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:
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After:
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We also got to work on renovating the kitchen. We removed the old kitchen units and then the tiles from the wall, the artex from the ceiling and the wallpaper leaving a shell.
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.
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We dismantled the storage heaters (which were full of tonnes of heavy bricks) and installed a new 7 radiator central heating system, replacing the immersion tank with a combi-boiler which left space in the boiler cupboard to fit a new washing machine (living without a washing machine is a nightmare).
We took the opportunity to fix up some other plumbing issues like re-routing any visible pipes so that they are hidden and we replaced the dangerous old lead gas pipe with a new copper one. We also installed a cooker gas point and a towel rail in the bathroom. |
XBox,First Person Shooter,7/10 – September 2004
 
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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 LIVE which looks like fun. With all the hype about Halo 2, I can’t understand why there’s such major graphics glitches in all the cut-scenes? Textures pop-in about a second after many of the scenes start! |
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).
XBox,Battle Racing,9/10 – July 2004
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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. I played 50 hours of this game, it’s just Fab! |
Horror, 5/10 – Summer 2004
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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 so ended up disappointed. |
Cyberpunk, 9/10 – Summer 2004
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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 doesn’t spoon-feed you all the threads that intertwine everything. I think putting everything together took me 24 hours after finishing the book.
The secret (and illegal by Turing police rules) unification of two AI’s called Wintermute and Neuromancer has left unexplained entities in the matrix (explained in the 1st book) – “Yeah, there’s things out there, Ghosts, voices. Why not? Oceans had mermaids, and we have a sea of silicon, see?” These matrix “voodoo gods” are referred to as the “loa” by Wig, Beauvoir, Lucas and their associates (who basically worship them). The problem is that the “loa” have found a way to inhabit the real world by designing biochips and having them grafted into people’s brains. Angie is one of these people – Angie’s real-life dreams affect the Matrix (she accidentally saved Bobby at the start of the book when he ran into some ICE) and the loa of the Matrix can affect Angie (they can possess her). This technology provokes the interest of one of the richest men in the world who is seeking to free his mind from his cancer-ridden body. The resulting power struggle pulls the strings of all the pawns that are characters in the book. Read it, you might see what I mean?
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 layout (using the Sims2):
Sci-Fi, 2/10 – Spring 2004
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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 have been so confused if I didn’t know about the culture from other books. |
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 drivers right elbow on the window sill.
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Lance is male because Chloe correctly pointed out that he’s a total womens car (for example, instead of a glove compartment, he has a make up box). Bought him (T476 TBL) for £2500 with only 51300 miles on the clock. |
Cyberpunk, 9/10 – Spring 2004
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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 required to grasp the abstract nature of “the matrix”. Perhaps, being a coder myself helped to inspire me. The book is basically about the creation of a new being, a merger of AI to form something so powerful as to be a digital god. |
I like that way that complete weirdness can be believable because it’s in the matrix. However, I am bugged by Peter Riviera, a psychopath who is able to create holograms with the force of his mind (Magic in the matrix is fine, but not in the real world)!
GBA,Turn-based strategy,9/10 – March 2004
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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 difficulty even though the setting is fixed (meaning I don’t have to feel like a wuss for setting it on “easy”). I must admit finding the tips you get when you are defeated quite helpful (I sometimes purposly yield just to get the tips). The enemy AI is well balanced so you get the rewarding feeling that your outsmarting it (but I get the impression it could kick my arse if it really tried). There’s quite a few times in the game where you get overwhelmed but manage to win the battle by sneeking round the back and destroying the objective. One variable which helps give the game flexiblity is the CO powers allowing for different tactics to try out. Great game.
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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 as well as Mozilla Firebird 0.7 which can run directly off the watch without needing to be installed on whatever computer the watch is plugged into (uses 16 meg though). |
War time Fiction, 8/10 – Jan-Feb 2004
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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 horror of this experience is depicted objectively; the facts are allowed to speak for themselves. |
The terribly tragic, and all too forgotten era of the great war is brought to life incredibly vividly. One can almost experience the fear during an artillery barrage, taste the tension and anxiety of battle and witness the horror of impersonal, needless, mass slaughter on the Somme. Birdsong derives most of its power from its descriptions of mud and blood, and Wraysford’s attempt to retain a scrap of humanity while surrounded by it.
There is a simultaneous description of his present-day granddaughter’s quest to read his diaries, which is designed to give some sense of perspective. A very moving book and I think it important to understand what our ancestors really went though for us.
XBox,Rally Driving,7/10 – January 2004
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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 was because codemasters were running a competition to win a 10000 pound Citroen Xsara car. Australia Stage 1 is now ingrained in my brain. I must have played the track 500 times to get my time of 258.333, sliding over the bridge in the Peugeot 205 using manual gearbox and the analog stick for gradual acceleration and breaking. Brake as late as possible but don’t floor it half way through a corner . Get the power on gently, any sideways driving or wheelspinning might look cool but it slows you down dramatically. Keep the back of the car under control and avoid wheelspin whenever possible. I could dictate the co-drivers comments. Competing for the prize was an awesome experience even if I only ended up 20th. I got a pretty good glimpse of the games depth but can you imagine how deep the competition winners went? I’ll answer for you – No – this game has depth that only hundreds of hours of play reveal.
