So what’s your new years resolution?  Mine is one of blogging and sustainability.  I’m going to make a lot of effort to make my life more green, especially with the forthcoming purchase of a new house (unless something changes over the next month) and the DIY renovations I’ll be making.   I’m going to make more effort to evolve the blog too.  Just you wait…

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.

Alcohol problems are a big issue we shouldn’t ignore, but increasing prices don’t ever seem to have achieved anything apart from line the pockets of the government.

Apparently the old argument of giving children alcohol is bad.  This is not as clear cut as it sounds.  Give two situations 1.) little Johnny sitting down for a sunday lunch with a small glass of wine 2.) little Johnnys parents giving him a pack of alcopops and letting him go down the local park.

Ignoring the issue of responsible drinking, which is responsible parenting?  The root cause is not the drink, but the parenting and not the price of cheap alcohol.  Granted the issues in the south are not the same as those up north and it’ll be impossible to make one law for all, but the point is normalising kids to alcohol removes the mystery and stops them from overdoing it later in life.  It worked for my friends and I, but when the kids at university who’d never had the opportunity to have a drink at home were let off the leash, they were the first comotose on the floor and their friends (not far off it) were the ones who’d never seen a paraletic student and were the first on the phone to the ambulances that were needlessly called out.

Pricing alcohol has historically never had the required effect, it takes a social attitude change which is long term – not a quick fix to line the governments pockets.

Meanwhile my homebrew gets cheaper…

Nothing like a bit of consumerism to get the blood pumping.  Of course in reality this has a lot to do with Gaming Theory - which I was reminded about last night by QI.  How does the charts work in gaming theory, well compare the music industry to the tobacco industry, granted one product allegidly gives you lung cancer, the other just persues you for damages in intellectual property for filesharing.  Both of which are guarenteed to give you a bad day.   But to answer my own question, each music promoter has to push equally hard spending hard cash to make sure their artist is in the top 40, be that through childrens TV, the now defunt TOTP, magazines etc, or x-factor.  They can’t stop because if they do, the other person takes home the bacon.  If they all stopped, everyone would have equal chance of business.  Sort of.

Then some group of internet people get fed up with listening to repackaged barf and decide to protest.  The promoter doesn’t really loose out here because Sony BMG still gets the same (if not increased) revenue, the artist will still get the same cash and less of this pretty much undeserved self hyped fame.  In the meantime Rage Against the Machine will get a bit more promotion hopefully helping yet another generation pick up the political torch.

And mostly, it’ll continue to annoy Simon Cowell.

Foam backed wallpaper.  Novamura.  God I hate that stuff.  Our kitchen was obviously wallpapered with love and attention.  It was seemingly cut perfectly to fit round window frames, boilers, even behind the fixed pipes and radiators.

Novamura was marketed in the 70’s as pasting the wall not the paper – its thickness and polystyrene backing meant it didn’t shrink once put on and there is various rumours that you could peel it back off and wash it in a washing machine.

Give it to a small child and they’d instantly stick their nails in it which it would never recover from. 

Three days later, we’ve almost managed to exterminate it from our kitchen.  It seems it works best for us if you steam it a bit so that it shrinks and becomes a little tougher and you can then peel it off in 2″ sections.  It’s horrible.

Most green kitchen ideas use the idea of sustainability and ask you to hand over cold hard cash.  It’s green profiteering.  We’re going down the route of removing the rubbish from our flat and reusing it, whilst using things like the cupboard shells stay in place and are freshened with a 2nd hand set of stylish reused cupboard fronts from ebay.  The taps will be refurbished and sold on ebay and given modern 2nd hand ones.   The cycle of reuse continues.

The Novamura will however end up in a landfill site.  The toxic chemicals in it and the wallpaper paste make it impossible to use in any other way and it was badly damaged and peeling off the walls, so I couldn’t leave it there evermore…

I was a naughty person, I went out on Friday and spent money in full knowledge it was ‘buy nothing day’.  What a consumerist I am.

I went to the local market, I bought duck eggs, bacon, black pudding and a burger in a bun from a local pig farmer whom has organic and free range produce from her own farm, which she sells raw or cooked on her stall for you.  Where did my money go? Into local industry and direct to the supplier.  On the way home I bought tools from a local DIY shop which stopped me throwing out a broken item and allows me to start refurbishing my kitchen which needs doing before I sell my house.

On Saturday I was even naughtier going to a local resturant, buying a curry, tipping 15% into a business that might actually be sending money out of the country.  This was mainly because my kitchen was in pieces in the aformentioned refurbishment.

I don’t think money is the root cause of all evil, it’s a necessary evil.  I can’t imagine a world without money.  What would happen if whilst doing my job (just for the love of it) I needed some food.  Without my job, the engineering work on the railways would be less efficient, I’m a very small cog in a big machine.  What do I barter with the woman for the next days breakfast or even todays lunch?  I doubt she needs my planning skills and I doubt I have anything to offer her.

Sense of community has not been destroyed by money, it’s been put on hold whilst us English build our castles and do our best ignoring our neighbours.  Just look at the ideas of fences or ownership of property/space.  Silly really whilst fellow humans starve or die of thirst.

Even so, the buy nothing day is really about concentrating on whether you actually need something.  I couldn’t have breakfast without buying the food.  I couldn’t do my DIY without the consumables I needed – I did borrow a steamer to get my wallpaper off, so all is not lost.

Making your own is so easy you’ll wonder why you never did it before!

All you need is a watertight container (such as a bucket) and err, some nettles and water.  Stick nettles in water in bucket and leave to brew.  Tada! Horendously smelly fertiliser!

More indepth details here: http://www.nettles.org.uk/nettles/activities/nettlemanure.asp though whether the additional steps make the blindest bit of difference in the long term I wouldn’t like to say.  What I do does the same job, it may just take a little longer.

My newly made fertiliser container is made from a discarded council green waste bin.  I drilled a 25mm hole in it, stuck in a water butt tap and filled with nettles and water.  The good part is that the bin has a close fitting flip lid.  This stuff stinks, but at least now I don’t need worry about offending the neighbours.

There’s some talk about even using horsetail and how to make a nettle brew smell nicer http://www.seasonalgardener.com/Tips/Liquidplantfertilizer/tabid/3190/Default.html

So I’m thinking I’m not planting early enough, so I’m planting some store bought garlic now. If that doesn’t work, I’m going to give up. Three years and no bleeding garlic, it’s just plain wrong. It’s supposed to be easy!

Mustard is apparently the easiest to erradicate when you’re ready to plant and you can do this most the year. I’m sowing mine now on last years beds.

The last two years I’ve always missed out on harvesting season and this was no exception! Loads of over ripe tomatoes, corn was set hard and raspberries shrivelled on the plant.

We still got a respectable harvest – hundreds of potatoes, some edible sweetcorn, loads of tomatoes, courgettes, chilis, beetroot etc.  No pictures though

The pumpkins are looking quite fine – small though they are.  I’m looking forward to carving a few faces and getting some lovely pumpkin cakes from them.

Apart from harvesting we also pulled up the dead stuff – this meant the three sisters bed was pulled to pieces and the last of the early potatoes dug up (they were already starting to reroot to grow over winter!).   On the sunday I filled both raised beds up with plenty of compost from the heap.  This had the unfortunate effect of throwing my back.  So todays link is curtosy of my agony:

http://backandneck.about.com/od/activitiesofdailyliving/ss/shovelingbackst.htm