Category: General

So, with some tweaking to Kathryn’s shifts we ended up with a 3-day weekend with both of us off for all three days. This is virtually unheard of, and so we promptly filled the days with activity. Cleaning the house (properly) on Friday, then having friends over for dinner (Olives/Nice cheese, Trout/Almonds/Asparagus/Salad, Rhubarb/Custard Tart). Then Saturday we piled into Chester an’ flew down to Cornwall. Well, actually, we sat in traffic because, of course, it’s a Bank Holiday, and we’d not really considered that.

Anyhow, we made it and after a very nice lunch headed off to my mum’s favourite nursery; the Duchy of Cornwall one. It turns out that this is an incredibly nice and shockingly reasonably priced nursery filled with plants that my mum rates very highly (in so far as she says she’s never had a plant from there which hasn’t thrived, which is high praise given the number of plants she buys). We pootled around and it became apparent that what we were going to do was return home earlier than intended the next day (i.e. today) with a large number of plants, mainly alpines, to go in the rockery which has hitherto been a pile of concrete and some mud mixed with gravel.

Not only that, but there was some intention to have a bit of a water feature thing going on, which had previously not been considered, at least, not in this form (we’d debated a pond, but it’d been scrapped).

Anyhow, having got home on Sunday we spent rather a lot of time working on the garden – and apart from much tidying, cleaning and planting, we made a rockery…

My mum bought us a very lovely Solomon Seal:

We also gave in and bought some Toms, mainly because ours our looking a little dinky for the time of year:

However, there’s still much to do…

So, yesterday I actually got a fair bit done. Which was an about-time/pleasing situation. The Volvo’s been waiting on this small plastic part which I wasn’t sure if I could get new or was going to have to fabricate in some way myself (I was bracing myself for getting a brazing torch out and asking John if I could borrow his lathe to make a metal version of it).

Thankfully, Renault who clearly care more about my V340 than Volvo still sell the parts for the engine. I’m guessing the B14 engine was used in something later than our late 80’s volvo, but I’m not sure what. It’s always difficult when you go to collect a part and they say ‘what car is it for’ and you say “I’ve no idea what Renault it’s for, I ordered it based on a part number, but it’s going in to a Volvo 340”.

They look at you for a second, then wander off trying to find your small plastic part.

Anyhow, it arrived and I ran it across to the garage where our partially disassembled Volvo has sat for a couple of weeks. Hopefully we should have Chester back (and actually running properly), possibly even today. Then I did the shopping for the week.

I stopped off at the wood recycling place to see how much it would cost for them to build a box shelf for the wall from scaffold planks. The answer is ‘more than I want to pay right now’. I think I’m going to end up getting scaffold planks and sanding them again, which is a bugger. It’s a time issue though. I want to unpack that room and need to do it before Kathryn’s Dad / his partner come over, but to do so need some shelves to unpack into.

To make the shelves requires wood.

To make the shelves I’d like to make requires wood and an awful lot of sanding sheets for our poor, much abused sander. I’m trying to work out if I have time to make them or should just suck it up and buy the box shelf from ikea. My concern there is that it won’t match the desk, the shelves on the other side of the room or the chaise. I am however starting to think that in the name of getting the room in order, perhaps it would make more sense to buy the ikea box shelf. I’m not that fond of the shelf, but it’s better than no shelf, and also would take much less time than me sanding and refinishing scaffold planks.

Feh.

Anyway, it won’t fit in the Minor without the roof rack, so it can wait until Chester’s back.

Next up was continuing progress on the stairs. I’ve let the chopped up ikea Expedit shelving unit in under the stairs, and have now slathered the surrounding low quality wood in low quality hardboard. Once I’ve bought some more glue (because I’ve run out of glue) I’ll finish covering the door and we can move on to filling and painting. Yet again I was reminded how appaulingly inaccurate the statement ‘instant grab’ is on the adhesive used for this job. Anyhow, there’s a bunch of seams to fill in, and once that’s done I can paint it all. I also need to put some shims under the centre join of the expedit shelving units (since there’s two of them stuck together) because our floor and walls have as little to do with 90 degrees as it is possible to have. Whilst I’ve supported the back end and they are screwed and sort-of-glued together, the centre join is under more stress than I’d like.

Pleasingly, we can cram another expedit unit in under the stairs offering more chances at organisation. This is good, because storage is one of our major challenges.

