Best present this year was a car, yes you heard me correctly, someone gave me a car for Christmas and it is glorious. And yes that is left over snow, unbelievable all round.

Unfortunately the car also coincided with a good friend moving away to California :- you can’t pack a car into your hand luggage unfortunately. Regardless, I don’t think the car was worth the disappearance of the friend, but the Internet is a marvellous tool so I have no doubt we’ll remain in good contact. I’m even willing to investigate this new fangled ‘Skype’ thing all the cool kids have been raving about. I don’t really do *talking* to people.

And so now it is new years. I’m not normally one for big celebrations on new years, I think back to the years of Heather, Alex and myself driving about listening to music, finding vantage points to watch fireworks, and then retreating to watch Bill Bailey dvds in Alex’s living room. I enjoyed those years a lot, but unfortunately Heather was busy this year. I was invited, but the event was spending the evening in Manchester city centre, moving from pub to club, meeting up with various people. I really didn’t fancy it, I don’t like going out in Manchester at the best of times let alone new years eve.

So instead I retreated to Lancaster, bringing with me my new fileserver! I’d built it at my parents’ house but sadly they don’t have any monitors, their TV was too old to have an HDMI port and even if I’d overcome that hurdle, there’s no way I could realistically download a linux install disc over 3G. Upon turning it on here the first issue was that it wouldn’t output anything to a monitor. After some panicking, and disassembly, and finally stooping to reading the manual I discovered that in the 8 years its been since I last built a PC in anger, things have changed. You have to run separate power to the CPU, else everything goes tits up. Never have I been so relieved to hear post beeps.

There’s a lot more to be said about the fileserver project, but I’ll save that for a future blog entry. I’m trying to document what I did as I am a moron, and I don’t remember anything. Blogging it seemed as good a way as any.

So in conclusion, it is 2010. A new year, a new start, that’s what people say. I’ve never held much stock by resolutions, or life changing decisions happening just because the calendar rolled over, but its sort of nice to feel like everything is getting a new beginning. This year didn’t end well, 2009 certainly contained some of the most miserable events of my life so far, but ignoring that I think the good has outweighed the bad. Hopefully at the end of 2010 I’ll be able to say the same.