My So Called Life…

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!

Well, it looks like we’re going to be moving next month!

After a second attempt at viewing the new flat Toni has her heart set on it. I still don’t think it’s perfect, but it’s a really nice area, really big rooms and close enough to the station to get to work. It’ll mean getting up earlier than normal, but them’s the breaks.

Toni is already off to secure the place with whats sure to be the begining of various non-refundable agency payments, so everything’s in motion already.

Our target for moving is going to be around the end of October, so it’ll be all hands on deck.

We went to have a look at a new flat this morning, one that’s not 4 stories up and in the middle of town, but the woman who’s there at the moment didn’t leave the agent the keys so we spent half an hour sitting about waiting to see if they could contact her, then gave up.

It’s nicely out of the way and looks good from the outside, and if we manage to actually get inside some time we’ll see what the rest is like.

Well it’s Friday night and i can look forward to 1 day off before my 7 day working week begins. Joy.

I need a few extra shifts, and the weekends stop us going into complete financial meltdown, but I do miss having a few lazy days that we can enjoy together doing as little as possible.

Toni’s arranged a viewing of a place near St. Davids on Monday so we’ll see what it’s like, although I’ll already be thinking it’s Tuesday by that point.

VLC media player has just had a major update but the new version has a fullscreen controller that is just plain annoying. In the old version once you went full screen there were no controls and it showed you the video. Now, for some reason, it simply blinks the annoying controls off and on. It also freezes randomly.

So much that I’ve dropped back to 0.8.6i so it just works. That’s what VLC was best known for after all.

I’ve been trying to get the PS3 to play videos off the network, so I can use that instead of the server, but there’s no way to browse a network for media files. Turns out you need to stream the video to the PS3 with a media server. After having problems with TVersity, it kept crashing trying to decode and encode the video, I tried Fuppes and it seems to be doing the job so far. There’s still a few files that don’t seem to want to play ball, but I think they just need a little tinkering.

Saves getting up though.