Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle

I bought a 500Gb SSD  as a Christmas present for my gaming rig. As usually happens with PC upgrades things didn't quite go as smoothly as planned. Most of the difficulties arose from peculiarities of my own rig but for posterity I am recording the main issues here: 0. Peculiarities of my rig: Prior to fitting the 500Gb SSD I had two 1Tb  HDDs,  one 120Gb HDD (archives from older computer) and one 64Gb SSD being used as a cache drive. The plan was to install Windows and common programmes on the new SSD freeing up one of the 1Tb drives for additional storage. 1.Preparations: Shrinking my 1Tb C: drive so that it would fit onto the new 500Gb SSD took quite a while. Mindgems folder size  was handy for identifying the main space hogs. I used symbolic links to shift programmes I wanted to keep installed to another drive. 2. Even after deleting a bunch of stuff I still couldn't shrink the C: partition below to 500Gb because of Windows immoveable files. This guide po...

At 51 years of age I have become very settled in my ways. Nowhere is this more evident than at gifting times of year when my wife asks me for gift suggestions. I am very comfortable in my life and its patterns and I don't really need or indeed want anything new. Yes I have my hobbies and interests but over the years these have become sufficiently specialised that I cannot ask an outsider to get me something for one of my hobbies unless I hold their hand through each step of purchasing exactly the right model from exactly the right vendor. In most cases, if I really wanted something I will almost certainly have already purchased it for myself. In my defence I am a very grateful recipient of any gift at all. True gifting is a shared experience that bring happiness to both giver and receiver. Nevertheless I know my wife and family really want to get Daddy "something he wants". I feel ashamed at the pile of unread books and unused gadgets that have accumulated over the year...

The latter half of 2015 has been some what of a mixed gaming bag for me. I started the Autumn with two very enjoyable games (WItcher 3 and Far Cry 4) but no game I played since has engaged me to the same extent. Anyway for the sake of posterity let us list the games: Witcher 3: Worthy Game of the Year that ranks among the best RPGs ever made. Far Cry 4: Far Cry 3 redefined open World shooters and will be remembered as the more important game but I think Far Cry 4 polishes things up a bit and is a worthy successor. The difficulty level is more even and there is a greater variety of stuff to do than in 3. I thoroughly enjoyed the couple of weeks I spent playing my way through Kyrat. Pillars of Eternity: This text heavy old school RPG in the Baldur's Gate mode has received high praise  across the board but I found my interest in the game waning after about a week. Story is a big part of this game but I found myself overwhelmed by the sheer volume of story snippets that you stumb...