Tom Fotherby
Kitchen wall demolished (12/Dec/2004)
The previous owner has a partition wall due to old regulations about a bathroom not being allowed to directly lead onto a kitchen. We decided the kitchen would feel a lot bigger without the wall: Before: After: We also got to work on renovating the kitchen. We removed the old kitchen units and then the […]
Central Heating Installed (19/Nov/2004)
The house didn’t have a boiler (only an old immersion tank) and it used ancient storage heaters. This meant the shower was cold, there was only ever five minutes hot water and it was impossible to heat the house with any flexibility. We dismantled the storage heaters (which were full of tonnes of heavy bricks) […]
Halo 2
XBox,First Person Shooter,7/10 – September 2004 Friends ask me what’s the difference between Halo 1 and 2. Halo 2 has more vehicles and the marines can now drive them, you can hold 2 weapons, you get to be a Covernent soldier and thats about it. Except that the multiplayer mode has been boasted with XBox […]
TV aerial installed (25/Aug/2004)
Unbelievable that our shiny new house didn’t come with a TV aerial. It was obviously an urgent requirement :-). We had a company install an aerial suitable for digital TV (freeview).
Burnout 3
XBox,Battle Racing,9/10 – July 2004 Go Fast and Hit Stuff. This game introduced a great form of driving combat which I first saw in “destruction derby”. You get to knock opponent cars off the track! The levels manage to vary greatly and the game gives the best impression of speed that I’ve seen so far. […]
The Wasp Factory (Ian Banks)
Horror, 5/10 – Summer 2004 It is obsessive, gory, cruel, repellent and gut churningly unsettling. This book will no doubt encompass some of your worst nightmares and lay them out clearly for you on the page. It will destroy your innocence. The story has a twist at the end, but I was expecting more and […]
Count Zero (William Gibson)
Cyberpunk, 9/10 – Summer 2004 First realise that this is the 2nd book of a trilogy that is “Neuromancer”, “Count Zero” and “Mona Lisa Overdrive”. I don’t advice reading this until you’ve read Neuromancer and have got into the whole cyberpunk vocabulary. The plots in the storyline are deliciously challenging to unravel and Gibson certainly […]
Got Keys to Great Knollys Street (16/Jul/2004)
In July 2004, we bought a small Victorian terraced starter home 12 minutes walk from Reading railway station. It has easy parking, a park out the back and plenty of potential (i.e. needs lots of work). Owning my own house has been a dream for a long time! This is a loose representation of the […]
Inversions (Ian M Banks)
Sci-Fi, 2/10 – Spring 2004 Besides extra moons in the sky and stories of devastating meteor showers that toppled a former Empire, this novel’s squalid, pre-industrial world seems to have no sci-fi elements. I was constantly anticipating something cool to happen but it never did, or it did but was really really disappointing. I would […]
“Lance” – 2nd May 2004
I bought this “Ford Ka” because he was built recently (1999) and has 4 stars in the parkers guide for reliability. But he’s an upgrade in a lot of other ways, power-steering, airbags, immobilizer, back-wiper, lights-on-doors-open warning sound, 1.3 engine, slow-speed wipers, 5-gears. He’s got good head room but not enough space to rest the […]
Neuromancer (William Gibson)
Cyberpunk, 9/10 – Spring 2004 Wow, I’d never read anything like this before. The language and slang is heavy going but once I got to grips with it I began to love it. I like tech stuff and this kind of literature is just what I’ve been looking for. A great amount of imagination is […]
Advance Wars 2
GBA,Turn-based strategy,9/10 – March 2004 This is a tweeked version of Advanced Wars 1 with the introduction of interesting defensive buildings such as canons, missles and lasers. There is also the new NeoTank which expains why the strong tanks of AW1 were only called “Medium” Tanks. The game is set at a perfect level of […]
32 Mb USB Memory Watch – 20th March 2004, birthday present from Kix
Contains 32MB of Toshiba flash memory USB cable securely integrated in to the watch strap Water resistant, Shock proof and Anti-static Oh, I don’t have a floppy with me… hang on I’ve got 30 floppies permanently on my wrist! I think it is amazing cool to carry around a backup of my most precious files […]
Birdsong (Sebastian Faulks)
War time Fiction, 8/10 – Jan-Feb 2004 The book starts before the war in Amiens, in 1910, when Stephen Wraysford has an intense love affair with a married woman that comes to an unsatisfactory end. The novel then shifts in time to 1916, when we encounter Stephen enduring the nightmare world of the trenches. The […]
Colin Mcrae Rally 4
XBox,Rally Driving,7/10 – January 2004 I’m into racing games like burnout and as a consequence I initially found Colin Mcrae impossibly slow and difficult due to it’s realism – It simulates the driving of a real rally car so well that you have to be an expert rally driver. The reason I stuck at it […]
