It has been six days

since I last posted. Lots has probably happened but I do tend to find it hard to keep track of absolutely everything. Therefore I will only log the most absolutely crucial events:

I think it was Saturday that I made the above. Yes, must have been. Pretty much just third-thirds wholemeal flour, one third white. Bit of yeast, some oil, touch of salt and sugar, left for a bit and then rolled, cut and fried in polenta. Very tasty. Initially served with sage 'n' onion turkey burgers, randomly thrown together by my good self. Bit of fried onion, chopped sage, white pepper and turkey. Maybe with some other bits and pieces. They were later served as toasted breakfast snacks.

I got a tonne of Mass Effect 2 done as well and I unfortunately totally buggered up regarding Thane. He's so sad now, I must find some way to make up for my failure. I have a feeling that there's only a handful of side-things for me now before I enter ENDGAME. We'll see when I find time.

Especially as I have been busy with my pointless Linux obsession. I'll go into details at another point but I'm mainly getting cheap usb memory sticks and installing various Linuxes to them to see if I can do it/how they work. Some are nice, some don't work properly and all of them hate my wireless card due to it requiring proprietory drivers that can't be bundled with the Linux installers. GAH.

Sunday saw the cooking of roast gammon and the continuation of forensics studies.

There is other stuff but I may just wipe the slate clean. I should just write more often rather than trying to do a retrospective. My biographer will hate me otherwise.

Coming soon: Linux screenshots, photos of herbs, rats and maybe that picture of a vampire.

Another Night

As the previous post indicates, last night I played a bit of Mass Effect 2. Specifically, I went on a mission with Zaeed to get revenge on some other geezer. It was, in a word, excellent. I decided to take the opportunity to be a complete bastard too by letting some people die. Mwahahaha. I think he may be a permanent member with me now, especially since he unlocked a big explodey grenade power.

My main reason for not using him in the past was because he came from DLC. I therefore worried that he might be overpowered or something and constitute some sort of cheat mode. That being said, I don't especially have much trouble with the combat parts as it is so if he is a cheat it's not going to make much of a difference.

I also invented a pasta dish which came out nicely. My plan for the night was "some sort of pasta bake thing" but I didn't have a recipe so I threw something together. It was the following:

Three rashers of bacon chopped up and fried to crispness.

About 250g of chicken chopped up and fried in the bacon fat.

200g wholemeal fusilla, boiled for five minutes.

About 200g of cheese, finely grated.

A pint of milk, warmed with a good bit of salt, 1 teaspoon of nutmeg, half a teaspoon of mustard powder and two tablespoons of cornflour which I first dissolved in an equal amount of water.

The halfcooked pasta was put into an oven dish and roughly mixed with about two thirds of the cheese. Then I chucked in the meat, mixed around a bit. Poured on the milk concoction and then the remaining cheese. Oven at 200 degrees for 30 mins. Worked well.

It was supposed to have also had a red pepper, finely chopped and fried to softness in the bacon fat. Unfortunately I forgot that.

I also started reading Maus in an attempt to get into graphic novels. This is about the holocaust as told by Jewish people represented as mice and the Nazis as cats. Enjoying it so far and it also had a very cute baby maus.

I am continuing my efforts to get Sansa used to me. Our two girlrats are Sansa and Arya. Arya is fine with us, she doesn't particularly mind being held and remains curious and explorative. Sansa is fairly curious but hateshateshates being handled. She has a bit of a 'head tilt' which is caused by an ear infection early in life. Her head is therefore held at an angle and has restricted movement, kind of like if you've ever had a crick neck.

Fortunately it doesn't affect her ability to move around, eat, climb or anything. I'm not sure if it's the reason she doesn't like to be handled - if it's at all painful to her or it affects her balance and makes her feel dizzy then being picked up might be deeply uncomfortable. The way she struggles and squeals whenever I catch her and hold her is little short of heartbreaking. It also seems to be making her less willing to come and see us and less willing to explore.

As she doesn't seem to be improving, I'm inclined to settle for not routinely picking her up. I think I've got to a stage where I can grab her if it's absolutely necessary (for cleaning or the vets, etc) which is pretty much all we need. I really don't want to be causing her suffering if there's not going to be anything gained from it.

Fran has suggested us taking the cage upstairs so we can have them coming outside of their own accord and climbing on us as a way to get further used to us. This is definitely worth trying and should also be fun for them.

Firey 'nough

Yeah, so Zaeed is pretty cool.

Commanding Data

Currently occupying me in work is the design of a database. The goal of this is to allow us to eliminate the use of paper log sheets and hence simplify billing stuff. Sounds simple.

Part of the problem lies in the fact that I need the database to be able to output data into Excel sheets which are formatted in a very specific way. The actual billing sheets for our finance department utilise Excel sheets with various codes for user groups, supervisors, all using some of the ugliest data you could imagine. I am therefore trying to use nice data in the database but have it all linked with the corresponding ugly data to allow it to be outputted in the appropriate format. I initially designed the database thusly:

The problem I have is in that the final output has to contain User, Supervisor, Group. Now, each group has multiple supervisors in it and each supervisor controls multiple users. There's therefore a need for a User entry to lookup supervisors and then for the supervisors to look up the groups. I'm having a tough job getting it all to make sense in it's current form and I'm kinda thinking it's easier for me to start from scratch with a new top-down design rather than trying to bend the current one into shape.

