House Project - First Digging

We hire a digger and bobcat and start the excavations! Digger is a real breeze to operate. Too many years with flight sims and joysticks.

First stage is to remove the soil pushing against the dodgey conservatory. This was one of the reasons the conservatory was moving down the hill as it was being pushed by the soil every time it rained.

Nothing hard there. Just paint a line and dig it up.

Then, its on to tackle the side retaining that is ready to fall over. As its next to a neighbours driveway we could only remove enough soil to halt the wall falling over. Then the funs over and its out with the bobcat to clean up. Thats a fun little implement!










This left us with a huge pile of soil to try and cover over the back section. There was just so much of it! Note for anybody thinking of doing anything like this. Soil 'fluffs up' quite considerably. Expect a large mountain afterwards!

The house project

Its been going for 3 years now and will it ever end. Originally brought the house as a 'do it uper' and had a nice small budget to do that. The project sort of grew and grew and complication after complication....


This is the house as it was when we first brought it back in 2004. 80's hardiplank house. 2 bedroom with a dodgey conservatory tacked onto the side which was falling down.

With a not so nicely placed skyline garage as they had closed in the downstairs part and the garage door was falling down. The house is down a driveway and the turning circle at the bottom meant it was very hard to go into garage forwards and reverse out again.

The Conservatory

This is the conservatory they had tacked on. You can't see it, but the left side is sinking down and was pulling the house down! The garage door no longer worked as not enough head room had been allowed for it. It didnt help that the conservatory had been built right next to dirt bank with no retaining or water protection!

The Side Retaining Wall

A retaining wall at the side of the house. They had dug out a bank to make room for a door to the laundry (no internal access downstairs) and propped up the wall with a few half rounds and sleepers. Would have been fine had they installed drainage and used some full rounds closer together! Still, because its next to a driveway the council would have complained... What didn't help was the water pipe going down neighbours driveway had been leaking for years.

The downstairs laundry

The worst part of the house! This is located inside next to that retaining wall and had been dug out under the house to make enough room for a laundry. It was totally stuffed! Every time it rained the laundry would flood, and behind the wall of the laundry was a disaster as can be seen. The bank had collapsed over the years due to no drainage around the top half of the house.







So we brought the thing at a cheap price and started the renovations.....

Mythtv

I had some spare time over the weekend and cobbled together quite a few older computer parts to make Mythtv box.
Used knoppmyth as its easier to install. Whilst I could go through the manual method of installation, I'm a lazy bugger who prefers the one click approach. Shame on me!

Got it up and running easily except for tv tuner card. What a fiasco that was. To see if things would work I went down to Dick Smith Electronics and brought a cheap tv tuner card (no mpeg encoding - cheap being the word here!) and got it home and hey wow, everything except the card in the box... Wait another day, go back and exchange it and try again. Amazingly (I have no faith in dse products but thats all that is open on weekends around here!) the card was picked up first go and available to mythtv.

Then disaster.... Her indoors decides to play with it for a bit and now it says it cannot connect to backend database! But its running and on same server! Doh doh doh. Oh well.

When does brand new end

You buy an item from the shop and tell everyone 'hey look at my brand new [item name here]'. At what point does is this brand new item no longer deemed brand new. One day, one week, one year?
I have a brand new pair of rollerblades. I've never used them and they are getting near 2 years old. Brand new until used once maybe. Or twice. Or is it a personal preference...

Climate change

When the scientists finally come out and say "Oops we forgot to mention that global warming is exponential and is not linear" we'll all be roasting in 50 degree (c) temperatures, thats if massive weather storms don't get us first. 500km/h winds. Probably not a problem in the not too distant future.
Perhaps there really is a future for nuclear energy. It can even run our cars (electric). Now to convince the US that they would not be in control of waste reprocessing and that most countries already do this securely.

