Other What currently makes your life awesome?

I've had a piece of music stuck in my head since 2010, I thought it was an outro to a film or whatnot, never been able to find it, tried whistling it to Shazam, asking people, watching films I thought it could be, nothing. Just been out in the car and it's the last 20 seconds of Closer by Nine Inch Nails. Incredible, 40% of my entire life I've been trying to place that.

 

Managed to snag a few "retro" PC games from a couple of the local CeX stores for a few quid to flesh out my collection and just won a 8800GT and 8800GTS 512MB on eBay for ~£14.70.

Thinking of doing a run back over how PC gaming used to be, Getting that "dream" machine and playing games until it can't run them well and then upgrading the components as I go until the game becomes playable. E.G. BF2 runs fine on a 6800 Ultra but Crysis is a slide show. Drop a 7800GTX 512 in there an see how that does, then onto a 8800GT(S/X) etc.

 

Enquiries are now satisfied and the report on contract has been drafted. Our solicitor just needs to run it past the senior partner, which should happen during a scheduled meeting she has with them tomorrow morning. We’ll be able to collect it shortly after.

Once we’ve read it, our mortgage advisor has said we can drop in at any time to have it witnessed, so we should be able to return it by close of play.

If all goes well, we’ll be in a position to exchange next week. The sellers have provisionally agreed to the 8th of December, and both solicitors are now working to that as the completion date, so the negotiation side shouldn’t take long.

 

I’ve worn an Apple Watch almost every day for four and a half years. But yesterday I treated myself to an upgrade:



It cost me £25 and it’s literally just a watch. It’s not even really waterproof, just “splashproof”.

And I ****ing love it, I literally couldn’t be happier with it.

No high resolution display, no sensors, no expensive interchangeable straps, no contactless payments, no notifications, no silent alerts, no audible alerts, no charging every day…

 

My Dad wore one of those in the '80s, I remember the hands whirring round as he changed it for daylight savings time.

 

Tweaked my main "retro" build with little upgrade / sidegrade (not really sure and haven't had the full time to test).

Full build is:

Asrock Dual VSata Skt 775 motherboard (Via KT800 chipset with AGP/ PCI-E & DDR1/DDR2)
Pentium E6600 (dual cores @ 3.06Ghz) - This is technically a side grade from the E8400 that was in there. 2MB L2 Cache vs 6MB L2 Cache but 3.06Ghz vs 2.4Ghz.
2GB DDR2 667MT/s
60GB Sata SSD (Old Crucial drive I got refurbished when SSD's were relatively new)
Geforce GTX6800 Ultra 256MB
Creative X-Fi soundcard

All on a BC-1 Testbench as I can't find a case I like to put it all in.

Played some Halo 1 last night and it felt awesome!

 

Wifelet got her notification of yearly bonus. Waaaaay more than we thought it was going to be given the amount of time off sick that she has had in the latter part of this year, it will pretty much double her pay for December.

Could do with it dropping in the account this month, but still not going to complain.

 

I've got a Brathwait Automatic Minimalist watch.



Unfortunately they ceased trading now, but they used to have a completely transparent pricing model, with keenly priced watches. Sapphire glass, rose gold plated case, Miyota 9015 high-beat self-winding mechanism. Just tells the time and date, and nothing else.

 

That’s really nice, it’s a shame they’ve stopped trading. I don’t normally like a bright white watch face, but I don’t think that would work as well in a more “muted” tone.

Honestly I think the only thing I “miss” from my Apple Watch at this point is the strap, and that’s only because it had a Velcro fastener that I could easily adjust. I’ve never really liked “pin buckle” clasps on a watch, and it’s a PITA to change the fit on this “sliding buckle” clasp.

But it’s a hell of a lot cheaper to change the strap on this watch than it was for my Apple Watch!

 

I have finally after a couple of weeks of head scratching and hair ripping, managed to access my Dad's orphaned email account.
The ISP have terrible service and it's taken 2 weeks to get the support and some idea of what I need to put in.

I ended up with 2 sets of usernames and POP/SMTP credentials that allegedly went to the same server. None of it worked; I tried all the combos of this and that and this morning used just the first part of the email address before the @ as the username and it connected, RESULT

The downside is that the poor PC is now downloading 11,500 emails that have built up while it's not beed accessible!!

 

I'll be back for an update in 2026 when it's finished

 

It's all done thankfully, a huge proportion can be ditched and a load of subscriptions removed.

 

Contracts have now been exchanged and we have a completion date for the 8th. It’s becoming very real now — even more so since we’ve given our notice, which runs until Christmas Eve. It’s doing nothing for my anxiety; I actually ended up calling the solicitor to ask if she’d had a formal response to the release of funds request. Apparently she had to follow up with a phone call, but after they received the title deed they confirmed the funds would be released on the working day before completion.

Meanwhile, our front door has now broken at home, so we’ve had to call the landlord out to sort it, otherwise the door won’t close…

 

Just booked the last of my 2025 holiday allowance.
Which means that my Xmas begins at noon on Dec 5th!

 

So I started as Principal Mechatronics Engineer at Tekever (the UK side) in October, which was kind of crazy, and on Friday I was approached by my old boss to do the same role at EIT, which is just an insane opportunity!!! If they fully offer it, I'm totally going for it, as it's career making stuff. Having two super senior roles in a few months is just crazy, I never thought I'd be in this place 5 years ago! After the **** show that 2025 was, fingers crossed for 2026 to being a really good one!

 

Work sprang for hot turkey baps, mince pies and chocolate cake all round.
Lunch sorted (burp)!

And a £50 gift card too

 

Split mine and my daughters Admiral multi-car policies back to single polices and it saved my daughter £400 versus the supposedly "discounted" multi-car deal. Bonkers!

Mine didn't change but the difference for my daughter it's a massive saving.