I’ve been meaning to write another update for a long time now, but every time I find a moment to do it I can’t be bothered. So here it is, a reluctant post. A forced entry, if you will.

Enjoying doing absolutely nothing this evening. The past few weeks have been filled with things to do every night, but with the week over, and St Paddy’s day on monday, I now have 3 days in which to relax, get caught up on things and maybe start some new tasks.

We had new doors fitted in the flat on thursday. While the white colour certainly brightens the place up, it now means the dirty-white of the doorframes stick out like a sore thumb and will therefore need painted. I may start that this weekend. May.

May indeed. The month of May is coming up fast and there are just 7 weeks till the wedding. If you ask me it’s all organised. If you ask Carol the most important things (hair, make-up) are still to be done. In any case, organised or not, both of us just want it to be here now. This whole being engaged thing isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

In an effort to fill my belly and satisfy my longing for sweet things during Lent I’ve been gorging on raisins, sultanas and dried apricots. Sometime’s it’s great, sometime’s you just feel like you never want to look at dried fruit again. Everyone told me that being off sugar in tea and coffee over Lent would make me used to the taste and I wouldn’t go back. Those people don’t know what it’s like to be me. The first thing I want once Lent is over is a big mug of sugary coffee (preferably with cream) and a double chocolate chip Tesco finest cookie. Mmmhmm. My mouth is watering. As if I’ll ever get used to not eating sugar! But I like that I chose something difficult to give up. Had I just gone off chocolate it would have been easy. But there’s nothing like sugary tea after lunch. I think the only thing I would have struggled more with is potatoes.

I caught an interesting (to me) article on digg this week celebrating the 10th birthday of the mp3 player. I love the fact that I owned one of the first mp3 players in the Rio pmp300 before any of my friends had even heard of the term mp3. I remember all the exclaimations about it being the smallest radio / minidisc player they had ever seen and the confused faces when I explained it was neither of the two. Ha! Minidisc - where are you now?!

I also remember buying it on impulse after hearing my big brother talking about this new technology. It’s not like me, and when I got it home and discovered it could only store a few songs at a decent bitrate I (like a little boy would) went and complained to a bemused Dave that he’d given me faulty advice (sorry, Dave!). I soon learned to reduce the bitrate and fell in love with the little beauty. They still don’t make em as beautiful if you ask me, though my little gunmetal muvo (which I haven’t used since I got my free nano) certainly turns the heads too.

There has been a real lack of good new movies recently, but one I’d been waiting for since I saw the trailer last year was The Bucket List. I highly recommend it if anyone’s thinking about venturing to the cinema but doesn’t want to waste money on tosh like National Treasure or Rambo.

Nigel introduced me recently to Explosions in the Sky which is nice music to have on in the background while doing stuff round the house. Similar in style to the wonderful (but now overly popular) Sigur Ros they don’t quite hit the heights of the Icelandic group, but entertain me enough to stay in my collection.

With the choice of music in work being wither silence or Radio 2, I’ve been forced to listen to two things I wouldn’t normally allow. And it has led to some odd discoveries. Ignoring the fact that it’s the same tune as their previous release “She’s So Lovely”, Scouting for Girl’s “Elvis Ain’t Dead” is a fine sound. Add to that the truly magnificent “A&E” by Goldfrapp and I’m quite surprised at the things I enjoy listening to. But when I find myself liking a Gwen Stefani song I start to freak out. But, quite frankly, Early Winter is about as good as it gets.

Next thing you’ll know I’ll be liking Kylie Minogue. No, wait. I have ears don’t I?

Here’s a humorous look at the apple fanboy world. Non-geeks are good to ignore this as I’m sure you did my last post.

While taking a trip to Tesco the other evening I decided en-route that I might like to make the journey slightly shorter and give Sainsbury’s a visit instead. Now this is no admission that it is any way better than my beloved Tesco but merely a suggestion of my lust for convenience.

When I arrived I was aware the store would be closing soon (whaddupwithat Sainsbury’s?! Tesco’s 24 hour!) and so made a quick move through the aisles, stopping off to see if there was a bargain to be had at the hot food counter. Sure enough those lovely cooked chickens that I often enjoy making into 3 meals for the price of one were there on offer at half price.

“The very boy for me!” I exclaimed and quickly hurried the warm bundle of chickeny goodness into my trolley.

It wasn’t until I was home and perusing my receipt - noting that the second most expensive item on my list was a tub of raisins (Fr Ted fans read Cocaine) - that I discovered that the girl at the checkout had made some kind of divinely inspired confusibungle and I had in fact received a delicious chicken absolutely gratis.

FREE CHICKEN!

Awesomeness.

The choosing Sainsbury’s for convenience incident is sadly a hint at a troubling tendency I’ve noticed in myself recently. The hardware of choice in work is predominately apple (as far as I’m aware it’s mostly for aesthetic purposes - one of the very reasons I tend to shun the apple community) and on my desk sits a 24inch iMac, albeit with Windows XP installed in dual boot.

Now I’ll admit it is a lovely looking creature, but I’ve had no end of problems with it. Cinema 4D crashes more regularly than it stays open for one, but mostly even with 4GB of ram in there and a dual core processor it’s still slower than my old desktop PC at home (2Ghz single core, 1GB ram). Maybe this has something to do with windows running on it rather than OSX but nevertheless it is a bother for someone like me who demands excellence from my hardware.

All this has led me to consider looking at booting up in Leopard and trying to get to grips with a new interface. It was a sad moment when I caught myself suggesting that I switch to Leopard rather than buying software for both Mac and PC in a discussion in work today. I felt all dirty afterwards.

It’s a worrying trend. I remember not so long ago Paul giving out to me about using the FREE iPod I got last year. Then just before Christmas Paul got himself a new iPod Touch for his round the world travels. Where does our alligience lie?!

I’ve decided this has got to stop. If the cost of software means I have to switch to Leopard in work I will do so begrudgingly, but I will not allow myself to be hooked into the world of gimmicky laptops without ethernet ports and optical drives simply so my friends can go “oooh look at that”. I get enough of that with my sexy little red laptop. A DELL.

I’m sticking with Tesco and I’m sticking with PC. It’ll take more than free chickens to sway me.