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Coffee Shop Update #1

Costes Cafe Bar is where I’m currently writing today. It is just off the Business Quarter near the Ring Road. It is possibly the biggest coffee shop on one floor and best decorated but definitely has that compromised design that you get when a building serves two masters. The best way I can describe it is a ‘Pub Grub’ family restaurant during the day and ‘Aving it Large’ pub at night. In the end there is a compromise to do both and well rather than do one brilliantly. I Didn’t write as much as I had hoped as my neck was aching but that can happen.

I had a Flat White

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Local Coffee Shops

I have started writing in coffee shops. I needed to get out of the flat and try writing somewhere new. Having been without internets for a while has left me stressed and unable to write. So thought changing the scene has been constructive and I have written 500 words. Which is very good for me.

I have tried to stick to independant coffee shops. The first of which is Six Eight Kafe just by the Great Western Arcade. It is a nice arty coffee shop and when I visited there is very quiet. That could have been due I went to basement to write and it was sunday. I had a Flat White

The second one I went to was the Urban Coffee Company on Church Street. It a small independant coffee chain across Birmingham and with one in Coventry. It is possibly the most independent coffee shop. If purely counting the amount of times I’ve seen the word ‘Independent’. I had a Flat white.

I shall update when I visit more Coffee shops.

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Interwebs Update #2

So I have finally emailed the CEO of Openreach. A one Joe Garner and now have a Director level compliant against my case. This means I do not have to wait ten working days for an Openreach engineer instead I have to wait two.I did this because on the 11th of September the engineer came out and said that he could not do anything as the line was on the wrong exchange and was the second time this had happened. I emailed on sunday and got reply on Monday.

Now I am not convinced that I will get it fixed then but should speed things up which is nice.

What I think the crux of the issue is the catchment area of the exchange. You see the building that I live in is in the area of the Birmingham Central Exchange but my postcode is in the Birmingham Midlands Exchange. Now currently Openreach say I should be in the midland exchange but the rest of the flats in the apartment block where I live are on the Central Exchange. So it remains to be seen who is right.

At the moments I am looking at the positives. If Openreach is right and it is the Midland exchange then I get the internets. Otherwise if it is the central then there is a delay but I can go for fibre.

As I said to one of my colleges,”I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. It may be an on coming train.” But I’d take even that at the moment, rather than stumbling around in the dark.

My Fiancée and I will find out sometime on Tuesday.

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Life with out Interwebs.

So I have been with out the interwebs for two months.
Because of this I feel it should be classified as a utility as your life become more complicated as a result.

The minor issue are things like not been able to update your phone/computer (Curse you iOS 9) and being able to catch up with tv on iPlayer and the like. These thing are not necessary but can be a pain. I do not really watch on time any more.

Where it get painful is when you miss an email from your Dad updating you on his rather delicate heart condition. This compounded by the fact one of your work college accidently erase your phone whilst you are at work. Restoring your takes a long time when you do not internet.

Currently I am sitting in a Costa drinking a coffee and waiting for my phone to restore from my backup.

The whole incident started when my Fiancée and I came back from holiday. That was in the 30th of July. Now at the time of writing it is 5th of September and I will not up and running with the internet till the 16th of September.

Every time I call up my Internet Service Provider (EE) I get a discount or free product of some discription. If this carries on much longer I will start getting paid by them for the internet.

What really pisses me off the most is that the issue is not related to my ISP. It caused by Openreach being incompetent. It is because unique way in which the internet is supplied to most of the residents of the United Kingdom (now that the Queen has become the longest living monarch should that not be Queendom). Bt Openreach own the the cable and the exchanges that run to my flat but the Internet that is run over those cables is supplied by a seperate ISP, in my case EE.

So when we came back from holiday my fiancee found she could not access the internet and a letter from EE telling that were leaving them and we could charged an early cancelling fee. I was alarmed by this as the letter said they would be charging just under £6000 in cancelling fee. I called them tell them I had no interest in changing ISP and thought the fee was way to high. I was told as the day I called them was the transfer day they could not halt the exchange but the cancelling fee was £60 not the thosands in the letter. They gave a name of the company that it transferred to and that so called “Slamming” common with ultiities. Slamming is when one of your Utilies is transfered to an other supplier with out your permission.