Having done what I could (and run out of glue) I moved on to planting potatoes. My mum sent me some very non-native potatoes (Peruvian) and they were ready chitted, so into the potato pot they went. A second pot was filled with earth for some of our ‘First Early’ potatoes (which should have gone in at the beginning of the month). Then I took the opportunity of being covered in mud to prep the pots for the tomatoes, which contrary to our early fears have managed to struggle on (despite our neglect). Having repotted them I’m hoping that they’ll prove that this early enthusiasm will produce plants worth planting. Which of course means that we need more wood to build the greenshed.

Which is all well and good, except I’m going on a 2 day course (only in Bath) in June, for which I need to do some revising. This is, of course, traditional. Lots of work on the house, a course to do and one of Kathryn’s parents coming to visit. I’m getting a distinct sense of déjà vu.

So, another little post about my dad’s activities.

Last time I posted some of his phreaking stuff, and here’s another post of some slightly less technological but non-the-less essential equipment for the 1950’s/60’s phone hacker.

Now, you’ll have to forgive me if I get anything wrong, my dad died 7 years ago and we didn’t talk about this stuff just prior to his death. It was one of those things we chatted about randomly at various points in the past… So I may not recall it all correctly.

There are two versions of this, I think. The later one:

And the earlier one:

As John said, they are indeed STD (Standard Trunk Dialling, or ‘area’) codes for every single area in the UK. The reason for the very specific breakdown of codes was that at the time there were codes that, as I understand it, were adjacent areas that were considered local. So you might live in a town, say, ‘Fredtown’ with the area code 0245. Surrounding Fredtown you’ve got ‘Potville’ on 0246, ‘Frankston’ on 0247 and ‘Joneston’ on 0249. All those exchanges in the neigbouring towns were considered by the Fredtown exchange to be ‘local’. A bit further away is Bobtown, on 0248.

Bobtown (0248), your exchange considers to be ‘long distance’. However, Bobtown is right near Frankston (0247) and the Frankston exchange thinks that Bobtown and Fredtown are both ‘local’.

If, say, you were in Fredtown and wanted to dial your friend in Bobtown (0248 12345) but didn’t want to pay the long distance rate then ringing the Frankston exchange and asking it to route a call to Bobtown (which Frankston happens to think is local) would save you paying for a long distance call.

Of course, you’d have to know which exchanges think other exchanges are ‘local’.

For which you’d require a complete set of UK dialling codes, their location, and ideally a means of organising them such that you know what is ‘local’ to what.

Which might, indeed, be the purpose of the cards.

Of course, you can also use the cards to identify which exact exchange any given number is served from, too. A handy side benefit :)

So there y’go. Phone hacking on paper.

Sadly I can’t remember exactly how the cards worked. Not that they would work now, digital exchanges spoilt all that basic simple hackery. Still, pretty nifty…

Whilst we’re here, here’s a better shot of my dad’s home-cut keys for Selkirk hall at Imperial College (the locks have sadly been changed…). That’s a bonus for y’all because the last set of photos were such hideously poor quality.

So, after a bit of a false start today*, I started to work on the house again. I spent quite a lot of time carefully working out how to construct the shelves I want to put under the stairs. Me and my MDF trimming plans spent some time together, and then I looked at the sheets of it available, and tried to work out exactly how to pack the sections I needed onto the one sheet, or one sheet and a small sheet. And then it became apparent that I’d have to get two of the sheets, most of the second one would be wastage, but there was no solution that allowed me to use a smaller sheet, because the two of the thinnest bits were still wider than the small sheet, and all the other bits had two sides longer than the small sheet. If you get what I mean.

Having stared at this problem and realised I’d be spending just shy of 40 quid for a lot of MDF I’d have no use for, and which I’d have to have cut-up to get into the minor, I then considered the possibility that perhaps I should consider modding something else.

And then it came to me. I could modify some ikea shelves. The whole design was based on the sizing for ikea’s storage boxes, the ones that slot into their shelving units. So I looked and realised that you could pick up a four-square shelf unit for £20. Granted it is mostly cardboard (but very cleverly designed cardboard).

I had a bit of a wander around ikea, considered a variety of purchases, but actually only ended up with one thing that was on no-list at all. A little set of red drawers to go under the desk in my office (there’s several whole millimeters of space, if you leave the wheels off, which I did, I then took up that space with felt feet (which I stole from the two sets of shelves I’d bought).

