On the verge of ...

The credit card is going to hate me by the end of the week.

I have two expensive things (technically 3) on the extraordinary shopping list ... The first is actually quite mundane. The car needs new front tyres. One disadvantage to having a relatively high performance car is that the bits cost a lot and for the tyres, it's £100 a corner.

It could be more but I'm avoiding the big name people in favour of Hankook, who score well on the economy, wet driving and noise thingys. Do I believe the economy, wet driving and noise thingys ? Nope - but in the absence of better info, they're all I have to go on. I've never used Hankook before, I'm curious as to how they work out. Hopefully better than Continental, which have been universally useless in all the cars that I've owned which have had those inflicted upon them.

Before the next bit - how about me ?

My legs are in far better shape now. They're actually normalising ... I know ... that's taken a lot of time. My arms on the other hand (oops - didn't mean that pun but it was inevitable) need me to leave them alone more so they can heal. It's just so easy to damage bits. And I'm not mentioning the two places that I really want to have healing happen on them.

I've been warcrafting again. A little too much to be honest. I have a feeling that the swelling in my legs was actually protecting the joints - lol. Warcraft hits me in the wrist and shoulder because I tunnel into it a little too much. That's not to say I wouldn't get safe (easier now that you can fly) and have a good natter to someone if messages popped up but if left to my own devices, I'll easily sink 3-4 hours into it straight. That's not really healthy and I've been using iTunes and dinner times as a marker for breaks. Plus I'm getting better at recognizing the signs of being in the game too long and take breaks.

I think after the initial rush wears off, I'll get back to normal again but I have sunk an obscene amount of my spare home time into it over the past week. And I've a) enjoyed it, b) been glad to be back in the guild (they're a good bunch) and c) the tunneling has given my fingers something to do which does not involve self damage.

So what's this thing that's going to break the credit card if it's more than the tyres ?

I'm going to make the jump to Macbooks ...

Every time I do a blog post on this laptop, I'm reminded about how bad the keyboard has got. I'm continually going back over to retype where random key didn't get recognied. See what I mean ? That's acually light for what it tends to miss ;-). But it's not just the keyboard, it's been suffering for power too although that could be the Firefox web browser and Flash being horribly inefficient. So it's time for the laptop to be traded in for something different.

It'll be a Macbook because I've had enough of Microsoft software (it's been steadily getting more and more hostile) and Windows laptops don't offer a spec I like at a price I'm prepared to pay. So I'm jumping ship to something that will be very shiny indeed. It'll be a bit of an effort migrating though :

Screen size - the resolution is similar but I'll be going from 17" down to 13.3". However ... it'll also be about a quarter of the weight. And with me occasionally tapping out a blog post with the laptop on my knees, that'll be appreciated.
Itunes - I might be able to copy over my library and keep the data but to be honest, I'm quite tempted to reset it all anyway. Of course it'll take me literally 6 months to re-rate all the music again but there we go :-). I wonder how long it would be before I'd start seeing repeat tracks.
Digiguide - is the one piece of Windows software that I use that I would miss from the laptop. But to be honest, it's a tv guide application and there are ways around it being gone.
Interface - my fingers dance on the keyboard. Tis nice.

But the rest of it - Skype (which I rarely use now since Microsoft forced us off the perfectly good Messenger), web browsing, email is done equally good or better on the Mac. And for the stuff that doesn't play nicely with Mac, I have my desktop. I'm not likely to put many games on the Macbook, gaming on a laptop is somewhat cruel for the laptop.

The one I'll get will be a 13.3" Macbook Air with a 256 GB hard disc. I'll be going for a refurb model for £££ off the price. It's still a lot of money but I'm hoping that it'll last long enough to wear out in ... a longer time than this laptop at least (almost 4 years)

We shall see !

I'm almost done with catchup on the Youtube videos so it's time to join that Draenor Warcraft queue again ...