Not much as changed with the house since the last post. The kitchen is still not finished, but we do have a sink, and I have been painting the ceiling! I’ll post up photo’s of progress on flickr soon.

We have managed to strip the wallpaper in the hallway, and have wallpapered half-way up the stairs already! It’s only lining paper, but it’s much better than the pink woodchip that was on the walls!
And again expect photo’s soon!

Since having Internet installed at our house, my girlfriend has been addicted to Facebook. In fact she on my computer right now, and all I can hear is the music of FarmVille, and the occasional pop of the chat window!

The progress with the kitchen has been slow but steady, but, the sink is in!!!

On Saturday we were finally able to wash up downstairs in the kitchen for the first time!

Today I’m going to replace the wiring to the sockets in the kitchen and dining room and wire in a new socket for the washing machine.
I will also hopefully wire in in an additional socket into the small bedroom so that I can finally move my computer to our house!

I have uploaded some photo’s to my flickr account, I don’t have any photo’s of the sink in place, but there is one where the worktop is marked out ready to be cut for the sink.

That’s all for now!

The amount of plaster that came off of the walls is shocking! In some places we have managed to get right back to the brick wall!

We have attempted to re-plaster some of the smaller holes, which went ok, but we are now stuck with the larger expanses!

To make matters worse, we have the new kitchen cabinets lying in flat-pack form on the dining room floor, and we have our new fridge freezer being delivered tomorrow, and no kitchen for it to go into! Lol!

I have plenty of photo’s but I have had no time to get onto the Internet to upload them.

I have only come home to eat dinner, and nick more tools, and have only had about half hour on my computer a day! (Which is more than my girlfriend thinks I should be on here for! Lol!)

To top it all off, I have no car, as it is making a really loud grinding noise. We hope it just another wheel bearing, but it sounds nothing like last time!

But it’s not all bad news, as we have managed to get the lounge/front room painted, and we have a dining room table and chairs! We have also got a bed!

But we have no mattress, so we’re sleeping in a sleeping bag on an air mattress.

But it has been so hot at night we have just ended up on top of the sleeping bag!

It’s time to go now, we’re only here to look for a spanner and to check the delivery time for our fridge freezer!
More soon

Yesterday (Thursday 18^th June) we collected the keys to the house!

It has been an up-and-down journey. Thinking: “Will we get it?”, “Are we doing the right thing?”

It started off pretty fast, with instructing the solicitor, arranging a mortgage, getting quotes for all of the insurances that we will need, and the survey.

Then it seemed to go dead.

Then suddenly, more paperwork to sign! Followed by the exchange of contracts, and a rough estimate as to when it will all complete.

Then on Thursday I got a phone call from the solicitors saying they had the money from the mortgage company, do we want to complete today?

Two hours later, we were told it was all done, and we could pick the keys up!

We are now the proud owners of a 1960’s mid-terraced three-bed house in Lawrence Weston!

We are hoping to move in around the start of July.

More details and pictures to follow…

8 To refit the cable, thread it through from the engine compartment, place it over the self-adjusting cam, and connect the inner cable end to the quadrant. [...]
9 Refit the inner cable guide to the top of the pedal.

Easier said then done, luckily I tied some string to the end of the old one so I could just pull the new one through.
Now, try doing that when you are led across both front seats with your head and shoulders cramped into the foot well.
Oh yeah, you are also upside-down resting on your neck, and you have your hands weaving their way through pedals and other bits of car designed to get in your way!

10 Working in the engine compartment, slip the other end of the cable through the bellhousing bracket, and connect the inner cable to the release fork [...]

Yep, done! Only its down there, and you need hands as small as a childs to get to it, and fingers as strong as a professional finger weightlifter!

11 Depress the clutch pedal to draw the outer cable into its locating hole in the bulkhead, ensuring it locates properly. At the same time, the inner cable guide will be automatically pulled onto the top of the pedal to hold the inner cable in position.

Only the outer cable doesn’t move! The self-adjusting cam doesn’t lock, so the quadrant springs back and the end of the cable springs free.

Back to step 9!

Oh what fun!!

Ok, I have only just started, so I’ve got my mum, dad and sister so far!

I thought I’d start by following my dad’s side of the family.
I’ve got some information on my granddad, it helps that he’s still alive! Lol!
I just need more information on his late wife, parents and family.

For now I will only concentrate on my dad’s side, but I will at least get my great-grand-parents on my mum’s side!

It is now day 32, and it doesn’t look much different to what it did last week.

At the moment there is two people on site, and they seem to be doing some work, probably building up the level of the base ready for the flooring, but there is a six foot wall up stopping us from seeing what’s going on!

To get a better view we need to go along the road at the top, I’ll try that on Sunday when no one is on site and get some photo’s uploaded to Flickr.

On Sunday I went karting at SupaKart in Newport with a few mates from work. We raced in the mini endurance, which was a 10 minute qualifying race followed by a half hour non stop race.

I went out onto the track in 9^th place, got placed 6^th on the grid after qualifying, and finished the race 5^th.

There is no photo’s as we were all racing, but there is a video of the podium on Facebook though.

It started snowing heavily Monday lunch time, and it was quite thick by the evening when we built a snowman in the back garden. There was a fine dusting of snow during that night, and by Wednesday it was all gone!

During Wednesday night it snowed again! And again Thursday night! Some places had up to a foot of snow!

Driving Thursday and Friday was hazardous, as no roads had been gritted, but the motorways had been ploughed.
There was also a lot of fuss about low grit and salt levels, with supplies in Bristol, South Gloucester, and BANES not having enough grit to grit all the roads, with reports that the supplies wouldn’t last till Monday!
It got so desperate that South Gloucester council had to use table salt instead of rock salt to grit the roads with!

