Things I Did Yesterday 05/01/10

Dammit, I'm so used to typing on my Eee PC keyboard that my fingers are all out of whack for a full-sized one. But yesterday I:

- Got up with great intentions of having a productive day. My main goal was to do a bit of PC housekeeping: something which always seems to take an inordinate amount of time for little visible result, but needs doing. I also thought I might get out and catch a film. The Coen brothers' A Serious Man is high on my list of need-to-see.

- Sat on the internet. I don't have any structured time for reading my RSS feeds anymore, so I'm well behind. About 75% of my web reading currently takes place on my phone while I'm travelling, which is handy, but restrictive. Anything with media or links or just too long gets left for a later that never comes (or does come 3 months later). Then of course I wind up spending half my day doing a catch-up and get annoyed with myself for wasting so much time.

- Got out of the house with the intention of going to the movies, but got a call from Alex about lunch, so I met her down at Angel. Popped into the Waterstones down there to have a browse while I waited for her. Unsurprisingly, with the Borders in the N1 Centre closing down just before Christmas, the place had been pillaged. Slightly depressing now to think that this store - never the best store around - is about the only bookstore that I know of in this part of London. Does North London not read? Or are we all Amazon fiends? Reminds me, I must check on the status of that order...

- Missed my intended session time, so flagged the film. I'm off today as well, so I might pop down. Came home and got a little domestic.

- Sat down to get stuck into my PC housekeeping. Started playing around with the Chrome browser extensions that are now available for the beta. I quite like Chrome. It's certainly very fast and much improved on the initial release. The lack of customising that Firefox offers has stopped me switching over, but now that's changed there's little beside a fondness for the Mozilla browser that keeps me with it. Not to mention my wariness of that feeling I'm being lured into Google's gingerbread house. In the last six months I've become a Google whore with disturbing speed. But it's all just so convenient. It all just works so easily. But then, I guess, so does Apple.

- Also played around a little with Evernote: note-taking software that I can sync across my machines, including my phone. The free version is pretty well-featured, but if works out I may well stump up the $5/month for the benefits of premium, the key attraction being the fact that the free version only comes with 40mb of storage. I've toyed around with note-taking software before, but never really found anything yet which has stuck. The fact that I can use this as an app on my phone then sync back to my Eee PC and my desktop might be the winning factor here though. Hey, at least it's not Google, right?

- Played Xbox. Dragon Age Origins, to be precise. But I kept dying during one fight, to the point I would have to get up and have a little walk between each attempt. Otherwise I may have embedded my controller in the television. Thankfully DAO offers saves at any point, a feature traditionally lacking in console games, so at least I'm not having to go back to a save point or anything silly. I appreciate that it adds a sense of peril to your actions, a cost for failure, but to be frank it just annoys the fuck out of me. Played a little Left 4 Dead 2 as well.

- Cooked dinner. Wifey was out for after work drinks, so I went back to Xbox. Left 4 Dead 2 again, but playing in Versus mode, which is just genius. It's two teams of four playing against each other. Sides take turns on each level of a scenario playing either the survivors or the "special" creatures. The survivors simply try to get as far through the level as they possibly can, with no resurrections for any character who dies along the way. When you play on the zombie side, you cycle through each type of special creature. Each has a special ability (grappling tongue, charging ability, venomous spit, etc), but they die very quickly. This results in you being timed out as an observer for about twenty seconds before coming back as the next type of creature. Anyway, it's a lot of fun and not a mode I've played much before, so I got completely sucked in a pretty much played it the rest of the night.

- Watched the second and third episodes of True Blood. Again, immediately enjoying this a lot more than last series. Trashy fun.

- Alex went to sleep, while I snuck back into the lounge for some more L4D2. I got it bad.