I'm baaaack.....

We moved house last weekend - because we've moved in with Candi's sister we had to downsize. This meant taking a load of stuff over to Candi's parents for storage, so effectively we moved twice. Not much fun :-(
We did manage to hire a Luton van with a tail lift quite cheaply though, so that helped. My younger brother also came up to help us and brought two of his mates with him - I don't know what we would have done without their help, it made a huge difference. At the last minute I decided to let my brother have custody of my hifi because there's not really room for it here. He took it away with him in the boot of his car - unfortunately I think the remotes for the CD player and amp are packed inside a box in storage. It shouldn't matter too much, but because the CD player is a 200 CD jukebox and you can search for CDs by title, a remote is pretty essential. If I was him I would buy a replacement...

One of the things about living here is that we can have pets. Candi has been going on about getting a cat or dog for as long as I can remember, so it's not really that surprising that she's going to pick up two kittens with her sister tomorrow. They are coming from a farm and apparently are very healthy and all, but the woman is charging £50 for them, which I think is taking the piss a bit. It's not like they are pedigree cats or anything and they haven't even had their shots. Still, she is happy.

I've been without broadband access at home for about a week because of the move. I had to switch from NTL to Virgin.net ADSL. If you ignore the fact that Virgin didn't tell me I was being activated today until... well, today - I'm pretty impressed with them. They offer a monthly contract instead of a 12-month tie-in (which is handy considering I may not be here for that long) and they are cheaper than BT (more accurately, BT / Yahoo). I bought a shiny new Netgear ADSL / wireless router to replace my MR-314 (otherwise I would need an ADSL router as well - I decided to go for the all-in-one solution). I may put my MR-314 on eBay but I'm not sure if I may need it again in the future. I must say, the DG724M was dead easy to set up, the admin web interface is a huge improvement over the MR314.

I've just received my newest toy, the Ableton Live / Evolution UC-33 bundle. I have had a play with the demo of Live and I was very impressed. The bundle seemed like good value so I went on about it so much that Candi bought it for me as an early Birthday present. I'm still getting to grips with it, I'm a bit of a novice when it comes to MIDI and making music with my computer but Live is much easier to use than anything else I have played with (Cakewalk, Cubase, Reason etc). I'm going to use it for creating remixes and mixing tracks together, I've already done a 30 minute mix of all sorts of stuff which has come out pretty well, considering it's my first attempt. As with all these things though, it's a matter of making time.

One of my friends at work has just bought Unreal Tournament 2003 (UT2K3) and told me about a load of patches, maps and mods that are available for it. I hadn't bothered looking before, so I was quite interested to see what was out there. The Star Wars Troopers mod really caught my eye, I've just downloaded and installed it - off to have a look now....

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