Phone Upgrade
Posted: Tue 18 November, 2008 Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic 3 Comments »Ye Gods, it’s time already for a phone upgrade.
Personally, I’m happy to stick with O2, so that makes life easier. I was torn between two phones, the Nokia N95 8Gb, and the new Sony-Ericsson C905. The iPhone just doesn’t appeal to me at all, I don’t actually need all the functions that the new HTC Touch Diamond has (plus I don’t want to go back to Windows Mobile) and I can’t stand Blackberry phones. Come to that, I’m no great fan of Nokia either – although as it’s about eight or nine years since I last had one, I suppose that at some point I should give them another go.
The main extra I wanted on a new phone was GPS – and yes, fanboys, I know that the iPhone has GPS too, but I just don’t like it, OK? – as I’ve had a few occasions now where GPS would have come in useful (road diversions, etc.) so it became something that would be useful to have.
Other than that, I really just wanted the “normal” phone functions – decent memory capacity, messaging, phone calls, that kind of thing. I use the camera function on occasion, but it’s not usually a defining factor – although I’ve used the camera more on the current phone, where it’s a 3.2Mp job that is actually pretty good.
So in the end I went with the C905. While I don’t use the camera-phone all that often, I can’t deny that I’m intrigued by an 8Mp camera on a phone. It’s got the GPS I wanted, and the memory card is compatible with the current phone, so that’s extra storage I’ve got already. (it’ll also make it even easier to copy stuff over from Old Phone to New Phone)
It should arrive at home in the next few days, so once that’s happened, I’m sure I’ll write more about it. Now, let’s see what kind of money I can get from Envirofone for the old K800i…
Done Tiling
Posted: Mon 17 November, 2008 Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic, Getting Organised, House Work Leave a comment »I forgot to mention it over the weekend, but Herself completed all the tiling and grouting on Friday morning, and we moved our stuff back into the bedroom on Friday evening.
It all looks fantastic, and it’s great to have another job off the list of things to do. Of course, I’m sure it’ll soon be replaced with other stuff.
Next on the list is to sand down and re-varnish/seal the teak parquet flooring in the hallway. When that’s done (probably before the Festering Season is upon us – or at worst, done in early January) then that’ll be pretty much all the major inside jobs completed – with the exception of the kitchen, which we’re currently thinking about, and debating options.
Oh, and we managed to get the tile-cutter for half-price in the end, because of the blunt cutting wheel. In fairness to HSS, when we do have a complaint, they fix it as soon as possible.
Hens – One Year On
Posted: Mon 17 November, 2008 Filed under: Animals, Domestic 6 Comments »It’s amazing to think that it’s already a year since we got our hens – and I still haven’t actually put up any photos of them, as promised in that linked post. And in fact, it’s a year today that we got the first eggs from them – and since then, we’ve averaged at least two eggs a day for the entire time.
In fact, the only reason we haven’t averaged three eggs a day is because Gladys has gone broody three times this year. We knew when we bought them that the Light Sussex was prone to going broody, so it’s not really been an issue anyway, but it’s just impressive (to me, anyway) that the main thing that has stopped any of the hens from laying has been a natural biological imperative.
All the books we got when we first started thinking about chickens warned that the birds would moult every year (and thus not lay for anywhere from 1 to 4 weeks) so we were expecting that, and it’s never happened. We actually expected far less egg-laying than has actually happened, what with expectations of moults, all hens going broody, laying seasons and the like.
We’ve been really pleased with having the hens – and as we’re now looking at upgrading the hen house, it looks like we’ll be getting more hens in the new year. That should be fun – so long as we can sell the increased numbers of eggs somewhere, we’ll be fine.
Ambition…
Posted: Sun 16 November, 2008 Filed under: Five Year Plan (now Ten), Own Business, Writing Leave a comment »Yesterday I saw a news release that just made me go “Ooooh. Me Wanty.”
Red have released information about a whole new digital movie/still camera system that they’ve created and frankly, Wow.
Maybe one day.
NCFE – Daylight Filters
Posted: Sat 15 November, 2008 Filed under: NCFE Course, Photography Leave a comment »In direct contrast to last week’s assignment, this week’s one I’m really pleased with.
The basic idea was to take a set of photos of the same scene, but using different white-balance settings, so that you could easily see the difference between the settings.
Now, I find it quite difficult to compare the images side by side and get a decent idea of what’s going on, so I came up with an idea where I could use some Photoshop jiggery-pokery, and actually get all the images side by side.
The inspiration for this came at about 4am on Friday morning, and by Friday night the assignment was complete.
And I’m decidedly happy with the entire thing…
Cutting Tiles
Posted: Fri 14 November, 2008 Filed under: Domestic, Getting Organised, House Work 5 Comments »As I’ve said before, Herself has taken this week off work as annual leave. One of her main goals during this week has been to do the tiling of the final bedroom floor – we did the floors of the other two bedrooms before we moved in, as well as the living room, and didn’t expect to use the third bedroom for a while, so we didn’t do the tiling there.
Of course, plans then changed, and the second bedroom (which we initially were using) became the office, and so we set ourselves up in the main bedroom with the untiled floor. And so it’s been ever since. Tiling the floor has always been in the plan, it’s just that while we’ve been using it, well, the tiling hasn’t happened.
So earlier this week, Herself did all the floor tiles that didn’t need any cutting – the great majority of the work – and we hired an industrial tile-cutter to do the cuts. The tiles, as I may’ve said before, are 10mm thick fully-vitrified ceramic floor tiles – in other words, they’re tough as fuck, and a normal tile-cutter doesn’t even scratch the things. So instead we have to hire the industrial variety with a water-cooled rotating blade – like a bloody big angle-grinder – in order to do the work.
And that’s fine – except when it turns out that the blade supplied with the cutter is, to be polite, blunt as fuck. (That’s far politer than what I was calling it last night)
Amazingly, I only broke two or three tiles with the bloody thing. It was jamming up three or four times per tile, needing to be reversed, or lifted, or pulled out, or sworn at – or all of the above, of course. So all told, the cutting of the (approximately) twenty tiles took nearly three hours, lots of swearing, and me getting piss-wet through (due to the water-cooling of the blade, which is basically just a pumped spray of water) and effing cold. Mid-November is emphatically not the time to be doing tile-cutting in an open garage.
Still, it’s done now – there’s only one more room that’ll need tiling at some point, and that’s the kitchen. But we need to decide what we’re doing in there first, so that won’t be ’til at least the middle of next year. The bedroom looks fantastic, even before the grouting of the tiles is completed, and it’ll make a big difference to the house.
Even better, it means we might be able to go back to sleeping in there tonight, once I/we’ve reassembled the bed, and moved the furniture back in…