Firstly, landlords cannot be trusted. When there's damp in the house, they don't care. They don't even care when paper starts curling because of the high level of water in the air. So the house came with a washing machine and basic furniture. The contract says it's their responsibility to fix faults and repair furniture and fittings if the tennant isn't responsible for damaging it. The washing machine has been broken for days, all we get are shallow promises that they'll 'be round today' to fix it. Of course, it never happens. It never does. I'm paying over the odds to live in a crappy place with a knackered washing machine and damp.
The Neighbourhood
I don't think I could live in a worse neighbourhood. My car's had a coupld of hundred quid's worth of damage done to it in 2 months. Local kids, mainly. Seems like it's fun to go around putting bricks through car windows and ripping wing-mirrors off. We have an outdoor mailbox with a big, expensive padlock on it. It needs the padlock because people go through our mail looking for information about us that they can use to gain false credit under a false name. So the kids got bored at launching fireworks at the house and decided to put one in the mailbox. Suffice to say the back blew off the box and the padlock was destroyed. Fun times. The Police can't do anything unless they see them doing it. It's illegal to buy fireworks if you're under 21, however it's perfectly legal for you to posess them if you're over 16. I mean COME ON. If the law says you can't buy them, surely it should be illegal to use them? Apparently not. I have another night of vandalism to look forward to.
Internet == DEADC0DE
I'm currently on hold to NTL at work. Our home internet is down. It'll occasionally resolve DNS lookups, but will get no further. Sounds like their problem, not mine. Either way it's nice to be patronised by the automated helpline whilst you're waiting. "What, you mean that I should turn the modem off?", I'll not tell them that I worked on the network fault resolution arm of EMI global infrastructure at one point, let them patronise me that bit more.
New House
Found a new house out in the country. I'm sick of Leeds, sick to death. It's seriously one of these cities that is full of people that have no time for anyone else. The students are all back which has made it even worse. We move in November.
Coder's Block
I still have the damned coder's block. I've not written a line in about a week now. Simply no motivation to do so. Having said that, my pixel Zombies are getting better [grin] - I'm drawing them at about 40x60 which is big enough to be used as a game sprite. I really want to make this game about Zombies at some point, so maybe after I've got Manta-X out of the way I'll have enough art to warrant a Zombie game [grin]
Ok Internetty
Ok so the time it took me to write this, I got in touch with a CS adviser for NTL. Turns out they'd lost track of my MAC address for the cable modem. We now have teh n3t0rz@!
Uridium
I bought a copy of Retro Gamer the other day. Graftgold have allowed them to distribute their back catalog on the cover CD. Queue a few games of Uridium later and I'm itching to get to work with Manta-X... or at least I would be if I didn't have this damned coder's block.
Buhhh
Not sure I like the head...
So tell me, how do you shift the evil coder's block? What is it, a problem with my project? Boredom? What? Hmm.
