Portal 2 – Perpetual Testing Initiative – My First Look

Posted on by
Reply

Unless you have been living under a rock for the last couple of weeks then you should already know and have played with the new feature that Valve added to Portal 2, the Perpetual Testing Initiative! Ever since they announced this awesome news, I have been wanting to get my hands on it. So, on May 8th they finally released it to the public. It is awesome!

I recorded my first time on it and uploaded it to YouTube for all to see!

The map isn’t brilliant, but its not bad for 25 minutes of work. If I was to do that in Hammer, then it would have taken perhaps a couple of hours to do! So there it is. It’s now out in the wild and people have been mapping like crazy fools over the past 2 days. As I write this, there have been 28,641 maps made.

If you haven’t jumped on the Portal band wagon, then I suggest you do it right now. For the next 12 hours Portal 2 will be £5.09, then will go back up to its usual price of £14.99. If you’[re real smart, then you will also spend an extra £3.40 and get both Portal 1 and 2 together!

If you’re one of those people who need to buy the game on a physical disk, then head on over to Amazon and buy it for £16.00 and free delivery if you live in the UK.

Maths worksheets

Posted on by
Reply

As it was still early last night after I printed off those maths worksheets, I decided that I would get Ryan to complete a few for me. I explained what he had to do and he done the rest himself. I am really impressed with his work! He had no trouble at all!

Of course, I had to record a video of him doing one! He’s completing the Greater Than, Less Than, or Equal To 1 – 5 worksheet in the video.

While he was doing the worksheets, I also snapped a few photos!

This is the set up that I used to film him doing the worksheet!

Continue reading →

Teaching Materials

Posted on by
Reply

I have looked around for teaching materials that I can use to help Ryan ( my son ) develop his maths skills and have found a brilliant website, http://www.tlsbooks.com/, that I can use to download and print out some worksheets for him.

It seems that this is an American website, but as maths is a universal language this presents no problems what so ever! It seems that tlsbooks.com also provide worksheets for other subjects as well as maths, which means I shall be coming back here in the future!

Some of the maths worksheets I have downloaded and printed out for Ryan;

  • Addition Number Charts 2
  • Multiplication Number Charts 1
  • Number Patterns worksheet 1 & 2
  • Missing Numbers 1-20
  • Number Line
  • Greater Than, Less Than, or Equal To 1 – 5
  • Greater Than, Less Than, or Equal To 1 – 10

Everything adds up to around 20 pages of work for Ryan to complete. With some time over the next week or so, I believe he can complete each and every one of these. I will post his results when he has finished.

Stupid Washing Machine!

Posted on by
Reply

The other night, we put some washing on as usual and then sat down to watch some television. Katie heard that the washing machine had stopped and went out to put some more on. The washing machine had flooded my kitchen, hall way and door landing ( I live in a flat ) outside!

The water had got every where! The kitchen and hall way contained the majority of the water luckily. I cleaned up the mess and proceeded to take apart the wahsing machine to see if I could fix the problem!

The first thing I looked at was the debris filter at the bottom of the washing machine. Opened it and water came gushing out. Mistake on my part, but what ever. This was not the cause. I then opened the top of the washing machine to see if I could do anything from the inside.

Once I opened it, it was very obvious!

The pipe that lead into the washing power drawer had completely come away from it. What an easy fix!

I attached it back to the draw intake and then turned it back on. The washing machine leaked every where! The leak came from the debris filter at the bottom this time. Turns out that I’m a tit and I hadn’t screwed it back on properly! I had to use some pliers to make it tight enough, but once it was all done, I tested the washing machine again and it worked perfectly!

Drying out the hall way carpet was a nightmare, but luckily we haven’t actually carpeted it properly yet, so it was all still in sections. We pulled it up and stuck them on the radiators over night ( a proper sweat fest that was! ) and they were dry by the morning. We re-laid them, and they are all fine now.