Soap and Shepard

I once again, missed my driving lesson. Which was entirely my fault for not getting up, and I really need to make sure that I do not fall back into my old sleeping pattern, not after this work has made me appreciate all the free time I have thrown away.
While I did not spend any of Christmas Eve on the roads, I did spend much of it playing Halo with Neil, and was spurred further into the seasonal spirit as we, the Americans, and various other worldwide Live gamers wished eachother a Merry Christmas at the end of each game. Even the internet hate machine seemed to be putting aside some of its differences with itself and be a little more polite than usual.

Christmas day hit with me struggling to pull myself out of bed, once I did presents were had. My two best presents were a Motorola Z3 and a 19 inch widescreen monitor, the phone was unfortunately missing a battery, and the monitor missing an adapter needed to connect it to the 360, the situation would have to be rectified the next day with a trip to Stevenage. I could still connect the monitor to my computer, and with a little third party support Vista was convinced to run dual screen, which does look absolutely fantastic and comes in extremely useful. Other than that I mostly got books and that sort of thing, all good stuff.
Meanwhile my parents kept themselves occupied downstairs by placing a freezer bag too close to a candle and playing around with the resulting fire, a little smoke inhalation mixed with what tasted like highly toxic plastic fumes were science's gift to my family this Christmas. Thankfully a fire extinguisher was on hand and damage to the base is minimal, we're just lucky it was caught when it was, before we became another statistic.
Christmas dinner was had at my brother's place this year, with much of our family and many of his girlfriends. Many of his girlfriend's family members that is, he's not into polygamy or anything like that. Everyone had chipped in a little something to make up the meal and things went very well, especially considering that it was the first Christmas dinner Zoe had prepared, and she put in a lot of effort that definitely paid off.

Boxing Day comes and it's time to do some shopping, so me and my brother drive into Stevenage to get stuff done. That's with my brother driving, because at this point I would probably drop the ball on the motorway and PIT maneuver myself into the armco.
We sidled into the Carphone Warehouse to grab a battery and a 2GB SD card, quickly fixing my phone problems and enabling me to take plenty of good quality pictures and easily throw them onto my computer. I still had to sit bluetoothing pictures and copying phone numbers for about two hours once I got home, which was the hight of tedium.
For the first Christmas in quite a while I didn't get any vidyagames, so I had to rectify the situation by buying Call of Duty 4 and Mass Effect with the swiftness of a startled fox. I have also been considering buying Just Cause for another £13 and Naruto: Rise of a Ninja if it drops in price (a lot), for the moment I think CoD and ME will keep me nicely occupied, but for such low low prices Just Cause will not escape me for long.
Maplin had one of the two adapters I needed, my brother having the other at home, yet annoyingly enough things have not gone quite as smoothly as I would have liked. The splitter I am using was designed for two computers to run on the same monitor, but I am trying to get it to switch between a secondary monitor and an Xbox 360. As it is, when switched to the computer the secondary monitor does not display, and when switched to the 360 I cannot use the keyboard on the computer. So I have to switch the sound, picture and keyboard wires every time I want to play the 360, which makes me want to go up to Gerard Butler and describe the situation with the words 'blasphemy' and 'madness'.

Today has been spent almost entirely playing Call of Duty and Mass Effect, with a little cleaning in preparation for the arrival of yet more family later in the evening.
Early on in the day I realized I hadn't actually bothered to look at the display settings on the 360, and what a fool I was for that. First I set it to widescreen so the picture wasn't just being stretched, and then I kicked it up from the ridiculously low 640x350 resolution to a higher resolution that has made the picture so brilliantly sharp it feels as if it is physically cutting my cornea. This new level of quality will not only make my new games fantastic to play, but even reinvigorate some of the older titles, so I am sure all of my friends on Xbox Live will have me readily available to kick reason to the curb and surpass the impossible whenever they want to play any games online.