It's a shame to abandon the work done so far but it's not totally wasted as I've learnt from it.

Sad news, etc

Woke up this morning and after my usual slow, grinding warm-up went downstairs and decided to feed the ratses. As usual, they went a bit loopy after I switched on the light, I dug out some food for them and opened the cage. Had to do some wrangling to keep them in (they are very keen to explore new frontiers) and was doing a headcount when I noticed that Vulcan wasn't up. I then spotted him laid out on the floor of the cage. He'd passed on:

Never could get a very good picture of him. We got him as part of a trio of brothers - himself, Havok and Nightcrawler. From the very start they were absolutely terrified of us and we struggled to get them used to us. Nightcrawler got there reasonably quickly but Havok and Vulcan were always still very wary of us.

The pair of them had continual problems with their chests due to the scourge of boyrats - myco. This is a bug that is normally resident and operates as an opportunistic infection. That is, when weakened by other things it takes hold and causes respiratory problems. I think the pair of them were always a bit stressed or not particularly forceful about getting food as they were often underweight and weakened by the bug. A little while ago they both came down terribly with it and we had to put them in a seperate convalesence cage to try to recover. Unfortunately this is where we lost Havok.

Happily, Vulcan pulled through and (though weak) seemed to be doing ok. By this point he was fine with being handled and I continued to work with him, giving him extra attention and treats and things. He'd finally become quite inquisitive and totally tame. He could climb and explore perfectly well, he was just a bit slow and continued to be pretty bony and weak. However, he was basically doing as well as I'd ever hoped.

A couple of days ago I found him in his Savic bed (a sort of hanging plastic orb from the top of the cage) and noticed he was unusually unresponsive - he'd normally at least have a rummage around if I was buggering about in the cage. I pulled him out and he was pretty much kaput. He barely responded to being handled and just lay there looking tragic. I took him upstairs to bed and Fran looked after him for a while, kept him warm and tried to comfort him.

After half an hour or so he came around and began exploring. Same as before, seemed weak but basically fine. I had hoped that he was now going to recover fully but I knew it wasn't particularly likely.

I do hope we managed to get him vaguely happy and comfortable for his last days, and I'm sure we gave him a better life than most domestic rats. From the start it was obvious he was never going to do all that well but I never really gave up hope. I'm glad he went in the company of his ratfriends.

Massive Effects

Little bit of Mass Effect this evening. I mostly just explored some sort of spaceship and put a monument down. The ship somehow seems significant but I can't think why..

I guess it's from the character's backstory or something. Still, I found some dogtags and had some nice flashbacky things. Since then I've gone to a planet to find a Krogan to join me. I ran into a kinda funky-armoured one:

Prior to this point I had crouched behind a block:

That's long enough.

So, over a year since my last proper post. Doesn't time fly when you're having fun?

I'll do some accompanying pictures in future but for now we only have words. I'll bold some to make it more exciting. Hopefully that is acceptable.

Lately, my activities aren't entirely without consequence but I'll focus on the ones that are. Trust me, that sentence does make grammatical sense. It helps if you read it out loud.

Mass Effect is my main gaming thingy at the moment. I completed the first one without realising there's practically an entire other game within it - I didn't realise you could talk to your crew on board ship and that they unlock quest lines and so on. But anyway, it was still pretty gripping and there was at least one traumatic death. Mass Effect 2 is ticking along nicely and I'm trying to resist the urge to rush it. I live in constant terror of Mass Effect 3 spoilers, particularly as I've caught bits and pieces about it having a silly ending. My silly ending theories:

• It was all a dream.
• It was all a dream that constituted a test by the first Prothean beacon to see if mankind was ready for access to the megadethray.
• It's all a test by the Reapers to see if organic life is worth preserving.
• Shepard is a Cylon.

EVE Online is still very much on hiatus despite occasional attempts to get back into it. I mostly can't bring myself to devote the required time to it. I did pop on the other night to do some scouting for the wormhole corp but I didn't find anything for us to kill. I only noticed in hindsight the number of people who were sitting around in our home system and not scouting, lazy devils.

Steam continues to draw money out of my bank account in small quantities in the same way as 'death by a thousand cuts'.

This weekend saw me finally planting out a bunch of herbs and other things. I planted out oregano, sage, thyme, tarragon, parsley, coriander and basil. For non-herbs I planted some spinach, strawberries and some garlic from the cupboard that had begun to germinate. I did this just about in time for a bunch of fresh frosts. *sigh*.

They seem to have survived but they aren't looking massively healthy. I don't know if it's the trauma of the replanting or the transition to the cold. Luckily our kitchen is pretty cold at night anyway (that's where I started them growing) so it's not a total shock to them.

I've been doing some Roleplaying games. Dungeons and Dragons 2nd Edition and a Whitewolf thing. In the D&D I am a younger brother (by about an hour) who is slightly thick, tetchy and violent. I am also 15 years old, which may be the same thing. The Whitewolf game is set in 'the real world' and has me playing a version of me that was hired by a supernatural investigation agency (MI9) in Cardiff. They hired me because they saw that pathologists and histologists work in the same lab but histologists are waaayyy cheaper and they must be more or less the same thing, right?

There's more but that's too many words without pictures so I'll end it there. Coming soon: pictures of herbs, rats, a bald shepard and a drawing of a vampire.