DLC. So I now have 100% achievements on that. I then started up Splinter Cell Conviction on Realistic. I had planned on playing some Red Dead Redemption, but even though my order shipped on Thursday, it didn't arrive in time for the weekend. Paul was also most displeased :) (Edit: He's happy now though, it arrived today).
