Write them thar words

/
Writing words today. In between writing programs. In between seeing programs that I have written eat aformentioned words and refuse to spit them out again. Number one son and I are writing some course material. Of course, as true computer professionals, when given a task we spring into action and immediately device and perform a complex set of displacement activities, which are more fun than the actual work but don't necessarily get us anywhere.

In this case we are devising a tool which will make it easier to write the words. The tool will be a wonderous thing, able to track versions, create websites, leap tall buildings etc etc. At the moment it sort of works. That is it makes me think that I've made it work and then swallows all my beautiful text. It how has a large and prominent save button. Which I press around every thirty seconds....

The kind of good news is that it is now useful. Which means that we need to do the actual work I suppose.

The Quest for the Best Picture of them All

/
I've, kind of, bought this, well, er, big LCD screen. It works a treat on the Media PC that I, er, kind of bought, at Christmas. I've also, er, kind of, bought this digital TV tuner for the Media PC which means that I can get rid of the nasty, noisy analogue TV signal (which actually gives the best picture) and replace it with the graphical certainty of computer data.

Except that I can't get digital ITV. Our TV aerial, although very good for birds to sit on (one of them sat on it when we had the gas fire on to get toasty warm, fell asleep from the fumes and woke up right behind the fireplace with an awfull headache. What fun that was - but I digress) is no good for actually pulling in the signal. Especially digital TV.

So number one son and I toddled off to buy a wide band aluminium extrusion with a large number of elements. We got this thing home, assembled it and fitted it in the loft. Before I went to the trouble of threading the wire all through the nastiness which is our loft I directly wired it up to make sure it worked, which it did. So it was out with the cordless drill and into the deepest recesses of the eaves to get the wires into place. And of course once I'd done this it didn't work. Life is unfair sometimes. And so it was out again to get a booster amplifier to get the signal up to a level which actually works. Most of the time. Unless the wind is in the wrong position and the trees have leaves on them. Such is the price of being a pioneer.

Possession is Nine Tenths

/
Bought a real, proper, Compact Disk last week. Normally I don't do this, because my wonderful Napster thingy lets me download any "bangin' new toons" for free. But this one wasn't on the network, so I had to actually buy a shiny silver disk in a box. I quite enjoyed the experience. It was nice to haver a proper sleeve with nice artwork and some kind of resale value.

The music (Speak for Yourself by Imogen Heap) is great. I got to wondering if, since I've actually paid real money for this record and got a physical artifact, if I will listen to it more.

Turn it off again

/
In Hull we are blessed in that we have our own telephone company. This means that phones are generally cheaper to use and we have had revolutionary things like untimed local calls for ages and ages. However, the phone company are now changing the way that you pay for your phone lines, which means that I now can't really afford our second number.

We got it ages ago when you had to use one of these quaint little modem things to warble your way onto the internet. After having free and frank discussions with number one wife, who made unreasonable demands like wanting to use the phone every now and then to actually talk to people, I/we decided that a second phone line - which was installed for free - was an equitable solution (and stopped me from having the handset shoved somewhere where holding a conversation would have been difficult in the extreme).

Nowadays we have that new fangled broadband thingy, and only need the one line. Previously I've just paid a small amount per quarter for the second phone with the intention of perhaps using it for a fax machine or something later. But now rental and phone calls are being bundled together in a way that means I would get to pay for lots of calls I don't make anyway. So the phone has to go. Unfortunately that is the phone with the broadband on (are you still with me) and so I went off down town with the mission to swap the broadband over and kill the phone line.

You might think that if you were a phone company who'd just made changes to your charging scheme that would affect all your customers, many of whom might want to talk to you about the way their bills have gone from a fiver to twenty quid, you would put extra people on the desk on a Saturday morning.

You might think that one of the assistants, noting the huge queue of gently fuming customers, might decide not to stroll off and take his tea break - treating us all to a cheery wave as he left us down to two operatives.

You might think loads of sensible things. But of course not everybody else does. The good news is that the person I dealt with was friendly and helpful. And that at some point in the future all the things I want should happen. Here's hoping.

Return to Hull and Spoons

/
Came back from out little trip away today. The house was still standing, and still the right way up. Which is good. I always worry about going away. I don't actually go as far as count all the spoons before leaving, but I guess it is just a matter of time (actually I think I probably know almost exactly how many spoons we've got - not being over endowed in the spoon department chez Miles).

