Jebus. I need a holiday.

16 hour days are no fun. Zzzz

I’m back! But I’m knackered.. ended up working 2 out of my 4 rest days, and it’s back to do it all again for another full week now. Night night, post soon!

I’m cat-sitting for a friend over the weekend, so as of this post until Tuesday, things may be a bit quiet around here. I’m not sure if $friend has internet access or not… guess I should have found that out before I agreed to do it really. Dumb!

Rest-assured I’ll be enjoying the peace and quiet, and you won’t have to put up with my rantings

I just got a letter from my bank offering me a £25,000 loan. Pre-approved, guaranteed to be in my account within 60 minutes.

Damn.

The Avia Journey was in danger of floating completely off-topic thanks to my love of photography. Rather than dilute the content here any further, I’ve started another blog called ‘Sussex in Focus‘.

There will be a new photograph every single day, taken by me, and the only constraints on me are that the picture must have been taken in West or East Sussex, ideally on the same day that the photograph is posted to the blog. Ideally they’ll be of a public nature, i.e. a landmark, landscape, sunset, a street or building, but you might find a few personal ones sneaking in now and again, such as my cats.

A snap-shot in time for every day not just in my life, but in other peoples’ as well. Do come and visit if you like any of the photographs I’ve taken so far.

There are hundreds of thousands of different styles of house, but they boil down to a few generic design types. Detached, semi, terraced, end-terrace, flat/apartment or bungalow. I readily acknowledge that as a first-time buyer my options are somewhat limited by price, and I’ll go with that. But from shopping around on the various property websites, I don’t think I’ll be as limited as I first thought.

So it’s time to set my base specification. This is what I’ll accept as a minimum specification for My Avia. Anything above this within my price range – which is too far in the future to be concerned with right now – will be a bonus. But these are my absolute minimum requirements.

• Ideally a detached property, although I will consider anything
• Minimum 2 bedrooms
• A good, spacious kitchen area
• A large living area capable of hosting my Home Theatre dream setup
• A separate area for a Home Office (will use Bedroom 2 if it comes to it)
• A manageable garden with room for BBQ, vegetable growing and relaxing (not too big!)
• Preferably off-road parking, and an on-premise garage (ideally).

Looking around the various property websites, that isn’t a wild dream list, either. With the ground rules set, everything else is a matter of design and taste and money. Despite being a first time buyer I’m looking at trying to buy the place I dream of first time round. If I can avoid having to jump to a succession of different properties and climbing my way up the ladder one tiny rung at a time, then I certainly will. Chances are that will require a lot of effort on my part – but I’m not afraid of a little work.

I’ve got the taste part covered. I suppose I’d better start working on the design and the money!

Another painless experience from Automattic. Thanks guys. An added bonus – all my plugins still work. Horray!

You may recall in May I was the very happy recipient of a Western Digital MyBook Mirror Edition. This USB 2.0 device contains 2x 1TB Western Digital Green drives, in a delightfully styled ‘book shelf’ case. Now that I’ve been using it for a month or so, it’s time for a review!

Ignoring the initial ordering disaster, this item was delivered on time and in good condition by Amazon UK.

The Packaging

A Boring Box - Goodies Inside?

I was a little concerned about the size of that box. I had a horrible feeling the product was going to be considerably bigger than it turned out to be. Fortunately it was just typical Amazon packing methods.

Wow. Wasted Space!

Enough! I want to see the box! Show me the product!

Hello little one.

Read the rest of this entry »

Regular visitors will know the hell I’ve been experiencing with my digital satellite reception lately. An engineer from Sky has finally attended today. He arrived at 15:45 with no phone call, despite the promise he’d ring on the day to give some idea of when he’d be here. Irritation point 1.

To his credit, he was considerably better than the previous engineer who turned up in April. He could see the problem from the various recordings I had made, and fortunately the problem presented itself during his visit live! Bonus. He got his ladders out, checked the signal on the roof and replaced our LNB. He said the quality of the signal was now superb. He then left. Irritation point 2.

So far, the TV is behaving. But I’ll be watching it closely over the next few weeks. Not a single gesture of goodwill besides kindly not charging me for the visit. Now that’s customer service for you.