My So Called Life…

Having been told we’d be without a home for 4 days you might be surprised to hear that we’re now approaching a whole month without a roof over our heads (Ok, so maybe I’m being a little melodramatic, but it’s starting to take the Michael).

Apparently the flat was plastered on Friday, which in this heat might mean they painted it on Monday and should be habitable by now, but having heard a resounding sod all from the agency this week your guess is as good as ours.

At least a months rent back will make my wallet a little happier, and we’ll finally be able to afford that new mattress, but it would be nice to be kept in the loop of what’s happening.

Well, Toni has actually spoken to the letting agency about the flat now, they were supposed to be letting us know the state of play lest Friday, considering they initially said we’d be back in by the weekend just gone…

They still don’t know when we’ll be back in the flat again, when I stuck my head in the door on Saturday the carpet was still up and we were missing a wall, so I doubt we’ll be back in any time soon.

To top it all off, the new Burnout DLC is out on Thursday and the PS3 is back at the flat still. Nooooo!

Yet again I’ve been neglecting the blog in favour of Twitter which is much easier to update on the move.

Well we’re getting ready to go to Richard and Natasha’s wedding do, Toni’s tarting herself up all pretty like whilst Roger and I watch a documentary on WW2. All very civilised.

I’ve been a fan of the Unreal Tournament series since it first came out (bring back the razor-jacks!!) and have played each incarnation with renewed joy and enthusiasm, but when the UT3 was released I felt it was somewhat lacking… Don’t get me wrong, I thought it looked amazing, but having played the rest of the series it seemed to add a little too much. It all seemed very busy and cluttered and far removed form the clean crisp lines of UT 2003/4. One way to look at it is that more clutter is more realistic, cracked and collapsing cement has a much more visceral look to it and it works.

Anyway, last weekend Steam had a free weekend to help announce the new titan patch and update to version 2.0. So I set steam to download the game and enjoy my weekend, waiting for the download to finish.

Around about 6pm on Sunday the download completed, and after letting it install and getting all the settings as I wanted them I played about 3 matches before the free weekend ended (at 8pm!) and I was turfed out of the game. Grrr. It’s only 8 quid now though, and as I already have it pre-loaded it might be worth a punt…

**Update**

Looks like Valve/Epic realised the problem and if you’ve still got your pre-loaded data this weekend coming will be free play as well!

I’ve been remiss in posting to the blog of late, and that’s mainly because of Twitter. Me being a lazy good-for-nothing probably doesn’t help though. This being a working father thing is pretty tiring. Work, sleep, sleep work, occasionally get a weekend off to spend some quality time with my little family, it’s all go, that’s for certain. Not that I mind, at the risk of sounding like a crap Brian Adams LP, everything I do, I do it for them.

As I write this sat at my desk, attempting to shirk my responsibilities for five minutes and getting interrupted by people who need to get their computers fixed, they’re probably off on another great adventure out in the world, and I really do envy the time Toni gets to spend with the little guy, I wish I had more time to spend with him. A day or two a week to go out for walks along the canal or off to see friends really doesn’t seem like enough.

But that’s not what I’m here to write about, so before I go off on a complete tangent, Twitter… I’ve had the feed on the right set up for a while, and it’s becoming slightly addictive. So much easier to send little bursts of wht I’m up to, than update this behemoth of a site, but that’s no excuse.

I should warn you that I have a tendancy to block anyone I don’t recognise, but don’t let that put you off. I seem to be updating a couple times a day at the moment, but I’m sure to get bored with it sooner or later. At least I can stalk Stephen Fry without fear of a restraining order…

This past year has seen a lot of changed for me. In February Toni gave birth to my beautiful baby boy, I got a Playstation 3, we moved house and, as much as I’d like to ignore it, I became 30.

Has anything really changed though? Not really. Sure there are a lot of things that are different now, things that I’d not have been able to guess at a year or two ago, but things which I would never change in a million years. There’s nothing like coming home from a crappy day’s work to see that little smile and get a kick in the nadgers (I feel I should point out this is from Ryan, not Toni…).

As you can probably guess from the lack of recent posts, he’s been keeping us both pretty busy, but I’ll try to update a little more often during the next year (I think that’ll be my only new year’s resolution). In the mean time keep an eye on the updates panel on the right for my mini-feed.

Happy blogging, and have a happy winter festival thing, whatever belief system makes you happy.

Well we’re in!

I never knew we had amassed so much crap in our time living in Sidwell Street. We threw out about 6 fill bin-bags of stuff and there was still mountains of stuff to move.

We’re sadly without internet at the moment as we’re still waiting for the agency to sort out the bills for the gas, electric and the phone line so we can get the broadband up and running. All I ca say is after the gas leak that was in the flat, which was sorted out this morning, they’re about a gazillion times faster to respond than our old landlord. To be fair, they couldn’t be much slower…

I’d invite you all  over to see the new place, but we’re still unpacking, and besides this is the internet and you’re all a bunch of weirdos.

I’m coming up to the end of an era in my life. For the last 6 or so years I’ve been living in my penthouse looking out over Sidwell Street, but now I’m the family man that I am it’s time to move to somewhere a little more family friendly.

Our new place has 8 steps, rather than the current 58, to get to the front door and seems substantially bigger than where we are now. The kitchen is rather lacking, but them’s the breaks.

Hopefully our little man will be happy to run up and down the corridoors and now he’ll have his very own room for all his toys and stuff. Woot!

Well, it was 2 years ago that myself and the wonderful Toni announced our togetherness to the world through the medium of the blog, and although it seems to have flown by we do have an amazing little man to show for our efforts. Who’d have thought it?

For the last few days I’ve not been able to get steam running, it just sits at “Steam - Updating - 0%” and does nothing. It was allowing safe mode but after trying to reinstall it from the download it lost that too. One fix on the forums says to delete StreamUI.dll and try again, but that didn’t work.

In the end it turns out that Steam doesn’t like network bridges. Deleted the bridge and deleted my second network port and it went straight in. Finally!