Having got them home and assembled them both (with glue, for extra permanence) I then took a saw to both of them lopping off one of the cubes, to leave two L-shaped storage units. yes, incidentally, I’m aware that ikea does (in fact) do some under stairs storage, but I wasn’t very fond of the bits that I could find (and it was also way more expensive).

I can’t say that it’s the neatest, most beautiful trimming. But the whole lot’s going to be slotted under the stairs and then there’s going to be some fun and games with hardboard to cover the manky wood that’s currently around, and filler, and such. Hopefully it can be made to look neat.

That done I clamped the shelves I’m intending to use as the front set, to try and make sure that it dries nice and tight, and then I came back to the house and assembled the little set of drawers to go under my desk.

This evening I started to populate the drawers. It’s quite exciting to have some ‘desk drawers’ again. Pens, and some staples, and such in a drawer, with a home. I also put some of the computing stuff in another drawer, and some of the electronics stuff in a drawer. It was quite exciting. What was more exciting was emptying a bag and a box and discovering another box is almost entirely ornaments, which can thus be discounted for the minute in the unpacking and sorting fest.

This is because my best beloved’s father and his partner are coming to visit. In the near future. The house, as may have been mentioned, is less finished than would be ideal. So the time has come for some committed house progress, I feel. Anyhow, the other thing that’s really rather required is some more shelving in the office. I have, I fear, vastly underestimated the amount of storage required in there for exciting things required for maintaining the RiscPC and the BBC Master…

My plan on that front is to wander down to BWRP and see how much a box shelf made from sanded scaffold planks might cost. If it’s too pricey, then I’ll get some scaffold planks and work on them as I did the desk. Although I’m a bit wary of my skills at producing a box-shelf from them. But hey, we can but try.

In car news, apparently, the part required to bring ‘im back to life is available ‘next day delivery’ from Renault. I just need to ring our local Renault dealer and order it… Thanks to the awesome folks at volvo 300 mania for that. I was getting a bit worried, although a large chunk of that was worrying about how you search for something without a name or a part number…

* I tried to do my tax return. This would have been fine if I actually had the P60 to fill in my tax return. However, I’d neglected the fact that my P60 doesn’t arrive until, I think, the May payslip. After much sorting of the filing stuff, and fishing through other sections of the cabinet thinking I’d suffered from insanity I realise that, in fact, I’m a numpty and I actually haven’t had it yet.

…include being ill.

I get bored. I don’t like sitting still. I get fed up watching TV or dinking on the internet all day. If I’m well and chose to spend a day dinking and relaxing on the internet, that’s fine. But if, like today, I’m required by my body to do so I’m gradually driven nuts.

I thought I was feeling better, so I stood up to have a shower, then decided as soon as I got in that nice warm water that actually, sitting down was more the thing.

One very rapid shower later and I’m back on the sofa.

Kindly friends have provided the last two episodes of The Americans and Elementary (both awesome). I’ve watched more MASH than you can shake a stick at and the original pink panther movie.

I didn’t at least sleep through much of today, which is what I did with yesterday.

And I ate lunch at lunch time and breakfast at breakfast time. Neither exactly went down well, but certainly they went down better’n yesterday’s food.

I’m off tomorrow anyhow (ill or no) so hopefully by the end of tomorrow I’ll be back on my feet, otherwise I’ll be driven screamingly insane I’m sure.

So, for essentially the last month I’ve had a succession of viral illnesses. This is mostly, I suspect, because my work have a sickness policy that 4 separate episodes of illness in a year is enough to get you managed for your sickness. I was on 3. Given that I spend my days surrounded by ill people, I don’t think that’s wholly unreasonable. But hey, that’s my opinion. Thus, when I got ill after our trip to the States, I resolutely declined to take any time off sick.

So for the past month I’ve tracked towards being well, switched onto or back from nights and… got unwell again. But I’ve given in today.

I actually went into work, feeling as I do faintly nauseous. No diarrhoea, no vomiting, nothing specific to point to, but I couldn’t really face breakfast (I managed about 3 spoons of cereal before deciding that it wasn’t happening) and my coffee and OJ were half drunk, but I still couldn’t say “I’m definitely too ill to go”. So I went. And then over the past hour it’s evolved to moments of feeling like I’m going to hurl. Cold/hot sweats. Just feeling insanely rubbish.

Part of me thinks I should try and sleep it off, but I don’t feel sleepy at the mo. So hot water bottle/cold water from the tap and some kind of light, unintelligent entertainment is in order.