The biggest killer to our environment right now is down to just one person. And that person is...... George dubya Bush. Cheers George for being the biggest tit in history. Perhaps you can go down as the man who killed the planet

The Olympics

Its on again and all the non believers thought it would be a shambles. Good on ya Greece, all running to clockwork.
I reckon they should have a drugfree and a drug allowed olympics. It would sure be interesting to compare results! Imaging the guys lining up for 100m sprints! And womans weighlifting. eek. I doubt these people would have much of a life after competing though. They'd either have heart failure or their liver/kidneys would collapse!
But its all about television and viewer appeal isn't it! I'm sure more merchandise would be sold, and more people would watch.......

Civil war in America

I was recently asked about John Titor. I knew nothing of him until I googled him. Interesting theories. I don't really follow the notions of black holes and time travel. My belief is that black holes are a bit like a blender, at a very large scale with blades so fine they work at an atomic level. And if a time traveller did come back, he would know dates/times of many things. Heck he could tell us what a share price would be on any day!

Not knowing much about civil wars and how they start, I wonder how such a war would/could start in a democratic economy. I thought mass unemployment would be a key motivator for such to happen, which causes breakdown of the economy. There is no mention of that.

The talk of having a police state etc that breaks down the fabric of American society would surely take years to occur, and wouldn't there be checks and balances to stop such. With the patriot act, MPAA tactics, Guantanamo Bay and barbed wire free speech zones it does make me wonder if there is a breakdown already occuring. People cannot even invent anymore for fear of patent violation!

Its probably a fair bet that outright anarchy from within America would have to be next. But from which sector of society? The techies have been so busy creating things and using their minds, if they get bored, what woudl they get up to? Whilst the perceived and real threat is from offshore, what is being done at a social level to stop the internal breakdown?

Am I correct in the assumption that in American elections, there are but 2 opposing forces, Republicans and Democrates? Is there no allowance for forming an independant political party and running for office? Having but 2 allowed parties does not seem overall very democratic, in colution with each other its fairly well a fasict state.
Perhaps a good idea for the future to stop any possible turmoil would be to have open election processes where any person can form a party to challenge for seats which make up a government. It would certainly slow down progress for some things, but may help in others. It does seem the peoples voice has become smaller in America.

Starforce Copy Protection

They're at it again.... A new copy protection to piss off the users even more. When are they going to give up. And now it seems all manner of device drivers are installed just to play the game. I say no thanks, so its a sale lost! They make it almost impossibly hard just to play a game now!

Whats the best way to fight back? Buy the game, open the packet, then return it to the store and say it won't install on your machine! There are so many nasties to WWII installed, I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't install anyway!

Browser wars

So much bad press about Internet Explorer.
I used to be a die hard Windows freak. All development on Windows machines, a good little MSDN subsriber forking out $5K a year...... Then things changed.....
Fast forward. No more Visual Basic, no more MSDN. Its all JAVA/J2EE and with MONO now out, hopefully C#
And what about the browser? I used to like coding specifically for IE as it was nice and easy. But then the w3c standards caught up and other browsers got significantly better while IE humbled along.
I don't use IE anymore. I'm now on Mozilla Firefox, its a dang great browser and with the full Google toolbar now available, who needs anything else! Its free. Its opensource. Its regularly developed.
What does Firefox it have over IE?
1) Tabbed browsing
2) w3c standards based
3) Open source. No hidden gotchas. We still don't know some of the hidden Windows API's!
4) No virus problems yet.
5) If a patch is required, I bet it will come out quicker than IE. IE is too bolted into the operating system to allow rapid patch fixing.
6) Themes (aka skins). Who wants to have the same looking app as everyone else
7) Extensions. A thriving community of them.
8) Javascript console that tells me where the errors are located!
9) Works on Linux/MAC/Windows.

IE IS LEGACY

If you want better safer browsing, download Mozilla Firefox now! If Thunderbirad had an integrated calendar it would kill Outlook.

Blogging

Just what is this blogging all about. Only entering one will allow me to find out!