*click*bzzzz*reboot from start...

[matgb]

Apparently, if I stop posting here, people will start ringing me to check I'm ok, or wondering what I'm up to, or other similar things. This is especially true if I just, y'know, stop writing stuff and stop commenting elsewhere.

Well, I did. It started as a weekend break from t'internet in which I didn't even look at my email, then it turned into a few months where I simply scanned my email for important stuff, occasionally checked into Twitter, but otherwise didn't read any of my reading, friends or feed pages and simply turned off. Honestly? It's been good.

So, what have I been doing instead? Well, making money definitely wasn't one of them. Ah well, that'll have to start changing. What I have been doing is enjoying life in many respects.

Learnt how to bake and cook

I've learnt, not just how to bake (which is quite easy), but also how to actually, y'know, properly cook. I am no longer scared by a recipe that requires I chop an onion. I know what a vichyssoise is (but not how to spell it), and have even made one. My carrot, cream and orange soup, adapted from Mary Berry's recipe, is quite simply gorgeous, and I successfully made baguettes yesterday.

I've been helping miss_s_b in the garden, in which we have potatoes, beetroot, oregano and even scented geraniums growing well. The newly planted garlic is already sprouting, so that'll be nice for next year.

Biggest bestest cake in the world

I've been spending time with amazing_holly, reading, playing games, cooking and having fun. I managed to get her to teach herself the basics of multiplication and division while baking a cake. I even, as a reward for her for sticking with learning to be good enough at Speed Racer to actually beat Mummy in a championship cooked, with her, the biggest bestest cake that Mister Mat has ever made! which has, somehow, now become the biggest bestest cake in the world. Well, she is 6. It was fun making it though, even if it was so big it had gone dry before we finished it.

But also? I've been playing games. A lot of games. For this you can mostly blame liadnan. Y'see, awhileback I had a catastrophic OS failure involving a critical Fx vulnerability and a dodgy porn site, and we gave up on fixing Windows and switched to Ubuntu for the main desktop. I had some problems getting a few things to work, and he pointed me at the wonder that is the world of Linux repositories. So I installed some, to see what I could find.

Open source, extendable games

Mostly, I found games. Open Source, extendable, games. Based on some wonderful classics like Elite, Civilisation, Sin City and similar. I will, I hope, write up the ones I enjoyed, just so I can have a record of them. I may even write up the ones I hated, to remind me not to install them again. In the meantime, I'm back. I've been reading, and even commenting on, most of my reading pages, and plan to completely reorganise them to keep my sanity in place.

In the meantime, enough about me, what've you guys been up to, have I missed much?

Comments

Good to hear -

[(Anonymous)]

Sounds both rewarding, productive and fulfilling.

The productive part surprises, but pleases me.

Regards,
Your old pal that you used to pick up along the way, and drop off on the way back.

Re: Good to hear -

[matgb]

Well, not that productive. It is good to be back in contact with you now y'know, even if only occasionally online; if you're ever up here feel free to give us a shout, we have a spare room weekends, with a 6'*4' table...

[pmoodie]

I had wondered what had become of you, right enough. Ah well, sometimes it's good to take a break from all the internet craziness.

So, what have I been doing instead? Well, making money definitely wasn't one of them. Ah well, that'll have to start changing.

Put your new-found cooking and baking skills to use, and go into catering! :)

[missdiane.livejournal.com]

I agree with this! Or you could just stand on the street corner and sell pies and cakes. lol

[matgb]

Yeah, I'd think about it but I'm not that good, and our oven isn't reliable enough. Plus, you've visited, keeping dog hairs out of the produce is pretty much impossible.

[pmoodie]

The dog hairs could be the secret ingredient that makes your tasty treats stand out from the rest! :D

[publicansdecoy]

Gardening is good. Have you got a shed? I need to plant some garlic.

-x-

[matgb]

Heh, a forthcoming post might go into the 'garden' a bit more--it's really a yard. And is a prime example of why the word 'yard' came into being. It's plant pots and similar. When we get a bigger place, it'll have a shed, else there'd be no point.

[miss_s_b]

I want a shed. Currently we are shed-free by dint of the fact that if we put a shed in our yard there'd be no yard left for plants...

Cooking

[rankersbo.wordpress.com]

There are recipes that aren't sweet and don't involve chopping onions?

Have to get round to instaling ubuntu on mini-biscit (probably renaming it mini-rankersbo) as the SUSE Enterprise distribution it has now
takes a good few minutes to get ready to do anything.

Re: Cooking

[andrewhickey.info]

If startup time is your problem, I'd go for Debian rather than Ubuntu. It's less user-friendly, but if you're running SLES it's more so than that, and it has a much smaller footprint than Ubuntu because it doesn't come with things like Compiz as standard...

[frith]

Welcome back. 8-) Been, doin' the same old same old. On my LJ version I'm blogging in pony-glyph font, just to see if anyone will put the effort into reading it. Each sentence takes an hour to sound out and typeset despite the lexicon I'm building. So, in a way, I make my own games, really Old School!

[matgb]

Pony glyphs?

That is a very scary thing to do. I think that's actually more scary than the artists who learnt runic script in order to paing model vikings properly.

[frith]

Could be worse. I could try and train a horse to spell its name out in the dirt in pony-glyphs. 8-D