Mostly lemon based

Category: General

  • The sun is shining, it’s a beautiful day

    And I’m lying on the sofa. In a bit I’m going to take Vixy (the other DAF) out for a little jaunt to check out the new fuel mixture and brakes. They’re still pulling to the right (odd, since the left is the new cylinder). Hopefully it’ll settle down as the brakes bed in. The tyres on the front are knackered though.

    The tyres on the back are, well, as old. So frankly it needs…guess what… four new tyres. But this time, just for fun, even the Minor suppliers don’t have any budget tyres. And frankly, the DAF can cope with budget tyres. The minor’s a bit more perky with 65bhp (not a great deal by modern means, but with cart-suspension at the back and lighter than a light thing on light-day she’s a lot of fun) – and the grotty old 155 Nankangs are feeling their cheapitude. Particularly at speed on the motorway.

    The DAF shod with Camacs though is acceptable. Not brilliant, certainly, but acceptable.

    I don’t really want to spend 40 quid plus per tyre, and so I’ve had to hunt around a lot, and have managed to come up with a company that says they have Nankang 145/80R14s in stock. If they do, once I’ve ordered, I’ll share then name with everyone. But first we’re going for a little drive-ette, see if all is well.

    Plan for today is have a fairly chilled out day, probably poke at the lounge and give it a bit of a clean, paint the window-whatsit in the kitchen; tomorrow is probably going to be fairly full-on-car stuff because the DAF…that doesn’t work any more does it… Jejy’s sucky tubes should be arriving. So Jejy will get ramp’d and have a going over – fiddling with the mixture, installing miles* of new vacuum hoses and whatever. Hopefully new sucky tubes and a tweak to the carb and we’ll be back to running well. I’m wondering if I should have ordered some new pipe to go between the manifold and the intake pipe (oddly DAFs have a flexible bit of tube on one side of the inlet manifold which, presumably, rots like all other rubber.

    I’ve got a dinky bit of painting to do today, and I might, just might, have a go at making the steps in the back garden. Could all go horribly wrong, really. At any rate I ought to move off this sofa, because its graviational pull has worked its magic. I have to admit I watched BSG yesterday – fracking brilliant – need to see the next episode (this seems to happen every episode at the moment, it’s all so tense, building to the end. Only it’s not the end, there’s that 2 hour special that’s been shot. So…), the L Word (ack, need to see E09), this morning I watched the Tyre Ecohouse in Grand Designs. It’s awesome.

    I would love to build something like that. I’m still more of a straw bale person, but I’m wondering if you could combine the building techniques – do earth sheltered homes have to be all earth-sheltered? Mind you, I wanted (want) to build the tile arch thingie too. I’m so fickle. If I built everything I wanted I’d have tile-arched, timber-frame-and-straw-bale, earth sheltered, recycled tyre & recovered materials eco-house. It’d be a mess. So it really needs to be one or two of those technologies, probably :)

    Oh, and I watched house.

    I really need to get off my arse and actually do something, really**.

    Links for the day:
    – Bad minister. Stole a biscuit. If you don’t believe in the evidence for evolution and Darwin then you should not be a science minister. Away with you.
    – If only I wanted to live in Detroit
    – This music is teh good.

    Side point: Mac Still Shiny. Have a fun day folks.

    * Well, feet. Technically, I’m told, there’s about 18′ of vacuum hose (split across two sizes) in a DAF44, so that’s what I’ve ordered. In blue silicone tubing. I’ve not had the shipping conformation yet though.
    ** I did actually patch up my pj’s while I’ve been sat here. Yes, Kate sewed. It’s rare, and not good when you look at the quality, but my PJ’s had a hole in approximately the size of my hand, and were destined for the bin otherwise…

  • Postal updating

    So, nights were made more entertaining than normal, or scary, depending on whether I was hearing the stories about the doctor or telling the stories about the doctor. Just remember, nurses save your life. Not always, but sometimes.

    Let’s just say that that was one of the more scary things I’ve had happen. Not quite as scary as the new doctor intubating someone, and despite me clearly saying “tell me what you need, I’ve never done this before” he got to paralysing the patient and then looked at me and went “oh shit, where’s the tube”.

    Anyhow, post nights have, so far, not been too awful. I stayed up yesterday, pottering in the garden. I laid the last few bricks; and then threw gravel down on the new pseudo-patio area. It makes the straightness of the concrete look less…well…like a big straight line of concrete. I’m already thinking we should have forked out for the weed control fabric, but hey, never mind.

    I also spent some time in B&Q staring at concrete and (very lazy) mortar mixes; I’m definately feeling more inclined to spend the extra and get the pre-mix stuff, just because I need so little to do the stairs that it hardly seems worth getting a big bag of concrete, and once you factor in the big bag of stones and half a ton of builder’s soft sand… well… it doesn’t work out that much cheaper, I suspect.

    Today I dropped Kathryn at school which proved to me that…the minor’s exhaust is lower than it should be.

    This I knew.

