Ben Shephard

It’s been a few days since my last post and I’ve been trying to think up a new years resolution. Last year I decided no more festivals which ended up being no gigs at all but I also wanted to go to some Linux events which I’ve done as I went to Lug Radio Live which was an interesting experience for me. I also said I wanted to go down to the Nottingham Lug meeting but I never did manage to get over the fear of being in a new situation with people I don’t know. This year I’ll be sticking with the no festivals thing but as for Linux events I’m also less bothered about doing that again. I highly doubt I’ll be going abroad this year but I’d like to if I could but since I now have other people in my life to think about planning a trip abroad is not so easy. I pretty much used to just book a flight and go.

I think most of my aims for this year are work related but there are a lot of variables involved there and it’s not as simple as getting up and doing something. I want to settle down a bit and work towards taking things further with Janine. One of the first things I wanted to do was to help Janine learn to drive. I’ve sorted the insurance out but since then the roads have been all iced up which isn’t a good thing to take a learner driver out in on their first lesson. I’ve had a few hairy moments myself over the last few days and I’ve been driving for over ten years now.

As far as new technology goes I’ll be sticking with the stuff I’ve got and doing a few repairs and upgrades. I’m in the process of swapping the solid state drive in my netbook for a 1.8 inch Toshiba hard drive. Sadly I’ve made a bit of a mess of this and screwed up the ribbon cable that connects the drive to the motherboard and had to order another off ebay so the netbook is currently in bits in a draw until I can finish it. I’ve resorted to using my big laptop but I have to keep it plugged in as the battery died suddenly a few months ago. I’ll be investing in a replacement soon but it’s been an expensive few weeks so I’ll wait a bit before I go spending any more. I still have to buy lots of other stuff like new tyres for the car and some more chairs for the dining room.

It’s looking like being a very different year for me with all the changes that have been taking place recently and I’m still not sure exactly where things will be in a years time but I’m looking forward to it and taking each day as it comes. The one toy I will treat myself to closer to next Christmas is a new mobile phone My G1 is a fantastic phone and gets better every day now I’m running CyanogenMod on it. The Nexus One was just released by Google and it looks like a cracking phone. My only criticism is that it doesn’t have a keyboard. I love the real qwerty keyboard on my G1. I use the on screen keyboard a bit but not much and for the sake of a slightly thicker phone I’d prefer one with a real keyboard so I’ll see what comes along in 11 months or so.

And so forward into the unknown for me.

Ben

= 6.6