Nick inspecting the carnage

Nick inspecting the carnage
Originally uploaded by j0hncooke

Hole in the floor

Hole in the floor
Originally uploaded by j0hncooke

Nick cut a hole in the floor to investigate why its sinking

Continuity

I have spent most of the weekend without internet. Even now the equipment which normally keeps me on-line is somewhat jerry rigged. The reason for this mess up is that this weekend I my dad and Bruce have been doing a spot of re-wiring. My parents are having a new kitchen, and moving the cooker and appliances around so the cooker mains and some sockets needed moving around.
I thought that it would be a fairly straight forward task, that isn't quiet how things turned out. We had to chop plaster off the wall, take up floorboards in the room upstairs, run a cable into the wall underneath the toilet and into my old bedroom.

Near the end we had to do too long cables runs, they were unexpectedly long because of the route we had to take. Unfortunately this meant we ran out of cable just after B&Q had closed. Fortunately Bruce had a brainwave, Phils parents are also having some work done. Including replacing all the old electrics, they ere only installed about 10 years ago so the cable would do for us. We called round and after asking for permission from Gillian we were able to find a few decent lengths of cable in the skip. It was in really good condition too.

Eventually we managed to get three ew single sockets and move two double sockets and get the wire for the new cooker in place. It took most of the weekend but for a bonus I got take away two evenings on the trot :) Very naughty, but extremely tasty.

Magic mystery and junction boxes

My head hurt this morning, unfortunately thanks to my routine I find it virtually impossible to sleep in these days so I was awake before 9 feeling sorry for myself.

I spent most of the morning chatting to someone online, she told me I should have proposed to Olya. I was a little horrified at such an idea but she sees the whole a lot differently than me. We always have interesting conversations for it though.

I was also trying to use PHP to access the webservice I wrote for my dad. To be honest I understand why people pay for products that just work, I am using complex types for my webservice and php just can't seem to deal with them :( Failing with that I foolishly turned my hand to some diy.

The light on our landing for well over a year so I decided it was high time it was fixed. Hours later I was covered in crap from the loft and desperately searching for fuse wire after blowing the fuses. Basically its got two switches one downstairs and one up which can turn the light on and off. Unfortunately the electrician just used chocolate boxes and the light was removed months ago so it was trial and error wiring. It was also all in the loft which has no light and it very dirty. My dad and I both get pretty stressed out, it took hours and hours but eventually I succeeded in getting it all hooked up.

This evening we went to see the new Harry Potter (Order of the Phoenix). It is the longest and in my opinion one of the best of the books, a lot darker than the preceding stories. Obviously there was far too much in the book to squeeze into the film, indeed I think this one is the biggest departure from the book. It mostly got things right balancing between being faithful to the main story whilst cutting out some of the sub-plots. Some of the editing was a little clumsy, a few words glossing over some huge part of the book but overall it was an enjoyable film well worth a watch.

This was a big film release and so we didn't have to sit with the mob (and children) we splurged out on gallery seats. The gallery seats are on a raised area above the main seating. There are large plush leather seats, there is also a separate sound sound system and the best bit is free soft drinks, sweats and popcorn. Its a bit expensive at £16 a ticket its a bit pricey but if your the sort who goes to the cinema, and buys drinks and popcorn its probably not bad value.