American museum

/
american museum_42

If you are ever in Bath (as opposed to in the bath) you could do a lot worse than drop round to the American Museum there. The country house itself is hugely impressive, the museum dedicated to early American life is very interesting but for me the grounds are by far the best feature. We go there whenever we are down in the area and it is just a wonderful place to visit.

Strong Nerves and Trend Setting

/
Drove down to Bristol today. Did a really brave thing, in that I actually used the electric window that I mended when we went into a car park. Bearing in mind that we were over 200 miles from home this was really quite something. And it worked. Much to my relief. I'm wondering if I'll ever get to a happy state with that repair....

Visited "The Only Shop In The Country Which Sells Clothes That Fit Me" and paid over the odds (i.e. their sale prices) for some trousers and stuff. I am now just so stylish. One of the few people beige looks good on (or so I tell myself). The good thing about clothes that you get from TOSITCWSCTFM is that that they are well ahead of their time, in that they will come into fashion at some point in the future. Or maybe not.

Twang!

/
Well, it had to happen. My carefully fettled repair to the car windows broke. The sequence was "Up - Down - Up - Down - twang - Down - Down - Down".

Not good. Fortunately I was at home, and performing stress tests on the thing, and so we weren't stuck any where. So I regrouped, did some thinking and now I can present my infallible "how to fix the windows on Rob's car" guide:
  1. Remove entire door panel, whilst muttering to yourself under your breath that "You didn't think you'd have to do this again, darn, darn, darn"
  2. Remove window winding mechanism and note that the cable has come out of the handy homebrew ending which you made out of an old terminal block and which turned out not to be strong enough. Reflect on how poor your forward planning was.
  3. Take entire assembly into garage and ponder on how to improve matters.
  4. Decide to double loop the cable around the block to produce an unburstable and solid fiting which cannot be removed.
  5. Do this.
  6. Find that you have not threaded the cable through the outer sheath and spring fitting prior to fitting unburstable end.
  7. Say a naughty word.
  8. Remove the fitting which cannot be removed, lacerating one finger whilst doing this.
  9. Refit the irremovable fitting again.
  10. Reassemble the drive cables and find that you have put the outer sheath on wrong way round.
  11. Say another naughty word. Twice.
  12. Find that you can't get the cable through the sheath any more because you have bent it about so much that the end is frayed. Lacerate thumb whilst doing this.
  13. Get out wire cutters to make clean new end.
  14. Remember that your wire cutters don't actually cut wire. They are just two pieces of crushed up silver paper which are labelled wire cutters.
  15. Reflect that you don't get a very good 100 piece toolkit for 10 quid.
  16. Recall that the next door neigbours, from whom you borrowed the wire cutters last time, are now in Amsterdam.
  17. Finally cut the wire and fit everything together. Lacerate other thumb whilst doing this.
  18. Put the entire thing together and make the window go up and down successfully twenty times.
  19. Refix door panel, and put a small wedge in the glove box so that if everything breaks when we are out I can always wedge the window up.

A Must See

/
Book now for the latest summer blockbuster. One of America's finest actors in a tale of a man forced to choose between the passion of his life and doing the right thing. Set in the frantic world of girl's football a referee must choose between his heart or his head. After a blatent professional foul does he show her the red card, or keep her love for him alive? Al Pacino stars in "Sent off a woman".

Bad for my Blood Pressure

/
Spent a huge chunk of yesterday evening and all of this morning sorting out the electric windows in the "big car". Wot fun. Turns out that the cable had rusted, jammed, and then destroyed itself winding round the pulley. I can imagine the design meeting in France around 10 years ago:

Engineer: "I 'ave used the stainless steel in the weendow regulatore to pull the weendows urp and down".
Accountant: "But eef you use the cheaper steel wire eet will save a couple of euros per auto and make us reecher."
Engineer: "Oui. But wire ordinare will rust after a while and jam up, causing the weendow to get sturk."
Accountant: "Eh bien. Then the customere (or suckere as nous can call him) will then be forced to spend boucoups de cash with us to purchase a replacement. I put it to you that thees is a good idea."
Engineer : (thinking about his femme, kids and le mortgage and what would happen to them if he loses his travail) "OK. Have it votre way."

There is no way I'm going to spend 220 smackers just because the people that made my car used cheap materials. Particularly as they are the ones that get my cash. So today number one son and I spent literally ages fighting with the stupid device to replace the broken wire inside with two nice shiny ones originally designed for bicycle brakes. Cost six pounds in all.

