The house is still standing, and so are we!

Ok, it’s been a good couple of months since I have last posted on my blog, but that’s because I have only been able to snatch a few minutes a week on the Internet at my mum’s house.
But we now have the Internet installed at our house, so here I am!

Not much as changed with the house since the last post. The kitchen is still not finished, but we do have a sink, and I have been painting the ceiling! I’ll post up photo’s of progress on flickr soon.

We have managed to strip the wallpaper in the hallway, and have wallpapered half-way up the stairs already! It’s only lining paper, but it’s much better than the pink woodchip that was on the walls!
And again expect photo’s soon!

Since having Internet installed at our house, my girlfriend has been addicted to Facebook. In fact she on my computer right now, and all I can hear is the music of FarmVille, and the occasional pop of the chat window!

Building Kitchens!

Ok, it’s been a while since I last updated my blog, and it has also been a while since I’ve been on my computer!

The progress with the kitchen has been slow but steady, but, the sink is in!!!

On Saturday we were finally able to wash up downstairs in the kitchen for the first time!

Today I’m going to replace the wiring to the sockets in the kitchen and dining room and wire in a new socket for the washing machine.
I will also hopefully wire in in an additional socket into the small bedroom so that I can finally move my computer to our house!

I have uploaded some photo’s to my flickr account, I don’t have any photo’s of the sink in place, but there is one where the worktop is marked out ready to be cut for the sink.

That’s all for now!

Where have I been?

To be honest, there hasn’t been much happening!
Apart from the fact building work has begun in the part of the garden we sold last year.

It is now day 32, and it doesn’t look much different to what it did last week.

At the moment there is two people on site, and they seem to be doing some work, probably building up the level of the base ready for the flooring, but there is a six foot wall up stopping us from seeing what’s going on!

To get a better view we need to go along the road at the top, I’ll try that on Sunday when no one is on site and get some photo’s uploaded to Flickr.

On Sunday I went karting at SupaKart in Newport with a few mates from work. We raced in the mini endurance, which was a 10 minute qualifying race followed by a half hour non stop race.

I went out onto the track in 9th place, got placed 6th on the grid after qualifying, and finished the race 5th.

There is no photo’s as we were all racing, but there is a video of the podium on Facebook though.

Another Year, Another Birthday!

I’m getting old now, I’m going to start drawing a pension soon if I carry on like this! Lol!

Yep, as you may of guessed from the title, I have recently had a birthday, it was on Saturday, and I am now 23!

The day started off alright, I opened my presents, and then I got a phone call from my mum, who was on holiday at the time in Cyprus.
Then my girlfriend came over and took me out for the day for a picnic on the Cheddar downs.

Boy was that some trek! First we had to walk up the road to a path, and then we had to walk up a load of steps, which would of been alright, but we were carrying all the food, and my presents!

Luckily it didn’t rain, and, even though the sun wasn’t out, it was warm, and it wasn’t all that windy either!
After the picnic we spent an hour or two in the gorge going in and out of all the shops.

And here’s the mandatory present list:

And now some news on my car.

On Sunday dad took me on a guided tour of the innards of my cars engine, we had towed the car to his work Friday evening, and he was working on it all Saturday. The photos can be seen in the usual places, on my website, and on flickr.

From what dad can see at the moment, it just looks like the valves need replacing, and because its been taken off, so does the head gasket.
But first dads got to make sure the cylinder head hasn’t been warped.

That’s it for now
Till next time!

New Computer Built

If anyone has been keeping an eye on my Flickr account, you may have noticed pictures of my new computer being built have appeared!
They are the best of the ones I took, and unfortunately don’t show every step I took in building the computer.

I started the build on the fourth of March (Tuesday) by fitting the power supply, motherboard, cpu, memory and DVD drive inside the case.
Then on the eighth (Saturday) I fitted the two hard drives, and connected all the cables!

The build went quite well, I brought a few extra bits that I didn’t actually need, but at the time thought I did need! Lol!

I found a few limitations with the case during the build, one of them being the extra hard drive bay in the bottom of the case right behind the power supply, I feel it was a little cramped, and that there was barely any room for the cables coming out of the back of the power supply!

There is practically no cable management built into the case!

And finally the external drive bays, only one side of the case can be opened, which means that only one side of any drive fitted is attached, but there is some support provided to hold the drive up.

There is also the problem of the blanking plates on the front. I found I could not remove the plastic blanking plate from the outside of the case, and I couldn’t push it out from the inside because of a metal plate that had to be broken off first.
Having the metal plate there may help with the cooling, or keeping the system quiet, but maybe there should be some easier way to remove it?

That’s all I have time for in this post, but I’ll post more details when I get another chance!

Till then,
Happy computing!

I’ve Finally Done It!

Way back in September I posted details about my new computer wish list, well I’ve gone and ordered the main parts of it, thats the CPU, Motherboard, Case, Memory, and PSU!

Processor: AMD Athlon X2 Dual Core BE-2350 2.10GHz (Retail AM2) £46.95
Product Details: http://amdqrg.getspringbox.com/gb-en/desktop/details.aspx?qsearch=true&opn=ADH2350IAA5DD

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H AMD 690G Socket AM2 Motherboard £34.95
Product Details: http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Motherboard/Products_Spec.aspx?ProductID=2579

Memory: Corsair 2GB PC2-6400 C4 XMS2 (2x1GB) £49.95
Product Details: http://www.corsair.com/products/xms2.aspx

PSU: Thermaltake TR2 RX W0146 450W Modular PSU £29.95

Case: Nexus Caterpillar – Silenced ATX case £41.95
Product Details: http://www.nexustek.nl/NXS-nexuscaterpillarsilentsystem.htm

Thats a total of £203.75 exc VAT
Delivery was an extra £11.86
The VAT came to £37.73
Which brings the grand total to £253.34

It should all be delivered tomorrow (Tuesday), I hope it does, it was an extra £4 for next day delivery!
When I receive the parts I’ll take some photos and upload them to my Flickr account.

Till then,
Happy computing!

The past week

Friday was Children in Need, and the big waxing took place in ASDA.
Unfortunately I missed Scott getting his legs waxed, but I have been told he chickened out and only had one leg waxed!

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I had an email from Schmap saying that one of my photos had been nominated to be included in the forth edition of their Bristol guide.
I got an email from them Saturday saying that my photo was included.
You can view it here.

Now for more news about Linux Links, I was working all day Saturday to try and get search working, but it just wasn’t going right!

I was copying code from phpBB, and from a couple of tutorials from the Internet, I was even using the MySQL search functions, but none of them produced the results I was after.

I now feel sorry for the pigeons working at google!

Search is still not working, but I have a new plan to try, it involves splitting the search string, searching for each word separately!
I’ll keep you posted on how it goes!

Till next time
See you!