Well it has to be said you can’t call a hot tub green in any way. My wife however was given money to enjoy and the most enjoyment she decided she could have, was a hot tub!

We have dead space in the garden, and it was pretty manky. So we did some levelling of concrete with a sledgehammer and some tidying.

My friend ben and I built a shelf from reclaimed wood based using our flag pole aerial as a base.

Other various stuff came from odd places like homebase. I’m not ashamed.

The hot tub looked quite nice. So we started filling it.

And the cat decided to get in before anyone else…

Not a happy cat!

One of my side projects is making my self a bar/cinema room outside (by the pizza oven) to enjoy movies and computer games which is my idea of fun after being ruined by my 3hr daily commute.  Today I managed to get the optics and built a bar out of scrounged bits of wood.

Yes that is the first JD…

We’re now at the stage of plasterboarding the mancave and ordered the board from B&Q.   Fortunately I got them cheaper due to a 15% discount which was good because two boards were damaged in transit due to poor packaging.  A long expensive telephone call to B&Q later and apparently they’re going to dispatch two more boards rather than issue a refund (bonkers)

Does seem odd to me to load a delicate material like plasterboard straight onto gravel (Decorating side first) then to load heavy wooden boards directly on top, but there you go.

My sparky friend Allan has been helping me out with the electrics in my man cave.  I would highly recommend whenever you’re considering doing electrics you get someone suitably qualified and someone with a good reputation.  Allan has made things safe for me, clipped out the excess and badly wired wiring and left me with power do see by and do general work.

This weekend he popped back now we’d stripped and battoned the room and put in the new wiring.  He’s even run extra additional cables so I have more control for dimming different sections of lights.  We’ve installed several sockets in bizarre locations for the projector etc and moved the remaining existing circuit for the storage heater.  All in all it’s a tidy job and makes much more sense than the spiders nest it replaces.

If you’re local to Southend/Westcliff and need an Electrican I can definately recommend http://www.birchselectrical.co.uk/

Pics to follow

When I bought my house, I got a full structural survey and one of the main things that stood out was “The car port is at risk of imminent collapse”.  Whilst the surveyor didn’t do any investigation works as such into this, it was pretty obvious because the ceiling was giving way.

This weekend we found out that the plastic cladding was a structural element which was stopping the beams from literally bending in half – as damp and rotten as they were.

After seven hours we managed to rip down the whole carport.  We’ll either rebuild it later in the year if funds allow or tidy it up a bit and leave it as is.

The Sunday saw the removal of the felt and tar to the tip – I have no idea how to recycle it, it seems like a pretty wasteful material to me.  The boards are either rotten or highly covered in tar – but I’m hoping they’ll make good shutterboarding for my highly un-enviromentally friendly concreting in a few weeks.

To ensure the floor had enough time to dry before the forthcoming weekends activities, I had to mix up a bag of concrete and lay some damp proof membrane.  The floor should be dry in time for us to start putting in the battons for the plasterboard this weekend.  Then I need to get the sparky in to do some electrics and it’s just plasterboarding and flooring to go before I can take over my mancave!

This is neither a self-sufficiency post or a green post.

I don’t tend to play a lot of computer games any more.  My main gaming age was between the years of 8-16.  After that I started going out, meeting girls etc though I still did a bit of gaming at university, but it was social gaming, it was the years of the LAN (local area network) and now these days with high speed broadband access we’ve moved into the WAN gaming years – that’s Xbox live and the playstation equivilant.

As an ex-computer scientist (got the degree as proof) I loathe computers.  It’s a bit like if your mother catches you smoking and makes you smoke a whole packet (I’ve never smoked, but this is a metaphor).  I like computers, so where should my education take me but into computing, or more specific computer science.  It killed my love of computer games really, but recently Modern Warefare 2 came out, and my wife now claims to be a MW2 widow.

It’s a short lived fad I know, because I’ll loose interest like I usually do in games like this, but what has really got my goat and what this post is all about is problems.  I bought a console because I didn’t want problems.  I wanted to switch on a dedicated device, it would run, open the game, let me kill a few friends and then I can switch it off and watch some TV.  Which it has done rather sucessfully for a number of weeks.

Until now.

Now when I’m playing Mw2 at my first startup the game crashes outright when searching for a random game against random people.  I then reset (this is a repeatable error) and this time round I can connect to other random people.  Except my friends I want to play.  The ones I don’t want to play still work fine…

Xbox live support have so far had me testing my network connection (yes I’ve done that), check my ports (yes I do know what a network port is, I have a computer science degree dontcha know) then it _must_ be my network connection (no, it works the same on other peoples connection).  So last but not least I’m removing my online profile and reinstating it.   The problem persists and I ran out of time.  Aparently now it’s not my problem but all my friends problems! So they’ve got to delete their profile and reinstate it if they want to play me!  So I’ve asked nicely if they’ll do that and a couple will.  Hurrah.  But I bet it doesn’t change the problem.

My next issue is to completely delete my profile and reinstating it back where I started over a month ago.  That would annoy me beyond compare and quite frankly I’d never buy another xbox product ever again, so here’s hoping they can transfer my progress if it comes to that.  I’ll update this post just in case someone else is experiencing problems.