In other news, I lost in my battle with the printer yesterday. I think I need to take it to someone with a WinXP / Vista / more modern Windows than I have, so as it can be configured to use DHCP. Feh.

So, years ago Nikki gave me a Buffalo Airstation so I could connect some of my archaic non-wifi enabled devices to our wifi network. I realised when I bought our Kyocera FS-1030D that I could use the Airstation so that we could have a wireless network laser printer. This would be ‘nifty’ as they say.

Of course, I’d forgotten what a pigging bastard the AirStation is to configure. Currently, I think it’s configured right, but I’ve never worked out how to connect to *it* once it’s configured to be on the network. Conceptually it’s meant to be ‘transparent’ I suppose, but that means I configure it to work via DHCP and it goes ‘plink’ and appears on the network only as an IP address that’s unreachable until you connect it to something.

And then you can’t tweak it’s configuration because it just hands everything straight to the device it’s attached to.

Which is unhelpful.

Then I connected it to the moderately archaic 1030D. Now, the 1030D was around when I was a network administrator and knows nothing of this WiFi of which you speak. It also knows about Mac OS 9 (with the odd nod to X in the configuration stuff) and is, thankfully, still supported by Kyocera’s Network Admin utility. The only problem is that Kyocera’s Network Admin utility is Windows only.

I do not have a Windows machine. I have a mac.

Macs and Mac OS 9 software aren’t friends anymore. They don’t talk. Not at all.

So the Mac configuration utility won’t run. The Windows run might run if I had a windows machine. It doesn’t, anywhere obvious, say what the minimum spec for the Windows app is, so I can try it on my Windows 2000 Server install on VMWare, but… most things look quite puzzled about the idea of running on Win2k. Although, to be fair, that’s kinda appropriate for installing a Kyocera FS-1030D driver.

Once I’ve got this massive behemoth of networking software installed, the next step is to see if I can tell the printer to please get an IP address that I can talk to. It’s moments like this when I really miss the obtuse and difficult interfaces of printers with displays on such that you can go painfully through them and configure things. Because at the moment I can’t configure the bloody thing at all.

This is, of course, one of the perils of having IT experience. You know stuff is possible, even with crappy old equipment that was never exactly the best, so you go and try things that other people probably wouldnae even consider. And that leads you down paths of circling insanity as you try and find user manuals for equipment that was considered out of date 5 years ago. Still, it gives me something to do.

So, I had an appointment this morning, which is why the panic to get a car back on the road. Chester, bless his little rubber feet, is waiting for a part. Waiting for a part for a volvo 340 is much like waiting for Lemon Soaked Paper Napkins, although the garage have yet to ring back and say they “can’t get it” which is what usually happens with any non-service part.

Anyhow, so, poor Rebecca was yanked unceremoniously from the garage, and we made it, eventually, to the garage for the MOT, as I said yesterday.

She didn’t pass.

This is not wholly surprising, although it was quite irritating. Then things didn’t go quite to plan. At the MOT test station she decided she didn’t want to start again. After about 10 minutes they managed to get her to go, querying whether the vacuum advance on the distributor was playing up. It does, it must be said, not seem to be doing a lot. They suggested it was sticking, but given that I couldn’t get it to move at all I’m not sure how it would be sticking.

Anyhow, we pootled home. And then I tried to get into our garage. Now, getting into our garage’s second bay is a fine art, ideally practiced with two people. Mainly because one of the door currently sticks on the ground outside the garage, which is something I can rectify with a shovel and some time. I may do so today. There only being one of me (something of an inconvenience I’ve often felt) it took a little longer than would perhaps be desirable. Also, on one of the shuffles to get her aligned, she stalled and would…not….restart.

I unclipped the distributor cap, had a wiggle and a check over. Nothing was obviously amiss, and I went to clip it back together, only… PING! Away went the distributor cap clip into the gravel outside our garage. Gravel and weeds. I fished around on the floor. I moved the car back and fished around on the floor. I found a small magnet and my work lamp and fished around on the floor.

After a while of fishing I decided that this was a stupid way to spend an evening and zip-tied the distributor cap to the distributor.

She instantly started and purred into the garage with only a little more shuffling. Having got her in I made a start on the list of three fails:

– Exhaust hanger broken (yes, Nikki, I forgot about it)
– Exhaust blowing at front silencer
– Tight spot on steering (I’d noticed that on the way and couldn’t work out whether it was me imagining it or not).

