New kitchen floor due to pipe leak

I had a water pipe leak in the kitchen last week and the kitchen floor had to be redone after fixing the pipe which was making the cement weak. It cost me quite a bit but it was worth it because the kitchen floor looks really great now.

Windows 7 64 bit patch stopped Windows from starting

Last night I had the fun of having to reinstall Windows 7 64 bit edition:

Some or other patch came with the security updates that prevented startup. There was only the initial grey/white progress bar at the bottom and then the PC went into a reboot. This happened several times. The progress bar was usually part of the Windows Startup Repair process which had obviously failed at this point in time.

Safe mode resulted in the same kind of issue including a blue screen. I ended up getting my original DVD out to use the repair tool. The repair tool could not fix Windows either. Using the last known good startup did not work and system recovery failed as well. The repair tool took a while, but at the bottom of the report it finally said that the startup was prevented by a patch. In the end I had to format and start from scratch. That installation also botched up with a restart and a partial repeat of the installation which included having to create users twice as well as having to put in my product key twice. On the second time having to add users, I had to create a different user. In the end, Windows was starting again.

Got off at the wrong train station last night

I took the train to Vasco railway station as usual last night which would have been followed by a 2.6km walk. I remember stopping at Goodwood railway station which would have been followed by Vasco railway station. The next thing I knew, the doors of the train were closing at Elsiesrivier railway station which comes after Vasco. That meant that I had to get off at Parow railway station and walk, or wait for a really long time for a train in the other direction. In the end I walked and ran 5.4km to get home.

Game comments: Supreme Commander 2

I really love this new Supreme commander 2 game. It has many improvements over the predecessors while keeping the style of construction, epic large scale battles with long range artillery and the same well known factions.

The game itself had many things simplified and automated, like the automatic repairs done by engineers as well as automatic nearest placement of buildings when trying to put them onto an area that is not meant for construction, like being too close to an edge for example.

The single player campaign is not impossible and there is an exact roadmap laid out to see how far there is still to go in a campaign. Multiplayer is unfortunately internet only, but it automatically uses the friends list from Steam, which gets rid of that problem. For me that is a really nice way of doing it instead of having to add the friends all over again like other games do. The building and unit parts flying off when attacked is also a nice twist as well as getting mass resources back from the wreckages as it has been tradition since Total Annihilation.

Some people were of course complaining about this game, but the reality was that it took far too long to build the big things in the previous games or to get started in a good battle. Supreme Commander 2 simplified all of this and made the existing system far better in my opinion. The game is now more fun than the previous games used to be. Long battles can still be fought.