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In Birmingham now! And people should be more careful about their open networks, teehee ;)

Last week was suitably chaotic socially, and I will write up more than just "OMG Vista is made of POOO", I've managed to get most of my Dell's stuff done so I can do work (and I didn't swear that much about fonts when setting up InDesign so I could work on pages away from the Mac. Honest).

Due to updating and so forth, I have to wish a belated Happy Birthday to graylion, since I was trying to get the computer to behave and get packed/organised, I missed the window to post :(

For future reference, all mentions of Vista now must be assumed to contain:

"It costs HOW much!?!?" (OEM bundles aside... Vista Ultimate is £369 rrp).
"Adobe CS3 won't install unless you manually faff about with registering components"
"There really is no keyboard shortcut to hide the sidebar"
"Writing a DVD image is a lot quicker if you just give up and use the Mac in the first place"

But it isn't all bad news. I have emulators for nearly every system I like and I finally have a MAME ROM management application I can use, so once I get a bunch of ROMs presumably I'll be able to downgrade them so they will work with the ancient ROMset required for PocketMAME and the less ancient set required for XBOX MAME. If I ever get around to fixing the XBox ethernet Bridge. And ideally shoving XBMC 2.0.1 on it.

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Well, today has not been too bad actually! Apart from getting up too late and having to rely on stolen WiFi for a little bit longer (it works and is fast, so I'm not complaining), IRC appears to be broken - is that the router I've found or just netgoth.org.uk being dead? It looked dead last night, no ops/hardly any people.

jenova_red and I went into the city, and appear to have managed to return with books and a new toy inevitably. We bought a http://www.gp2x.com/ as it was randomly in the second-hand part of the "Computer Exchange" place (mostly full of overpriced used computers) and appeared to be almost unused - all the plastic still on it, boxed, all components. When Jenova bought the Hydra, I think she was expecting an electronic kit, and then a software development system; what it actually is is more akin to 1970s console technology - you basically design the "hardware" of the console. GP2x is an Open Source handheld and IIRC both deathboy and princealbert have recommended them or the GP32 predecessor as fun toys. I really, really want to be able to 'port' and update the LucasFilm game "Rescue on Fractalus" to a modern system - currently I can play the Atari 800 version via emulators, but I feel like a Zarch-style update to the Fractal-generated landscape, and some new models for the spaceships and so forth, would be really fun.

I now have a couple of books on C# development, I willingly admit that I know absolutely fuck all about C and object-oriented programming, but I am determined to learn, especially since the syntax of so many modern languages looks "C-like" to me. The fuss of getting VS2005 Pro to behave and install on the Dell (which is proving to be absolutely fantastic to work on and type on; the keyboard is SO much nicer than anything I've used from Apple) was of course working towards understanding C++/# and that class of programming anyway.

I have two goals: To learn about the language, and to adapt the SmartPhone port of Fuse to work on larger format Windows Mobile devices and detect screen orientation/keyboard versions accurately. The former will be easy, the latter, near impossible for me I expect, but if I can do it I'll be pleased. Hell, if I can tweak it enough to work in QVGA Landscape mode with the Athena/Ameo/Universal - that'll do.

I have "C# 2005 For Dummies" and the Microsoft Visual C# 2005 Step by Step, which had the reassuring "Read these chapters if you are a n00b" type into. The SAMS books were appealing but either included Microsoft's own distro of Visual C# Express (with no samples mentioned), or was 2004 and I was worried the samples might not work with Visual 2005, or rather, might not be "really easy". The "for Dummies" book doesn't specify Visual, but actually assumes you are using Visual Studio.