Showroom house

This picture is taken in the living room of a showroom house almost opposite the house we have bought you can see it on the left through the window. The news on our house is, well, unusual or even dissapointing you could say.

A few weeks ago we saw a crack in the wall which is not unusual in a new house, all the water in the cement walls dries and you always get cracks, nothing to worry about.

A week ago we were supposed to have the first inspection where you can walk around the house and let the contractor know what you think is wrong and they can get it all fixed before finally giving you the key. This inspection was postponed because the contractor thought the cracks to be on the "worrying large side". The second inspection was also postponed due to the outcome of the meeting between all sorts of people, all denying resposibility.

What seems to have happened is that the building site next our house have built a dam wall (this being Holland and under see level) but this wall has managed to upset the foundations of our house and thus cracks in the wall have appeared.....and got bigger and now the outside resembles that famous Italian building, well not quite that bad.

Anyway it seems that the lawyers and contractors and whom ever else they can get together are going to sort it out.

Must be a claim there somewhere for someone..

Not moving yet then.

My not so easy album choice

I decided to give myself the almost impossible task of trying to name my favourite 3 albums. At first I thought about 10 albums but this was much much easier which is why I wanted the difficult task of naming 3.

 

Radiohead          – In Rainbows

Rush                      – Moving Pictures

Iron Maiden       – The number of the beast

Joe Satriani         – The Extremist

Radiohead          – In Rainbows

 

Even after naming the 3 that I now have chosen I am still not sure if they are my 3 top albums. Just choosing my favourite Rush album was hard enough. Fly by night has so many good numbers, 2112 is an ultimate classic but side B is not so good, Permanent waves has the amazing Jacobs ladder on it and more, I just love Hemispheres but I finally choose Moving pictures, it has 3 masterpieces on it Red Barchetta, YYZ and Limelight and also my absolute Rush favourite The Camera eye. But even after writing this I still fight myself and am continually finding arguments to challenge my choice.

 

I had less of a fight choosing my favourite Satriani album and ended up choosing The Extremist even though it does not have my top songs on it.

 

The number of the beast by Iron Maiden is just pure heavy metal greatness.

 

I have just noticed that I have 4 in the list and not 3. The 4^th one, In Rainbows by Radiohead, is the newest Radiohead album and has grown to be  one of my all time favourite albums, so many great and diverse numbers on it. But now you see my problem, I have 4 on the list and I said 3 so now I have to lose 1. Hmmmmmm……

 

Well it surprises me too but I will choose The Extremist as the one to lose. Or….no….you see, I can’t choose. Anyway a few more worthwhile albums that were in my top are:

 

Porcupine tree – Deadwing

Ayreon                 – 01011001

Airbourne           – Airbourne

Mercyful Fate    – Melissa

Slipknot                – Vol. 3 The subliminal verses

More Rush and more Satriani

 

Try it yourself and you will be amazed how difficult it is to let go of great albums just so that you can choose your top 3. I think I will now try and choose my favourite 3 songs.

Deep FAT fryer

After reading Peter’s blog I thought I would also write a little something just to agree with what he has written. He noticed that they have taken the word FAT away from the deep fat fryer because nobody wants to associate themselves with eating fatty chips. Good marketing trick if you ask me, just by taking the word away many will no longer think that chips are fatty and will eat more. Well that may be going too far but it is probably what the marketing geeks have thought.

 

Whenever shopping I nearly always go for the whipped cream, mayonnaise, Greek yoghurt with the rich creamy fatty goodness in, it tastes just so much better. Low fat milk, diet chocolate, fried bacon without the fat, it’s not the same. Anyway I’m drifting.

 

Going back to the disassociation with the word fat brings me to a TV series I have been watching of late called Ashes to Ashes. It’s about a women detective who has been shot in the head and that bullet has taken her back in time to 1982 where she is also a detective. I know, back to the eighties, how crap is that. Being a child of the eighties I don’t think I would want to do it again BUT….Seeing it again brought to me via this series I’m thinking, wow, such an uncomplicated decade. I’m not sure that 1980’s police brutality is the way to go as it was then but the “criminals have rights too” these days is just too much. There are many more examples of this uncomplicated time but it’s better if you see the series especially if you yourself are a child of the 80’s.

 

I blame the media as you may well know but I do notice a slight change these days especially in the British media. Whether this is artificial and media driven  I don’t know but it seems that there is tendency to bring more and more products out for men and women separately. I saw an advert for “man crisps” and when man gave a namby pamby answer to a ballet question in this advert he got zapped. There are hundreds of man magazines these days and I’m not talking about Vogue for men with tips on shaving but FHM types with tit’s an arse in them.

 

Oh well

Cricket, music and more apps

Cricket

England won against the West Indies and convincingly too. They won the test with ease and the ODI’s even easier, I just hope that this doesn’t mean that England can only win against teams when playing in England although seeing as the world cup is in England and starts 5^th June (during the normal England season) it feels as though England could go far this time. We shall see.

