MMXI Week 5–Things That Go Bump in the Night

This week I really felt the impact of working full time. Not in tiredness, but lack of free time. Before I started working, I had a plethora of empty hours with which to fill with whatever fancy took me. I thought nothing of maybe playing Minecraft for a couple of hours, then settling down in front of the Xbox to unlock a few achievements, back to Minecraft, then maybe a movie.
Now it’s very much a different case, as I’m out of the house five days a week from 7am till 5pm. This means that I have to priorities my activities in terms of what needs to be done and what I really want to do. No more spending a couple of hours just browsing Wikipedia. But this isn’t entirely a bad thing, as I do have a new found focus for getting things done. ‘But why are you telling us this, Davyd?’ Well, the answer is that it leads on to explaining why this week I feel like I haven’t got much to write down for what is a whole busy week.

For the majority of my week I have spent my evenings wrapping valentines day presents for Viv, with a new found obsessiveness for neatly wrapped packages. I have never in my life put so much effort into wrapping a present!

A veritable work of art

Apart from professional present wrapping, I’ve also been working on my costume for the Midlands MCM anime expo in two weeks. I’ve decided to go as ‘Minecraft guy’, otherwise know from now on as ‘Steve’ (he looks like a Steve.
The inspiration came when I realised that I happened to own a t-shirt and pair of jeans the exact same colour as ‘Steve’ and all I would have to do was make a cube head and possibly a Minecraft tool. And so began project box head!

From this…..

….to this!

I’m in too minds about posting my completed costume before the convention itself, as I think it might be a nice surprise. The only thing I’ve got left to work on is the pickaxe and Viv’s ‘costume’. She didn’t like the idea of wearing a big box on her head, and she’s too pretty for me to do that to her. Instead I’m going to put together a simple ‘cute creeper’ outfit for her, but we’ll see how that turns out.

On Saturday (which incidentally should be ‘today’, but due to repeat tardiness in my blogging habits, is ‘yesterday’) I had my passport interview. It was one of the weirdest experiences, I was basically being quizzed about myself by someone who seemed to know more about me than I did. When was my father born, what’s my mothers date of birth, how long have you lived at your current address? These are all questions that I couldn’t answer because you never think about them, lol. Luckily I’m not getting deported as a terrorist or whatever, and even better, my passport will be arriving in four to ten working days.

While in Oxford, as this was the nearest location where I could have my interview, I decided to purchase Dead Space 2 as I loved the original and what with getting paid weekly, I had the money to drop £40 on it. Just over an hour in, I’m absolutely loving it. The first game in ages that is properly making me jump and creeping me out!

“Why do I have to be in such a creepy game, I had it good in Skate 3, but no, I had to come back to Dead Space”

On a final note, I’m slowly settling into, and thoroughly loving my new phone. I was delightfully surprised to discover that I was wrong about the music player not supporting wma format when synced from windows media player, and now all I have to do is get myself a bigger memory card, and I’ll be able to completely stop using my old phone (which is now just a glorified mp3 player). I am debating making one small modification, to the hands free kit. You see, my old phone had an inline remote/ hands free kit that allowed you to control the music/manage calls, that you could connect your own headphones to. This was great for me as I have a pair of skullcandy asyms that I love using as they’re perfect for me.

They look odd, but my misshaped ear holes wonderfully

Now the desire HD does come with a hands free kit with music and call control (although lacking volume control strangely enough) but the head phones are built it. What I’m contemplating is buying a 3.5mm stereo jack and cutting the built in headphones off and wiring the jack in their place, thus enabling me to use any headphones I wish. Now I’m obviously apprehensive as this is an accessory for a new product and there’s no guarantee that I’d be able to successfully wire the headphone wires to the jack. But on the other hand, there is an almost zero chance that I’d use the headphones otherwise, favouring to just use my asyms with no remote. I’m certainly going to leave it for a while, at least until I get a bigger memory card for my phone, and then I’ll probably wait until I can maybe get another hands free kit, that way if it doesn’t work, I still have a working kit.

Well, that’s all for this week, goal wise nothing much has really changed, I’ll probably do a more concise summary next week. On a small note, the image I posted last week of what I said was my new phone was actually a picture of the previous model, the HTC desire. This is my new phone:

All 4.3” of glory!