Property Ladder

So it’s that time of year again. Our tenancy is coming to an end on the flat, and as we’ve finally got fed up with the crazy, deaf old lady who lives downstairs and likes to watch BBC News 24 at full volume at 5AM most days of the week, we’ll be moving out at the start of next month. We aren’t going too far this time, though, but that doesn’t mean we get to…

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Freedom2BeShit (Part 247)

Yet another outage from my shitty hosting company (Freedom2RunAReallyPoorService), so sorry if you were over here looking for some quality bloggage and left disappointed (or maybe I should apologise if you came here looking for some quality bloggage and found the site working as normal, who knows…) After the last time that things fell apart, I considered moving to another host, but then things seemed to get a bit better and in the end I…

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The Campaign Against Waste

So the indie has just launched a new campaign to get retailers to cut down on unnecessary packaging. They were asking for readers to send in their own examples of ridiculous packaging, so I sent in this. Do you think they’ll print it? > Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2007 09:08:59 > From: “Matt Armstrong” > To: waste@independent.co.uk > Subject: The Campaign Against Waste > > Dear Sir, > > I strongly support your new campaign…

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Has It Really Been…

Four Years? 511 blog entries, and approximately 133,291 words later, well, here we are. A hundred and thirty thousand words? That’s enough for a small novel. I mean, yeah, admittedly it’d be a pretty rubbish novel (and one that’d mostly just be full of one grumpy man moaning about customer service), but a novel nontheless. Has it really been four years, though? Where does the time go…?

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Unfinished Business… Pt. IV

And so, finally, at the end of the two week holiday we took last September that has now taken me FOUR MONTHS to blog (is this some kind of record?) we arrived in LA, for the briefest of brief stays. Everyone told us we’d hate it, and I fully expected that it would be the sort of place that I would, but actually I quite enjoyed what we did and saw. Perhaps it’s because for…

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Unfinished Business… Pt. III

“The first time he flew, saw the Vegas skyline gently melt into view…” So to Vegas, then, which we finally reached only a couple of hours later than planned. If you want to enjoy yourself in Vegas, (well, on the strip at least) then your first task is to embrace it for the glorified shopping mall in the middle of the desert that it is. “Paris”? “New York”? “Venice”? Utterly fake and ridiculous as it…

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“…a band called The Kaiser Chiefs, who were, well, alright, I guess”

In a bizarre twist, 2 and a bit years on from the first time we saw them there, last night Sal and I once again managed, for free, to see “a band called the Kaiser Chiefs” at Koko playing a bunch of songs we’d never heard before. This time, it was because they were recording a stack of new material for broadcast on “The Album Chart Show” on channel 4 (footage that is no doubt…

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Unfinished Business… Pt. II

After our brief stop in Carmel, we headed on to spend one night each in Monterey and Santa Cruz, which are both pleasant enough. Bizarrely, Monterey is home to numerous “British” themed pubs of a kind that would be considered authentic only by people who’ve never actually set foot in the UK, while in Santa Cruz we inadvertently found ourselves walking for miles to reach a restaurant over by the marina that, although blessed with…

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Unfinished Business… Pt. I

Right. I don’t usually make resolutions, but there’s a couple of things I have in mind this year (one of which I’m keeping to myself because I’ll probably fail miserably). The other one, though, is to write more. I’m not saying I’ll necessarily manage to complete NaNoWriMo or anything, but at I’m at least resolving not to neglect the blog so much. (Of course, I’ll also plan on continuing to take a photo a day,…

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