I spent most of my weekend playing The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess on our Wii. It is an excellent game and I am loving it! Takes me back to my SNES days of old.

We also went to the North Devon Beer Festival 2008 in Barnstaple with Simon and Sarah. We had a great evening – including a curry at The Moghul – and tried lots of rather good ales! Jess and I are considering joining CAMRA at some point now, too.

Just to prove that this isn’t (quite) dead yet, a happy birthday message to my very good friend Aram!

I am so busy at work and busy at home with Ferris that I don’t seem to get round to posting much now. Jess covers most things in our life together, so I suppose you’ll have to content yourselves with reading her blog most of the time! I am going about setting up a metering system for our electricity here at home and trying to fit in a few games of Diablo II with my wife, too. Hectic doesn’t really cover it.

In May we celebrated our first wedding anniversary and our fifth of being together by going to Paris. It was great and we had a couple of delicious meals! We have our holiday in Brittany to look forward to over the summer. I have never been to this region of France and we’re going with a big gaggle of family so it should be really good fun we hope. Then in October we have a break in our beloved North Yorkshire, as well.

The best addition to our lives recently has been getting our JRT Ferris. He’s a lovely boy! Although Jess had a Labrador, Beano, when she was growing up, it is a first for me and I am really loving being a dog owner — even more than I expected to! He has just been in for his chip ‘n’ snip operation, but seems to be recovering excellently.

I am off to see Jess’s Nan and help Paul herd the sheep in for sheering so I’ll stop now, but hopefully be back a bit quicker with my next post. But don’t bank on it!

For quite a while now I’ve been reading xkcd, “A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.” Here’s the latest strip: Commitment.

Well it certainly has been a long time since I last posted, surprise surprise! Well, since that time Jess and I have got married, went on our honeymoon, bought a Wii, were visited by Aram, and finally, I got glasses!

The wedding went off really well and a good time was had by all. In fact it was one of the fun parties that I’ve been to for a long time and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves on the whole. The registry office part was a bit strange, especially as we were promised the ability to change our vows only to have that idea ridiculed when we got there, and add to the mix some really stupid and unexpected poetry (even Jess will agree)…suffice it to say it’s not what we expected. But at least the party afterwards more than made up for it.

We went honeymooning off to Paris, which was really nice indeed. We took the Eurostar again, and as usual had a smooth and comfortable ride, once again being amazed at the smoothness of hurtling through the countryside at 300 Km/h. When will the Brits admit defeat and make our railways run on electric? Anyway, we had a really nice time, stayed in a tiny little cramped hotel (that Jess has already described) that was simply fantastic, saw all the sights and generally had a fantastic time.

In other news, we have also bought a Wii! Once Alex got his we managed to wrangle a week with it while he was on holiday in Paris and got hooked. It’s been a great source of fun, especially Wii Tennis in which I am proudly a Pro. Much more fun than the real thing. Jess also got Harry Potter for it, which seems fun but I haven’t tried it yet. It’s one of those where you have to wave the Wiimote to cast spells and such, so fun but quite hard too.

We were also paid a visit by the Flying Finn not too long ago. It was really nice to see him, and we have a great time going round a few sights and having a relaxing time. We shall have to reciprocate, though I dread going through customs in the US! We went to Baggy Point near Croyde, which was especially nice and the views were amazing!

Finally, my parents’ extreme short-sightedness is catching up with me, and I now wear glasses. It’s not a huge prescription, don’t need them for driving (but will use them to drive) or anything, but can tell I’ll be wearing them most of the time anyway. It really made a world of difference, and can now see leaves on trees in the distance instead of just green blotches, which I had just got used to seeing.

And to top it all off, we’ve just booked a holiday to go and visit Dublin in November. I’m really looking forward to it, since I’ve never been and I’d like to see where Jess lived for so long. We won’t actually be going right out to Co. Clare, but it’ll be nice to see a small part of the place nonetheless. Hopefully we can line up a tour of the Guinness brewery!

