Mmm, that was a good Bank Holiday weekend. Definitely. Yes.

I've spent a fair amount of it round at the Gallery, doing the usual sorts of fun things and playing a lot of board games. Particularly good fun was playing Robo Rally after a long hiatus from it; it tends to take quite a lot of time and so in the usual Sunday-evening gaming slot we don't normally play it because some of us have to get up the next day – which made this Sunday perfect for it. Also to my astonishment I won it (or at least I was miles ahead by the time we all gave up); I attribute this to having gone a slightly silly way to the first checkpoint, thus getting me mostly out of the crowding and carnage.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less travelled by,
And everyone else bashed into each other repeatedly on the other one and got in one another's way in a comedic manner,
And that has made all the difference.

Or something like that.

Also yesterday I invited post-pizza back to mine to play silly PS2 and GameCube games (this wouldn't have worked in a normal week, but half the world was away so post-pizza was reasonably small), and apart from general fun I also managed my best run ever through Ikaruga (while demonstrating it to people) by quite some distance; instead of one or two lives left at the end I had more like three or four credits. Must have been having an audience that did it; Gareth says he also managed his best run in similar circumstances.

And most importantly of all, I've recovered enough energy to be able to do half-decent PuTTY coding. After being constantly exhausted over the last couple of months (I blame the heat), it was a great relief to find that I can still spend four hours doing something useful, and that I'm not (for example) unwittingly bored out of my mind by the whole exercise, which was something I'd been vaguely worried might be the case. So as well as winning and doing well at various games, I've also managed to do a hefty chunk of actually useful stuff over the course of this weekend. Rock righteously on.