The neighbours

Today me and Amy have spent the day helping Beerman and Lagerlass (Jonny and Vikki to the rest of the world) move house. They’ve moved from a small cramped hovel next door to some chavs who, amongst other things, have posted flaming matchboxes and meat pies through their letterbox.

They now live further up the road in a nicer area of town - rather than the chavs being next door hammering on theirs asking for food, they merely have drunken normal people walking down the street yelling drunken randomness as they go home from the trendy bars and curry houses. Their neighbours are much more quiet and peaceful.

Amongst moving boxes and things I managed to capture some blurry photos with my awesome VGA quality cameraphone.

After a nasty start this morning we’ve had a productive day, turning a manky smelly, dirt ridden room not fit for human habitation (really, Amy’s ex housemate is a scruffy bastard who doesn’t know what hygiene is) into something pleasant, clean and nice to be in.

Amy’s now got a front room, ready to be filled with junk and crap retro hardware.

Yeah Me and Amy have just been to Lincoln to meet another Llamasoftie, and once again to collect yet another piece of junk retro hardware. This time it was an Atari 1040STFM. I’ve also had a Philips 14″ monitor and several hundred Amiga floppies from Amy too. It’s like I’ve just been handed the whole of 1990 in the boot of my car

Today was also a tactical way to allow Amy’s highly irritating housemate to leave quietly without causing hassle. She told him to get out by Saturday night, so we went off to Lincoln and had an excellent day, and came home to an empty room which we can now turn back into a front room.

We win all round

That is the reason for this weekend’s mad 600-mile round trip, stopping off at four people’s houses on the way to break up the trip and make it a bit more interesting. It’s a 42 inch Toshiba rear-projection telly.

Getting it into my car was a mission and a half. We spent the journey home with the front seats slid forwards, and the back seats flattened. The telly just fitted in my car but did very horrible things to the fuel economy. Getting it out required help from my neighbour, but me and Amy managed to lift it onto its stand by ourselves. It’s a big bugger, coming almost up to my shoulders.

I got it free for one reason; it has convergence problems and will randomly decide that the red, green and blue images shouldn’t match up.

Rear projection tellies are strange beasts. There’s three CRTs in the bottom part of the TV, they project their image upwards and through a complex system of lenses and mirrors the three images are converged on the back of the screen. The screen is a giant piece of plastic that has been tinted. If something happens to the convergence ICs, or some part of the optics, the image starts to look like one of those anaglyptic 3D images with mis-aligned red and green images.

However, when working, the picture is pretty good It’s big and doesn’t have any weird artefacts like LCD displays show. I have tested it out with some TV, a bit of Crackdown and Space Giraffe.

I’m strategically ignoring the convergence problem until it becomes permanent or starts to irritate me. The Internet is full of people saying their rear projection tellies, and the fix seems to be to gut the telly and replace the driver ICs with new ones. Apart from the lethal death voltages the replacement is a simple soldering job.

I shall have to closely watch the telly for a few hours and make sure it works properly I don’t think I can go back to a “small” TV any more though. Maybe two player Halo and Mario Kart will be better on such a large screen too

What the hell! There I was, writing some prattle on the Internet when I heard a strange crunching sound from by my foot. At first I ignored it, then decided to investigate. A few shiny trails on the carpet caught my attention and then I had a major moment of disbelief.

Stuck to the top of the yoghurt carton is a slug. One of those brown ones that live in the garden and eat all your plants. Only it’s not in the garden eating plants, it’s in my house eating a yoghurt carton. It even made weird little chewing noises.

After staring at it in disbelief, having a little rant about it on the Internet I did what any self-respecting person does… whipped out my digital camera and took a picture. The slug is now outside again, I hope it finds plants nicer than plastic.

The weird thing is I can’t see where it came in. The slug trail stops at my settee, it doesn’t go underneath. Now if used car salesmen read this blog, maybe my landlord does too; in which case I also have a loose slate on the roof that needs repairing.

My washer likes to try and shake my house down when going into Hyperspin. The kitchen floor is a suspended floor consisting of beams poking out the walls with floorboards on the top. With 30-odd kilos of washing machine bouncing around on top the whole house shudders in a slightly alarming way. In an attempt to dampen the gyrations I went off to Homebase and came back with some concrete slabs.

Two slabs are now under the washer, and four more are outside by my car so I don’t get mud into it. The ones under the washer seem to have made a difference since the pots and pans on my shelves no longer vibrate and rattle. The floor still shakes enough to make eyeballs vibrate though.

It’s a three day week this week. On Thursday all the NUT members go on strike so the school is closed to students, and on Friday it’s an INSET day. I’m not in the NUT so I will be in work, but don’t worry - I won’t be doing anything that would ordinarily be done by an NUT member. Mostly I’ll be sorting out lessons and all the other little things that get put aside during the week.

My front room isn’t the biggest, and with a settee and chair in there’s not much room left, especially if you want to do certain things like use the front door. After a bit of shuffling round I have the room sorted and it doesn’t look cramped. I just have my office to attack now, and then the carpets to hoover.

It’s nice having a room that isn’t cluttered with junk and things to trip over.

The estate agents that I rent this house off are coming to do an inspection on Tuesday. This is a good chance to do some tidying up and a spot of spring cleaning. The washer’s been on most of the day and my mountain of washing up has been reduced to a cleverly stacked pile on the draining board.

I’ve decided to change my console setup around a bit too. I’ve got them all very neatly clustered around my TV, the intention being I can just turn one on and start playing it. In theory it’s a great idea, but the wiring is a total mess and with so many choices I can’t decide what to play on.

To solve all this mess I’m putting them in different parts of my house. I’ll put some in my bedroom, keep some in the front room and have one in my office.

I collected Amy and her slightly dim dog, Twinkle from the station today. She’s still unpacking her house and I think getting a bit bored of it now.

Contrary to what my sister wrote in her Facebook, I did not forget Mother’s Day. I forgot to post the card off in time, but I was well aware that Sunday was Mother’s Day. I was just helping Amy move house…

So I went over today instead

Occasionally I was phoned by Amy asking “Where are the screws for the bed?” and “where did you put that thing with the stuff on it that I had in my room?”. All these replies were dealt with in a super efficient manner of “err… they’re in a box… it’s brown, and is held together with tape”.

Mental note for next time: Write box contents on box, or use some sort of RFID/barcode tracking system. “Yes, what is the item you want? Ok, forks are in a kitchen box, you need to find the box with serial number 8374745.”

I had to leave at about 8pm, but by then Amy had moved about 90% of her junk stuff into her new house. It’s all sat in her room in various boxes. Today mostly consisted of putting boxes into a van, going down the road, taking the boxes out the van and then repeating. Unfortunately the van and its driver had to go at 2pm, but fortunately she managed to convince some of her other friends to come and help move too. It was sort of like house moving in shifts with a constantly changing band of helpers.