I arrived back from Donegal on Tuesday after our four day campervan trip, which was pretty fun. I was apparently the designated cook, so had an interesting time cooking within tight confines. The cooker is decent, and we were well stocked with kitchen equipment, but the van was filled up with lots of other stuff so space was tight. The whole trip covered around 450 miles, and a lot of beaches, and beautiful scenery along the way.

Things didn’t stop, or even slow down when we got back home. My auntie, uncle and cousin are visiting from England, and arrived on Wednesday. When guests arrive in my house, all hell breaks loose! The entire morning and afternoon prior to the arrival of guests is spent cleaning and cooking intensively, to the point of driving me insane. The end result is always good, but there’s so much stress and work involved…it’s not something I’d want to do every week.

And then the next night we had more dinner guests! Repeat the same intensive cleaning and cooking process over again, and then it was over. Today was significantly more chilled. I was out at the Head of the Road pub near Portadown tonight, celebrating my grandad’s 80th birthday. 80, and he still Skypes, and uses a DVR and is the most skilled craftsman I know. He was a cabinetmaker and joiner, and is still building things and engineering solutions to things, and being generally handy.

So I have a temporary reprieve, until Sunday when the madness begins again. Quite a few people are coming for dinner…quite a few.

Aside from being domestic and all that, I’ve been messing around with my phone a lot lately. Motorola still haven’t released an official update to ICS (Ice Cream Sandwich), or Android 4.0 for the Atrix, which left me stuck in the land of Gingerbread, otherwise known as Android 2.3. For my old phone, the ZTE Blade, installing a new ROM was a lot easier. The bootloader was unlocked, and rooting the device was as simple as downloading a file and pushing a button. With the bootloader locked on the Atrix there’s no way of accessing the system partitions to install custom versions of Android. That’s a shame, as ICS is really nice. Every subsequent build of Android feels like a significant improvement over the last. Faster, smoother, even better looking. It’s just a shame they can’t get their asses into gear and release the update. As usual, the Android community is fantastic and has a solution to every problem you encounter along the way.

With the help of folks over at xdadevelopers I was able to root, and unlock the bootloader through a roundabout method. Working with this sort of stuff does scare me sometimes, because if anything goes wrong you can end up with a completely bricked device, which is no better than a doorstop. The many warnings from other users are testament to this, and I admire the early adopters who probably sacrificed many a device in the name of progress.

The computer building issue is still to come, but there may be a rather major spanner in the works. My photos have disappeared, but hopefully they turn up soon so I can get this thing written. I also have to write about Max Payne 3, which is a smashing game.

That’s it for now. If you’re looking for something else to do, go watch Death Wish. Charles Bronson really is fantastic.