 

Music

I’ve been practicing a few more songs the last few weeks, I may have already mentioned Jimi Hendrix’s Little wing, I have been continuing to practice this song a lot as I want to really nail this one on the electric as well as acoustic. Others songs are

 

Always with me, Always with you – Joe Satriani

Are you gonna go my way – Lenny Kravitz

Speed King – Deep Purple

 

Apps

A few more apps of interest are:

ECB cricket

A free application from the England Cricket Board, allowing you to follow the scores (very nice old fashioned scoreboard), get the latest news and watch some TV cricket news.

Reference

A total guitar reference app, very cool indeed. It has already helped me with chords and scales.

iMastermind

The mastermind game, it’s worth a couple of plays but I probably won’t play it that much

iShift

Cool black and white game where you have to escape from a maze, but the cool thing is that you have to turn your world upside down to change from black to white to do certain things.

Yetisports

Hit the penguin as far you can

 

 

More apps

I bought some more apps for my iPhone and still have not been disappointed with the diversity and creativity of the developers out there.

 

1.       Nintaii – great puzzle app. The idea being that you have to push a block around a maze and get it into a hole, much more difficult than it sounds. Japanese always no how to make great mind apps. Price 0.79

2.       Realmaze 3D – Very gorgeous dungeon maze with great atmospheric sounds too. Just find your way out is the game plan. You can choose between tiny, small, normal, big, huge and enormous. The dungeons are all multi-level and when you start a new maze it is never the same. Price 0.79

3.       iKitty – A tamagotchi style app but with a kitty cat to look after. Bet you can guess who I bought this for. It not’s very responsive unfortunately, kinda slow but at least you can poke kitty in the eyes. Price 0.79

4.       Archers – Try and kill your opponent with arrows by firing them, changing speed and angle. Head shots are better. Great simple game for two to play. Price free

5.       Cricket 2020 – Yep, another cricket game for my expanding collection. Apparently this is the number one app in India and Pakistan. Haven’t figured out how to play well yet, my fielding is hopeless and my batting is so so. Graphics aren’t that great but it’s more of an addictive game. Price (last week 2.99) now 0.79

6.       Route Candle – A cute cartoon game in the style of Little big Planet but with colouring pencils for the graphics. I have only got the lite version so far but may get the full if I get addicted. The idea is to help “things” escape before your flame blows out. Price free

7.       qTweeter – This is a jailbroken app. It’s for updating twitter and facebook at the same time but from within any application. So if I’m listening to music I can just swipe my finger and then type in my message and update my twitface status. Haven’t bought it yet, it’s donation software but before I buy it I would like to see if it is this application that makes some other official apps crash, Also I may wait for Apple Update 3.0 and see if qTweeter still works.  Price, well anything from 2.99 to whatever.

 

 

I may have missed a couple because I have downloaded so many the last few weeks and don’t keep them all on my iPhone until ready. Most are free apps, there are plenty of them out there. My favourite of these…..Nintaii

Films

I watched a couple of films this weekend, I had some spare time and thought it was such a long time since I had watched a film that I would do 2.

 

SAW V.

I like the SAW films, they normally have a good twist in them, hahahaha, literally too. SAW V  though I found a bit, well not farfetched but it seemed as though they had tried too hard to get a story together just so  that they could film some gruesome shots.

 

The Day the Earth stood still.

This is the remake of the classic black and white film, Klaatu barada nikto, what a great film. It came as no surprise that this would not be as good as the original. Of course it had good special effects and it also had the basic good storyline but it just didn’t pull it off in the 2008 remake.  For me it was the stupid happy feely Hollywood scenes that are almost mandatory that makes it just a bit to ridiculous.

“Please don’t destroy us, we humans can change, honest we can.” Followed by all the things that Hollywood could think of to make humans look as though they are worthy of saving but those are the things that the film got wrong. It was all a bit….nah, I won’t bother, if you really want to see this film go ahead but don’t blame me if you think it’s naf.

 

So a little bit of a waste of time really, but you never know before if the film is going to be good or not. After two films like these I had to watch something that was good though, it was my duty to myself, I ended up watching an episode of Spooks season 4, great stuff.

 

 

Wacom pen

On Friday I bought a new pen and tablet to replace my mouse. I had been having pain/throbbing/numbness with my left hand a couple of months back and so switched back to right. I should point out that it’s not really painful it’s just not normal but couldn’t think of a better word.

 

Anyway I have always moused with my right hand until a couple of years ago when I started to have the same symptoms, so I switched to my left and now of course back to my right. It didn’t take long for the same symptoms to come back to my right hand so I had a bit of a problem. I didn’t want it to get any worse and become a victim. Also after reading Kristina’s blog describing atrophy I thought no way.

 

So, we had a pen mouse at work that wasn’t in use and thought I’d give it a try. After two days of getting used to it I find that I no longer feel the symptoms after 5 minutes as I did when using the mouse. I then thought I’d better get one for home use too, there is no use using one at work and then mousing all evening on my Mac at home.

 

Being slightly design conscious I opted for the more expensive iMac matching white version of the Wacom Bamboo pen. Now all I have to do is wait until I get writers cramp :-)