    I think it’s time for a state of the fleet address:

    Rebecca:
    Transmission almost dead. 2nd and 3rd attrociously noisy, and sometimes not that easy to obtain. 1st sounds awful too. 4th’s pretty good though!
    Front suspension worn out.
    Exhaust needs two parts separating which don’t want to come apart (no matter how hard I try). I will have another go, though, since the current arrangement of parts has the exhaust fouling speedbumps.

    Jejy:
    Brake cylinder needs replacing.
    Exhaust needs replacing.
    Probably needs a rebore and new rings, burns oil like a good’un.
    Needs new vacuum hoses, probably, and new heater hoses, definately…

    Vixy:
    Needs a new brake cylinder, I think, because the one that’s not been replaced’s leaking more than a teeny bit. I think the new cylinders are a different diameter to the old ones, and that would explain the uneven braking. I’m hoping the new shoes will improve the braking in the sense of making it more effective, but I doubt they’ll do anything to improve the significant pull. Needs new gaiters on the front suspension…will Duct-tape do?
    Needs 2 new tyres (well, probably needs 5, but I’ve not looked at the rear ones as hard as the front ones).

    Just a few jobs then :-/

  • I probably shouldn’t do this

    But, y’know, I like to post when I’m on nights. I think rambling incessantly into the night makes me feel less lonely, because I miss Kathryn like crazy these weeks.

    I sit up here, late into the night on this first night, trying to make it to 3am when if I fall into bed I’m likely to sleep to some reasonably late hour tomorrow. Although I need to go to the chemist. But ignoring that…

    I have been stuck on Canada again. Which is funny. Because nothing’s set it off, as far as I’m aware. It just popped into my head, unbidden, like some kind of booby-trapped meme. An ambush hidden in a thought process.

    I was watching Grand Designs (S09E03, the Welsh Folly), and suddenly found myself desperate to be away. Interesting side point: well, there might have been one thirty seconds ago, but as a marker of how tired I am, I wrote ‘Interesting Side Point’, looked at ‘Family Centred Care in A&E’, came back, and have no idea what the interesting side point was. I guess it can’t have been that interesting.

    Anyway, we’re stuck in Slough for a while; months, we hope, not any longer, but I am forced to consider whether I should do a ‘critical care course’ at work. I’ve been told I should go for it – but I have no idea if I should. I barely make enough to cover my bills every month – if I suddenly add ‘working more time on a course’ then my ‘time with Kathryn’ goes down. And then there’s the risk that I might be off in Canada before I finish (or even, potentially, start) the course. So I need to check if I shove off – can they demand the money back?

    Ironically, I want to do the course, I just don’t want to do it here or potentially now. It’s one of those things which would be an excellent course, which would really improve my knowledge base, which is hard work, which would give me better skills to use in my job and make me a better nurse. But I don’t want to stay here to do it.

    Sigh

    But the question lurks in my head; should I apply just in case it all goes a bit Pete Tong?

    …and there’s an interview too. Geeze. I don’t know if I want to subject myself to that.

    Anyway.

    complete change of subject
    I am reminded, today, that the one big thing I’m going to miss from the UK when we do go is Friends and Family. Yesterday Chrissy and Lauren came down, and we spent a very pleasant day chatting and playing games*. Despite the fact I missed my mum’s birthday this year (yes, flay me alive and send me to Slough…oh, already there), I don’t normally do that, and I will desperately miss my mum.

    I wish we could just get on with moving, and with life, because this hanging around here is driving me gently nuts.

    Incidentally, we put up the bookshelves in the kitchen, and they look awesome. We only got them up about half an hour before Chrissy and Lauren turned up…but that’s just the way it is sometimes…

    Incidentally, watched Dollhouse, very impressed with how they (and particularly Eliza Dushku) make(s) you care for a character who changes in each and every episode. Also very impressed with the show as a whole. Joss Whedon does seem to be incredibly talented.

    Also watched BSG – and am very sad… P’raps that is the subconscious origin of my contemplation of it being time to move on.

    * Including the atrociously awful Buffy the Vampire Slayer game. It appears to have a small novel’s worth of rules, each of which adds another incredible layer of complexity, or so it seems, until you start playing it when you realise that the complexity is entirely there to transiently obscure the fact that it is, essentially, random. It’s basically like playing snakes and ladders; luck decides who’s going to win, and only 2 players in the game have a chance of winning, realistically. It was funny though, and imbibed Trivial Pursuit** with potential extra moves involving fate-cards and challenging other players. We also played Things in a Box – this is the first time I’ve played it with not-that-many people and it suffers. It was fun, but it needs more people.

    ** Our edition of Trivial Pursuit is from the 1980s and this makes the game extra-specially challenging. Did you know that Bob Paisley received the Milk Cup (at Wembley, I think) in 1983? Do you know who Bob Paisley is? I do now, because we looked it up. Still. It’s fun all the same :)

  • Visitation

    So, Lauren and Chrissy are coming down today, we’ve given the place a little bit of a once over (bathroom needs doing, and that’ll do us); bizzarely this has prompted me to finally (finally’s a bit extreme really, it’s only been a week or two); get around to replacing the light switch in the kitchen. Not that there was anything wrong with it, apart from being manky. And the 1970s decision to replace screws with plastic? Not so hot.