It took a lot of effort, lots of heartache, skimmed knuckles, swearing and numerous twangy failures. But now we are pretty sure we've fixed the window. We just daren't use it....

Dingley Dell Do the Business

/
After my tries and tribulations with the folks down at Dingley last week it was a great surprise to discover that all my equipment has now arrived on campus. The only mistake that they had actually made was to read the letter I as the digit 1 on our order, which confused the order finding system no end. The stuff that arrived is just what I wanted, including a beefy server for my new classroom installation and a couple of Dell Axims for demonstrator marking (if I ever get round to producing the software).

Doors are complicated

/
What's in a door? Quite a lot as it turns out. Tonight number one son and I spent a happy couple of hours stripping down the car door in search of the cause of "Windows - non moving version". I reckon there is more electrical compexity in this door than there was in the whole of my old Mini. There are four motors, a heater, a whole bunch of switches and heaven knows what else.

The good news is that we managed to dismantle the door and put it back together without causing any lasting damage - at least not to the car. The bad news is that we don't think that we can fix the problem. We need to remove the window glass to get the regulator out. The manual says that to remove the glass the first thing you do is lower the window to around 3/4 down and then start work. Bit tricky to do this if the window is stuck in the up position.....

We reckon that the only way to attack the problem is to cut the thin wire which is used to pull the window up and down. Of course, as soon as we do that we are deep into recovery mode and it would help at that point to have a spare assembly. Which we don't have. And which costs 220 quid. Ho hum. Any ideas folks.

Do the Sausages Last

/
Had a BBQ today. The weather for the last few days has been fairly dreadful, but we went for it anyway. Ian and Geoff and Chris and a whole bunch of other people turned up and a good time was had. For about the first time we managed to get the charcol fired machine to work a treat. My top BBQ tip, do the sausages last of all. If you do them when the thing is real hot and has some flames you get loads of fat and massive conflagration. If you do the bangers at the end when things have cooled down a bit the results are much more restful.

We had one sausage left at the end, which went next door to Jack. Our neighbour's dog is vey partial to our BBQs, and apparently stands quietly next to the fence waiting for us to hurl a sausage or to over to him whenever he gets wind of of one.

Window Wind Up

/
The car is starting to worry me again. Only a few hours after having been given a clean bill of health I was using the electric front windows (posh eh?) at the council tip yesterday and ran into a little difficulty. The first visit was fine, with me all suave and James Bondy. The window smoothly whirred down and I was able to ask the chap where to get rid of most of a holly bush and accompanying debris. Then it jus as smoothly slid back up again. At the second visit things were by no means as suave. The window shuddered down making a sound rather like a team of blackboard finger scrapers practicing for the Olympics Blackboard Finger Scraping finals. A very talented team with a good chance of getting gold. Having staggered half way down the window then refused to go back up again. This is problematic. Leaving a car outside all night with an open window is not a good thing to do, even in an area as genteel as ours. Particularly if it rains.

By a combination of pulling and frantic button pressing we managed to get the window back into place, but something is definitely wrong. Something under several layers of trim panels, funny breakable clips, one way screws and complicated wiring. The Haynes manual says that it is a "four spanner" job to dismantle the door and take a look inside. I'm not sure if I am a four spanner mechanic. Fortunately for me fate, in the form of an afternoon of pouring rain, has prevented me from getting to grips with it today. Something to look forward to next week methinks.

Holly Gone

/
Did some gardening today. Spent the afternoon grappling with the undergrowth. I don't like gardening. I don't like any job which you do and then have to do again later. When I do a job I like it to stay done, but gardens are not like that. You can spend a whole hour (or even two) getting rid of all the weeds and stuff and then in a year (or sometimes even less) you have to do it all again.

Anyhoo, one of the few garden tasks that I do well is getting rid of stuff. Ask me to plant something and the odds are I will perform something akin to a burial. Ask me to dispose of something (but remember to ask me to get rid of the right thing because my targeting is a bit wayward) and you can be pretty sure that something will be removed. Today it was the turn of the holly bush.

Holly is cute on Christmas cards. It is not cute when it is 8 feet tall, prickly as hell and hiding the dustbins. So it had to go. By a cunning combination of cutters, brute strength and ignorance and innumerable plastic bags the holly bush is now spread around the council dump. A little holly removal tip: Leave yourself a nice long bit sticking out of the ground for you and anyone else daft enough to help you. This can be swung on most effectively to lever the stump out of the ground. Oh, and wear the thickest leather gloves you can find.