Right, that’s it for today. If I keep up this pace the next post will be some time in October/November, so see you then! Just joking, I’ll try to post sooner, but you know how it is…

As per usual I haven’t written for, well, ages! So what’s happened since I last posted?

First of all I went for a week of training in London. Abacus Tree sent me on the RH300 Rapid Track course for an RHCE. A week of brushing up on how to set up and fix computers that run Linux (in particular, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, had you not guessed). I had a nice week, and met up with lots of people including Chaz and an old friend from the TMDC of lore who I’d never met before! I got the RHCE certification in the end, with 100% on the exams which surprised even myself. A good outcome in the end!

Since then we’ve been preparing for the wedding (only 10 days to go!). The dress and suit are sorted, as are the venues, the rings, and just about everything else so all we have left is the last minute prep really: getting the food organised (we’re doing it ourselves), etc…

In other news, Jess passed her driving test! After having tried a few times and getting overcome by the nerves, she passed with 6 minors just like me. Because it was raining, and I felt ill, and we needed some shopping she picked me up from work, we shoved the bike in the boot and headed to the shops just hours after she had passed. Great stuff.

No doubt next time I post something will be after the wedding, ha!

An excellent short (4:24) animation that seeks to remove people’s rose-tinted spectacles when it comes to the current security paranoia… From Stop The Big Brother State.

In similar news (from Slashdot):

UpnAtom writes “People who refuse to give up their bank records, tax records & details of any benefits they’ve claimed, and the records of their car movements for the last year, or refuse to submit to an interrogation on whether they are the same person that this mountain of data belongs to — will be denied passports from March 26th. The Blair government has already admitted that this and other data will be cross-linked so that the Home Office and other officials can spy on the everyday lives of innocent Britons. Britons were already the most spied upon nation in Western Europe — more so even than Sweden. Data-mining through this unprecedented level of mass-surveillance allows any future British government to leapfrog even countries like China and North Korea.”

And finally, I went for my first drive without an instructor today (well, excluding when I drove around a car park on my dad’s lap when I was a wee lad). I drove Jess and I to…Tesco evil capitalist shop with red and blue logo! Yes, we already have a car and yes I am already insured to drive it, and although yesterday I was lacking in confidence to go off without a bit of guidance from someone first I thought I might as well give it a go anyway. It wasn’t so bad after all, but getting used to a completely different car was a bit of an experience: I kept putting the windscreen wipers on instead of indicating off the roundabouts, etc… But it was good. I got us there and back with a full load of shopping!

I dread to think how much data has been collected about me since I first started driving. Ouch.

I’ve passed my driving test! It was my first time, and I got 6 minors. I went round all sorts of difficult areas, did lots of manoeuvres and all that while being very, very nervous. Ah well, at least it’s all over with now. I can drive.

…it’s really quite dark actually.

For the past year I have used O2 as my Mobile service provider. Since my contract was up, I thought I’d look around and go with a different provider, mostly because O2’s customer service was crap (it took them around 3 months to fix my account so I could send text messages online, and they reset by password multiple times so they could access my account) and their network is unable to send SMS delivery reports (which just about every other network can manage and is an integral part of the GSM system). After hunting around I decided to switch to Orange.

I told O2 I would be cancelling, and sent them my letter of cancellation and asked for my PAC code (a code that lets you take your phone number to a different mobile provider), which I got in the post a few days later. Then I got an SMS with the code in it. Then a second letter, and about 3 phone calls in the same day from O2 desperate to keep me with them (going so far as to offer me free service for 12 months if I didn’t switch). I had firmly decided to teach them a lesson, so I put my order in at Orange online.
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As some people have commented (*cough* Charles *cough*) I haven’t posted for a little while. Truth be told there really isn’t much going on in our lives that isn’t covered by Jess, is worth reading about, or that I can talk about…

From BoingBoing: If the iPod had been a Microsoft thing (as if!), their packaging team might make the box look a little like this: