Another quiet week. I had a wander around Brixton in the rain last Wednesday followed by a few beers with some ex-Netscallies at The Market Porter by London Bridge. Everyone seems to be doing very well, which is as it should be.

The flat sale seems to be moving along, no date for the survey yet, but they’ve got a couple more days.

Vic and I have been watching a few films:-

* Spellbound – very good, low budget documentary about the US National Spelling Bee
* Goodbye Lenin – German comedy (!) about a family and the fall of the Berlin Wall
* Underworld – pretty poor vampires vs werewolves shooty flick, made only just bearable by Kate Beckinsale wearing a rubber catsuit throughout.
* Love Actually – chintzy Brit Rom-Com thing. Not as bad as I’d feared.
* In The Cut – Meg Ryan thriller which is surprisingly sexually explicit in places.

The server that this site is hosted on will probably be moving later in the week. Shouldn’t cause more than a few hours of downtime while all the DNS re-aligns.
It’ll be moving to a new uk colo service run by a former colleague of mine. (Very reasonable rates etc etc).

Since I finished work, and more so since we put the flat on the market, I’ve not been going out very much. As a result, I’ve not had much to write about here really.

Trying to keep busy I’ve set up a site dedicated to the old Telecom Gold Noticebd with some pictures and a message board. I’m sure anyone who wants to would be welcome to join in. I intend putting up more pictures and maybe a history of the Noticebd.

Popped into town and met up with my brother, Nick, last week. It made a change to go out, and try out my pre-pay Oyster Card which seems to work well. I still need to find out when the new rules kick in about it only charging you the price of a Travelcard, if you could have made all the journeys using one, and when the buses take pre-pay.

We’ve had 7 viewings of the flat so far, with another 2 due in the next hour. We’ve accepted an offer, but you never know what’s going to happen with the other viewings.

Better make myself scarce, so I’m going for a wander around Brixton.

Updated 12:40 – The estate agents have cancelled the extra viewings as they want to give the buyers 5 days to arrange a survey

I’ve been meaning to get around to this for ages. I took a load of pictures of rice terraces in the North of Bali, when Vic and I were on our honeymoon last year.

I’ve stitched a bunch of them together to make a Quicktime VR panorama, which can be seen by clicking on the picture below..

It’s a bit on the large side (1.7mb) and you need Quicktime and the VR plug-in so my apologies for anyone on a slow link.

The TG Noticebd reunion went off fantastically well, though Vic and I arrived a little later than originally planned. Lots of old faces, and a few people who were from before my Noticebd era.

So many folk armed with cameras naturally resulted in lots of digital pictures and a few folks have donated retro pictures from the heyday of the Noticebd It was great to see so many of the crew, and to see how little most had changed. Chesh even turned up later than everyone else, just like he used to 15 years ago.

I’m hoping that there’ll be another Eyeball rather sooner than the last 10 year interval.

I’ve also created a new message board for the old TGers; if anyone wants access to it, drop me an email as I don’t want it to be publically visible just yet.

Vic and I worked off our hangovers by tidying the flat up ready for putting it on the market. So we’re now officially “For Sale”, in case anyone out there wants to buy a 2 bedroom garden flat in Brixton.

Just across the road from where I live, there’s a mural painted on the side of a house. It’s been there since I moved here in 1992. In fact, I think it dates from 1985. In all that time it’s survived untouched.

Until about 6 months ago, when a tagger decided that he/she would enhance it by spraying their tag on it in black paint.

The mural really is quite a work, with a real window being incorporated into the picture, along with swans, herons and a watermill.

Why they’ve decided to damage it after 18 years, I’ve no idea. Deeply sad.

Everything going well, our flat should go on the market on Monday. We’ve had some “issues” with the estate agents though. We phoned them to say we’d like to put it on the market last Friday, and they sent though some paperwork which arrived on Saturday. As Vic is going through a redundancy process and we needed to sort a couple of things out, we didn’t immediately complete the paperwork.

On Wednesday and Thursday the estate agents called to say they’d arranged viewings, despite them not having any paperwork, details, keys or permission. Vic sent them off with a few robust words. We’ve now agreed they can arrange viewings from Monday, when they come around to take details, photos and get keys.

I’m not looking forward to future dealings with the agents, but I guess they’re a necessary (and expensive) evil if we’re to sell with minimum hassle.

The floor guys should be in in the next week or so to fix up the hallway floor. They did try to make out we need to replace the floor in the backroom too, but I just don’t have £1100 quid and time to shift all the furniture.

Last minute tidying up this weekend then.