Happy new year and all that jazz. My new year was spent with no internet access, so I felt like caveman for the day. I resorted to primitive forms of entertainment, like books and the Nintendo 3DS. It actually wasn't so bad. One of my "new years resolutions" is to try and read more. I'm still not sure what my target number of books will be but I made a start on The Hobbit anyway. Read it a while ago but I want to get through this and the three Lord of the Rings books. That'll probably take some time. Quite fancy reading through the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books as well. I've already read the first three (I think) before but will start over. Recently saw the old BBC TV series based on the books and that made me want to re-read.

After being told by the ISP tech support that because we weren't using the router they gave us we would have to wait several days until they sent us a new one I thought "fuck it" and tried to fix the connection problems myself. Aside from the usual "switch it off and on again" speel which I'd obviously already tried myself, they uttered something about the broadband account password needing refreshed. But since we weren't using the router they issued, they decided the best thing to do was send out a new router, which would probably take a week to arrive. So I decided to look through the router's config for where it takes the broadband account username and password. Finally found it, re-entered it and... it sort of worked. Mobile devices seemed to be able to access the internet fine. PCs would happily access Google sites but that was about it. Assumed it was a DNS issue, DNS flush did nothing. Thought I'd have a look to see what DNS servers the router was looking at and it was set to ISP default. Thought "fair enough, probably should leave it at that". After 30 minutes of fucking about and still getting nowhere, I tried pinging the ISP default DNS servers and low and behold, no response. Maybe they don't respond to pings, but I had a look online (via phone) to see what the suggested DNS servers were for my ISP. I found different IP addresses. Tried these new ones and just like that, I have proper internet access again.

No internet access wasn't all bad though. Like I said before, I resorted to reading and I started playing The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds on the 3DS. Was always a bit unsure on how much I'd like that game because it had a couple of significant mechanics that I didn't like the sound of. Renting equipments and the whole merging into walls thing. Renting items sounded like it would take away from the Zelda experience and the wall thing just sounded a bit shit and gimmicky, but so far I'd probably consider this as the Zelda game I've had most fun with. The dungeons (so far at least) have never felt frustratingly lengthy or too maze-like which is my main gripe with most of the Zelda games I've played. I'm just not huge on the art style of this one. It's not bad, it just feels a bit generic to 3DS style.

Also been playing quite a lot of bass since Christmas. I've been learning songs via Rocksmith 2014 and so far I've managed to get 90-100% for most of them. Find it so much more enjoyable than playing guitar for some reason.

So anyway, I'm just happy to have proper internet access again!