Star Hopper.

Hello their readers. Once again I find myself apologising for not making more contents, but at least I have a rather compelling string of reasons / excuses as to why this has happened.

Going back to the end of April, I returned from the Falklands ahead of my ship to take a weeks leave in preparation for my leadership, a three-week intensive course which helps develop an understanding of core values and ethos required for those taking a promotion to Leading Hand in the Royal Navy. I passed the course with flying colours, the only thing i need to work on is to use smaller words more often (and avoided severe blistering this time around too). And have been given a ver nice £5000 pay rise too.

After Leadership I had a couple of weeks off, during which my laptop decided to go all wibble wobbly (turned out to be a failure of the HDD causing the windows 7 install to become corrupt), which left me without a laptop for the best part of a month. I could boot the Ubuntu install I had, and duplicated the windows partition, so nothing lost there. And that takes me to the middle of June anyway.

Not all of this time has been spent entirely on my haunches, I have been toying with ideas for some simple tutorial videos for Liberty BASIC, as well as other things like my origami, or some game play videos (World of Tanks has taken up far too much spare time).

After that, I finally decided on the laptop i wanted to give myself as a congratulatory present for getting my promotion, which took a little over a week and a half to get put together, tested, and shipped to me, in Bournemouth, all the way from Shanghai in China. So Dell are way up in my good books to be honest. Yes the poorly laptop was also a Dell, but that was the first thing to go wrong at all in 18 months of heavy use, and now it is my dad's laptop. It must be an improvement over the Vista desktop because it is still in one piece

Anyway, now that I am in possession of my shiny new Dell XPS 17 (with a few bells and whistles). I can get back in the saddle with my consolidation project for Liberty BASIC, as well as playing Portal 2 (GlaiDos cracks me up).

Thanks for sticking with me, and here is to more from me soon.