After a lot of searching I located the spare exhaust hanger, trimmed it down and got it fitted.

Then I slathered the back of the silencer (which has already been welded twice) in exhaust paste.

Then I popped the steering wheel back off, and the cover back off the indicator switch and found that whilst I was arsing around with the steering column mount* I’d managed to move the indicator switch so that the cancelling pin was just fouling on one of the mounts, and thus creating a tight spot. Rejigging things showed, again, what an appauling fit the new indicators are but eventually I managed to hit the point where the cancelling mechanism is more or less in the right place and it’s not fouling. Unfortunately, en-route I found that the cancelling mechanism still isn’t working right :(

Anyhow, this morning, with my appointment at 9:45, I fled the house at 8:18, pulling up at the garage at 8:25. She was in, rechecked and back out by 8:45, and off I walked with my shiny, shiny MOT certificate.

Then I went to my local post office which, the Post Office website tells me issues tax disks. They don’t. However, Church Road post office does, which I arrived at at 9:14 (by my Moskva). New (free) tax disk obtained, and I flew across Bristol to my appointment, arriving fully 4 minutes early. Which is pretty darned impressive, I feel.

And Rebecca? She’s lovely. And later today I shall take her to a jetwash and get all the dust off her, because she deserves it.

*I’d forgotten to fit the plastic ring, and then done so without checking whether I’d disturbed the indicator switch mount

I know on this blog I’ve ranted and raved about the destruction of the NHS, but it appears the final plank is in place. Whilst the legislation passed a while back to allow private companies to become NHS providers, i.e. opening the door to privatising the NHS, the regulations that were yet to be passed still held out some slight hope for slowing that privatisation. (Now, this is going to be a little dull for a second, but keep reading…)

The reason for the potential delay was because the regulations that defined how the GP Commissioning Groups would choose providers for particular services had not been written yet. So there was some hope that with some beating the wording could be made to make sure the NHS was at least a little bit protected.

Last week the House of entitled arseholes Lords passed the government’s sneaky section 75 regulations. s75, as they are known in the healthcare circles are the regulations that define how commissioning groups chose providers. And they’ve been worded in such a way as to ensure that the NHS is gutted as quickly as possible.

Not that you’d know this from the almost utterly silent press.

Apparently the mirror had something, although I couldn’t see it on their web front page, or their health page. The Belfast Telegraph appears to be the only paper that’s covered it, and it’s about 3/4 of the way down their web-front-page.

So despite my mother’s pain at me going and working in a for-profit healthcare system in the USA, I’m thinking the that, if DOMA unpasses, then that’s where we’ll be going. Because the For-Profit healthcare system here is undoubtably going to be at least as bad as that in the states. And I don’t think I can bear watching them do that to the NHS. Canada seems to want an inordinately large sum of money to have me work there, which is ridiculous ($1800 for the assessment (plus $900 flight) then $600 for the exam plus $900 flights, with no guarantee at the end of that of a job. Also, they’ve taken nurse of their skilled worker list, so we would then have to go the long way round for citizenship. That move also implies an excess of nurses in Canada as a whole (despite Nova Scotia appearing to be somewhat short of them, at least out in the boonies). I guess I should start researching the good old US-of-A for immigration purposes…

So because the Volvo has decided it needs a new part (small, difficult to obtain) I decided to run Rebecca to the MOT centre today. The journey there went entirely smoothly until I got lost… and then Rebecca decided to stop. She stopped outside a random bloke’s house who seemed under the opinion that he knew more about cars than me.

He was quite nice, but irritatingly condescending.

Having turned over the engine a few times, it became apparent that something was amiss. I knew I’d put fuel in, and had a worry that I’d managed to suck enough crap through from the tank into the carb that there wasn’t any fuel getting through. A quick check suggested that there was at least fuel in the carb. I had a quick look over of the wiring and nothing seemed amiss, then I disconnected and reconnected things optimistically. Retrying it and praying didn’t seem to work.

I finally gave in and rang the breakdown company, and then sat for a few minutes. Tried again. No dice. Then I thought this is ridiculous, you can perfectly well fault find a Minor. A more thorough look revealed what should have been instantly obvious.

The rotor arm looked like a bucket load of crap.

A quick rub on a passing cobble, and she started instantly.

And now she’s at waiting to be squeezed in for an MOT.

Whilst I wandered back in the sunshine.