As a little gift to myself I went and bought a Nintendo DS. Sssh it's not officially out until tomorrow.

The game I bought was Zoo Keeper, which is a puzzle game. You use the touch screen to move blocks of animal faces into groups of three or more. You have to try and catch a certain number of animals per level.

If you haven't captured enough of a certain animal, then their faces will turn angry. There will be the elusive one you can't find as the timer ticks away. Then the animals all start to shake making it even harder to find them! The machine itself is lovely. The screen is fully backlit, so SP games are much brighter. Stereo sound is also quite welcome. There is a stylus and also a thumb thing on the strap which is good for the demo FPS (Metroid Prime Hunters) which came with it.

There is a built-in mic, but the games which use it haven't fully exploited it. I hope some developers will use voice recognition in some cool way.

Wireless built in, so you can play against others who have a machine. You can also send messages in chat rooms if you have other DS owners around. Also there is an alarm clock and calendar. Go get one!

Sorry for the lack of entries. I have been looking for a new job.

By chance, a position opened up in London which I think I'll really enjoy. I will be starting at the end of the month as a Ruby developer. :)

There may be a continued lack of entries for a few weeks more, as I have to find a new place to stay.

There are some birds nested in the eaves just outside my room, so I'm used to scrabbling noises. This morning, there were scrabbling noises from elsewhere in the house.

Of course, it stopped as soon as I went to investigate. However, when I was in the loo, I could hear noises coming from underneath the bath. As I opened up the panel, I heard a bird panicking. I left the panel and the window in the bathroom open.

Up to the loft with my Surefire (finally, an excuse to use my torch!) but I didn't find anything except for bird poo. I have left the loft hatch open too, just in case.

I hope it has escaped, otherwise we'll have to find it by smell in a few days.