Nerd diversion: the new PC

Circa August 20, 2005. After finally having received some money from the EBI (after having been working there for over 6 weeks and lining up the job for around 6 months), I went out and bought myself a whole bunch of PC bits and set about getting myself something to do at night. Up to this point I still only had a bed, a table, a chair, and a bunch of plates and cutlery in my whole apartment with which to amuse myself. The PC I built consisted of the following:

• CPU - AMD 3500+ (2.2GHz) Venice (socket 939, 90nm)
• 2GB RAM (2 x 1GB, PC3200/400MHz)
• Asus A8V-E deluxe (2xSATA2, firewire, gigabit ethernet, 802.11g, digital audio, 8xUSB2)
• 2 x 200GB 7200 RPM SATA HDDs (8MB cache), one of which I brought with me from Australia
• nVidia 6800GT video card
• Dual layer 8x DVD-RW (Phillips I think)
• Logitech wireless matching black keyboard/mouse (LX500)
• Piano black sexay case (Antec)
• and, last, but certainly not least, a 24" LCD screen! (Dell 2405FPW)

Check it out:
Yummy
Gotta love removeable drive bays.
Check out the size of that screen...

Moving in, getting around

These photos are from circa early August 2005, starting from the day I moved into my own apartment (after having bummed off a fellow aussie and former PhD colleague for almost 2 weeks...), and following with photos from initial explorations to get to know the surrounding area. At this point I had been working at my new job at the EBI for about one week.
Move in day, August 2005. Me with a celebratory brewski. "move in" is actually a bit of a misnomer in this case because I had nothing of my own to move in, except for my suitcase. The extent of my furniture at this point was a measly double bed, an office table, and a chair, supplied by the landlord. The bulk of the furniture in my "fully furnished" apartment was due in the next 2 weeks. Suffice to say it took about 2 months to get all of the furniture I requested. I had nothing to amuse myself with, or even sit on, for almost a month - just the bed, the table, and the chair.
Prior to moving in, I had been staying at Brett's place (a fellow PhD student from Macquarie Uni is Sydney). Brett and I had just come from a huge shopping spree at one of the biggest Tescos in England, to buy basic housewares - plates, cups, cutlery, tea-towels etc etc. Note the nice flowers from the landlord above the fireplace. Nice touch.
Heading into the heart of Cherry Hinton for the very first food shop. This path leads from the end of our street to the main road through town. It's nice because this is quite a busy road and we're only a couple of hundred metres from it but can't hear a thing because of the bush buffer.
Just down the path is the main road and a cute little gastropub just across the road. Sure it's a fairly character-less family-style pub (with a pretty decent beer-garden), but least it's handy... we've been there a couple of times.
Alternative view. The main road into Cambridge runs tranverse to the photo, and the main road into Cherry Hinton is where the bus is coming from. And yes, Cambridge has an airport, but it's a tiny freight & enthusiast affair.
The road into Cambridge, replete with bicycle path along the right side of the road.
A little way down the road towards Cambridge is a fairly large & beautiful park with lots of walking & cycling paths.
More park...
The park even has a little lake/river.
with ducks and geese...
At the heart of the park is Cherry Hinton Hall, which is a heritage listed historical building. It is also the approximate venue for the renowned annual Cherry Hinton folk festival, which sounds twee but is hugely popular with all age groups, with tickets selling out weeks in advance.
The park is really quite huge... big enough to cycle around for a couple of hours.
Heading into town now we have yet another pub...
...and then the main shops -- a Tesco express, couple of hairdressers, a medical centre and dentist, bakery, booze shop, DVD store, £2 junk store, bank, a chinese takeaway, fish&chip shop, and indian restaurant. All the basics really.

Where we live

Here's some pictures of the house where we live, taken when I was first scoping for places to rent. Our apartment is in a small, cosy block of 8 apartments, on the second (top) floor, in a cute little village called Cherry Hinton. It's debateable whether Cherry Hinton is actually a village or really just a suburb of Cambridge, since they pretty much meld into each other. In any case, Cambridge central is 5 mins drive away, or 10 mins on the buses that run every 10 mins to there (double/triple the travel times during peak hour). All in all, it's pretty tasteful.
This is from the front door. The guy in the hall is the real estate agent.
Straight down the hall is the lounge room, replete with bush/park out the main window and gas fireplace on the right.
OK, standing in the lounge looking back the other way into the kitchen. The hall is off to the right.
Mmm... gas stovetop. And look at all that benchspace, w00t!
The kitchen even has a nice view too. Note the standard washing machine placement below the sink. The UK hasn't yet caught onto the concept of laundries and dishwashers...
Even a decent fridge (by UK standards). The landlord was nice enough to leave post-it notes on pretty much every appliance & fixture, as well as a bunch of flowers on move-in day. You just don't get that kind of touch from Sydney real estate agents/landlords...
Ah, the shitter. For some reason, brits seem to like having it so that one has to manually hold the toilet seat up. Bizarre.
The bathroom. Decent shower with a temperature control that even works.
Main bedroom. Looks small, but it's really quite huge -- big enough for a double bed across-ways in this photo, and a huge big wardrobe out of view to the left.
Second bedroom, AKA the office. A little smaller than the main bedroom, but still really quite large for the UK. Can easily fit another double bed in here too, with space to spare.
Storage room, to immediate right when you come in the front door. That's the central heating to the upper right.
Same view as above, but looking down into the garden of the flat below us.
This is the view out of the loungeroom. This area used to be an old lime quarry, but is now just a chunk of unspoilt bush. We see quite a few birds and squirrels in the trees on pretty much a daily basis (and local cats trying to eliminate same).
View from outside, towards the town. The town centre is about 500m away, down the street and off to the left a bit.
In the opposite direction, we have our parking spot, and beyond that, a field of some agricultural crop I don't recognise. I guess having crops growing right outside our house puts us at the edge of the village, which is true, though in this case the village is long and thin, rather than roughly circular, like most towns. So even though we border a farm, we're still only 500m or so from the heart of the village.