Friday was the worst day of all, as the snow just settled on top of the snow left over from Wednesday night.
Friday was also the worst day for school closures, as all schools in South Gloucester and BANES were closed, as were most schools in Bristol.

During Saturday the snow stayed around, and conditions were icy.

Today (Sunday) it has been raining most of the day which has cleared all but the thickest deposits of ice and snow from the roads, but the forecast is for more snow for either tonight or Monday night.

I have posted some photos on Flickr, but I do have a few more to upload which I will do in the next couple of days.

News stories on the snow:
Heavy snow and low salt supplies may turn UK roads into ‘death traps’ – guardian.co.uk
In pictures: Snow in Bristol – BBC Bristol
Snow latest across the UK – BBC News
Where does road salt come from? – BBC News

Here is his email in full:

Dear Friend, I am Mr. Peter Wong Executive Director of the Hang Seng Bank Ltd,HONG KONG. An Iraqi named Besem Faruak, a business man made a numbered fixed deposit of (126,336,8299.38 HK) for 18 calendar months, this is valued to Eight million United State Dollars only in my branch. Upon maturity several notice was sent to him, even during the war,four years ago (2005). Again after the war another notification was sent and still no response came from him. We later found out that Besem Faruak, and his family had been killed during the war in Gunfire that hit their home at Mukaradeeb where his personal oil well was. After further investigation it was also discovered that Besem Faruak,did not declare any next of kin in his official papers including the paper work of his bank deposit. And he also confided in me the last time we was at my office that no one except me knew of his deposit in my bank. So, Eight million United State Dollars is still lying in my bank and no one will ever come forward to claim it. What bothers me is that according to the laws of my country at the expiration five years six months the funds will revert to the ownership of the HONG KONG Government if nobody applies to claim the funds. My proposal, I am prepared to place you as the next of kin in a position to instruct HANG SENG BANK to release the deposit to you as the closest surviving relation. Upon receipt of the deposit, I am prepared to share the money with you in half. That is: I will simply nominate you as the next of kin and have them release the deposit to you. We share the percentage 50/50. I would have gone ahead to ask the funds be released to me, but that would have drawn a straight line in my involvement in claiming the deposite. I assure you that I could have the deposit released to you within a few days. I will simply inform the bank of the final closing of the file relating to Besem Faruak, I will then officially communicate with my Bank and instruct them to release the deposit to you. With these, all is done. I am aware of the consequences of this proposal.should be interested in executing this with me,indicate your interest by sending me the following: 1. YOUR NAME 2. YOUR RESIDENT ADDRESS 3. YOUR OCCUPATION 4. YOUR PHONE NUMBER 5. DATE OF BIRTH 6. COUNTRY OF RESIDENT Your response with the requested information should be sent to reach me at my personal email address below: peter_1wong (like I was going to give you his edres ) I shall then provide you with more details on this operation when I hear from you. Sincerely, Mr.peter wong [snqtrtkru2j]

That’s it! Complete with no line breaks what so ever!

I’ve had a couple of these email before, but none of them where this persistent and sent me 12 of them!
Interestingly, that string of random letters and numbers is different on each email!

It seems that Mr. Peter Wong has struck before using different email address and wording the email differently, but they all say that he’s from Heng Seng Bank Ltd, which is a genuine bank in Hong Kong

Details of Mr. Wong’s previous emails:
Mr. Peter Wong director of operations of the Hang Seng Bank Ltd..
Peter Wong, Hang Seng Bank, Hong Kong – Anti-Fraud International

Since then and now, Christmas and then the New Year has been and gone. All the turkey has gone and the Christmas chocolates have been eaten, and the last few Christmas nibbles and pickles are still being shared around!

My sister has moved out and is renting a place with her boyfriend. We’ve not noticed much difference, because before she was hardly home anyway!

 
Last week my trusty 17 inch monitor gave up the ghost, so I had to make do with an old CRT while my new 19 inch wide screen monitor was delivered. Interestingly, the screen is just a little shorter than the old one, but boy, does the width make a difference! 1440×900 pixels baby!

Also, after a forced upgrade to my monitor, I also decided to bite the bullet and upgrade my operating system. I went from Fedora 7 to Fedora 10 in a matter of two days!

After going down the doomed upgrade current installation path, I then tried the old delete-it-and-install-a-fresh route, and it worked!

But like all new things there were teething problems, I would loose network connectivity if I tried to assign a static IP address, but I had no problems getting onto the Internet if I used a dynamic IP address. I found a solution on the Fedora forum, which didn’t work, but I did find a solution that works.

I had another problem with Firefox, or more specifically with Fast Dial. When getting a website preview, it would cause the whole system to just hang.

My problem with Pidgin was solved by setting my public IP address, or I could of solved it by configuring a STUN server, strange how this didn’t affect the last version!

I still haven’t been about to mount CD’s, but I’ll work on that when I get more time, I just need to edit the fstab file, I don’t know why it wasn’t set automatically!

Other than that its been great, KDE 4 looks and works great, I’m still getting used to the changes, the main menu set up is a little weird, but it’s cool!

I have a spare partition on the hard drive which I was going to install Windows XP, but I might install another distribution I was looking at, Foresight Linux.

 
I have also updated my website, last year in December I upgraded my installation of WordPress to 2.7, and moved a few things around so that (eventually) the whole website (will) run on WordPress. The only two pages not currently running on WordPress is links and photos.

I have also updated the design, but there’s still a couple of areas that I need to sort out, like the home page, comments and the footer, but, overall I think the design is all finished, it’s not a complete redesign, but I think that it improves the overall look and feel of my site.