Well a frantic couple of hour without any luck finding who had taken over my internet, I had a thought. Part of the apartment block that I live at is a flat with the same number but rest of the address is different apart from the postcode.

Low and behold when I spoke to the nice lady whoe lives there I found that she was trying to get internet service and had having no end of issues. Her service was supposed to go live on the 30th of July as well. This had not happened for as it was connected to my Flat now.

So I tried to get my Internet reconnected but kept getting told that the line belong to a different ISP who would not let it go. For some reason BT Openreach could not tell our two flats apart. So when I pointed out this to lady calling from openreach trying to the lady in the other flat and I pointed out she have difficulty as the line is connected to the wrong flat. I said “if you think that is bad then imagine how I feel.” She did the muture thing and put the phone done on me after a long pause.

This resulted in openreach send an engineer out to fix the other flats line but made things even worse for my fiancée and I as since that point our flat has dissapeared from Openreach’s systems. So we do not exsist and are not eligble for any of their services. Which has made EE job of setting the internet up for us even harder.

What frustrates me the most is that if I could talk to openreach I could get this fixed. But that is not how they work. I have to ‘liaise’ with my ISP but when I try and do this Openreach denies that it has any responsiblity for the issue. If I look at their website I find that it is not setup to help people and the issue I have with them making me disspear from their systems but a quick search on the interweb reveals the CEO email. I shall see what happens when the engineer comes out on the 11th.

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The Order 1886 Update

Well I wrote the last post before I saw the storm about the length of the game. I think it strange how the gamers are so upset about this.

Now I wish that you could the same value as you get with Skyrim but truth being told I don’t think I could deal with time requirements of a game of that length—Four hundred hours so far.

But I don’t get the furore around it. Some stories are long, some are short. They both equal value. I brought two books recently, both £8.99. One was ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ by ‘J.D. Salinger’ at two hundred and twenty nine and the other was ‘Perdido Street Station’ by ‘China Mievile’ at eight hundred and sixty severn pages.

I’m not saying games are necessary analogous of novels just that sometime something are better short than long and until we get hold of the game and play we will not be able to comment.

I feel that the commoditization of games has something to do with it as well. Games need to have certain tick boxes to compare. So maybe we as gamers need to be less entitled and just enjoy the games.

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The Order 1886

So I have ordered The Order 1886.

I had mixed feeling about it originally but I realised it doesn’t matter if it is a bad game. What I’m expecting the game the game to game to have simplistic plot, at least good play —when I ordered the sales assistant said it was like ‘Gears of war’ and ‘very violent’ as though this was a good thing— and pretty. I realised this will be the first game I have bought that will be designed from the ground up for the current generation console. Most of the other games have either been remakes or built for the both current and last gen consoles—still not used to calling them current gen.

I’m really buying this for one reason. To offer my support for single player only games with the only thing corp care about, money. They are rather thin on ground and rare in this day and age.

Most games these are forced to a have needless multiplayer which suck resources from the main game like a parasite. Or the other way around, a multiplayer game with a insulting rudimentary single player game tack on as a tutorial.

So even if The Order 1886 was an objectively bad game I simply don’t care.
Also I’m a sucker for steampunk and it looks ‘Gorgeous’.

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Nanowrimo here I come.

Well my start to NANOWRIMO has been found a little wanting but at least I’ve started now.

I’m doing this off my own back but maybe next year I shall join up to do it officially but we will first have to see how well I do this on my own. I’ve got to hit a least a thousand word each day to even have a shot of it. So far have written grand total of 269 word. Not so good. but I’ll try my best to get there.

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Smashed 10,000 words

Well smashed through the ten thousand word barrier.

Currently I’m writing it all out by hand which is slow but the quality is much higher because of it. Probably won’t do this long term. Really enjoy this process though.