    We’d taken it off the wall while we painted and for the last couple of weeks it’s been held loosely in place by one of the plastic screws which, while I attempted to undo it, snapped in half.

    Still, a pair of pliers and some patience had it out of the wall, and the kitchen light switch replaced with a more modern looking one. I then wandered upstairs and did the two bedrooms, but, annoyingly can’t do the stair-one (which really needs replacing because the rocker’s awful on it) because while I stood in B&Q and thought about the number of lightswitches that need replacing (7) and therefore opted to buy a multipack (5) I didn’t think that the stair ones (2, but one’s a double and was going to wait anyway) are two-way. Well, one of ’em is.

    Still, it’s handy that I didn’t get all 6 because I actually have enough places to use the lights up, it’s just annoying I couldn’t do that one at the top of the stairs while the power was off.

    I also spent 5 minutes throwing the plastic ducting onto the wall (ducting? pipe-things, y’know, for wire) by the extractor fan – thus making it look marginally neater than the wire trailing across the wall. This is, one presumes, one of the few benefits of waking up at 6:30 every day.

    In other news: this is making me want to live in Vancouver (community market! zines! cool bookstores!). It’s funny, because the house is finally getting to the stage where it’s honestly just a pleasant place to spend time. It’s light and airy, and warm (most of the time) and clean, (much of it). And if it were in Canada I’d actually really like it. I do really like the house. Just it’s in the wrong place. And we need a garage.

  • Just plain wrong

    A while back a black teenager was killed in London in what turned out to be a ‘racially motivated attack’. The media in the UK were all over it, it was covered from every possible angle and the killers eventually found and prosecuted. The papers continued to discuss it for ages. Then there’s the young girl abducted while on holiday; that’s run and run, and still running occasionally.

    Compare those experiences with this: Young, gay, proud, battered to death. I vaguely recall hearing about this story, initally, but since then nada. Not until now, when I ran across the acquittal of the accused. There’s always two sides to every story, but the quotes given seem pretty damning.

    Why haven’t we heard more about this?

    Presumably because the UK is still much more homophobic that it likes to imagine.

    *sighs*

  • Do I…?

    Okay, now it’s long been noted, particularly by me, that I’m a harsh environment for technology. I’ve frizbee’d MP3 players, my phone’s spent more time falling to the floor from a height (usually a hard concrete floor) than I’m sure it’d care to recount; my paranoia has meant that the only reason my iPaq survived was a process of me not actually taking it anywhere.

    Well, it comes to this.

    Do I try and keep the Mac as it was, a beautiful testament to Apples minimalist design? Or do I accept that I’m going to ruin the outside of the case, and slap stickers on it now?

    Or do I wait until I’ve ruined the case then slap stickers on it?

    It’s not like I’m short of stickers…

    But it is very pretty.

    As a side point. The office is very untidy. I’ve been poking at it since I posted and…well…now it’s marginally less untidy. But I’ve seen the light regarding wireless devices. I used to think ‘oh, why would I want a wireless printer’? Now I understand. Since I don’t have a desktop anymore (not counting the RiscPC which can’t actually drive the printer, or any of the devices in question ‘cos it doesn’t have USB), then I do seem to be suddenly surrounded by millions of cables.

    There’s:
    – The TV Capture Card
    – The SD/MMC/CF/other odd memory card reader
    – The Printer
    – The hard disk
    – The USB keyboard and trackball (for when I want to do serious stuff, or lots of typing)
    There’s other devices too, but I can’t think what they are right now. Having shuffled things around a bit I’ve realised that (a) I need a much larger office, and (b) labelling the cables is going to be essential. So I have.

    I need to tackle the pile of crap on the sofa-bed now. And then I should take the huge box to the recycling thingie (‘cos it won’t fit in our bin). And now, the excuse for this quick break? I’m going to post a few bits and bobs on Freecycle.

  • We have good news

    Kathryn can stay! We finally got the Visas back yesterday; well, visa. Kathryn’s now allowed to stay here until we leave, unless that takes more than 2 years. I was incredibly relieved, since we’re going on holiday in the not too distant future and need passports for that.

    So that’s good.

    Also good, I had my eyetest today; in 5 years my eyes have hardly changed. In fact, one eye is exactly the same and one is so very slightly different they recommended no change in prescription. I also have no signs of macular degeneration – which is good – my mum’s got very serious degeneration and I’m slightly worried about my eyesight (long term) but they checked it today my field of vision is hunky dory.

    I will just have to take care of my eyes.

    I was sat reading the contact lens sign and really want to go back to wearing lenses; but can’t at the mo. If this allergy clinic does the Sublingual allergy treatment, that might mean I could, which would be awesome beans.

    I was also good today for numerous reasons:
    – I actually walked to town and back, rather than driving, despite it being cold.
    – I sorted out my debts a bit. A very nice woman at the bank explained that there is a way to avoid early repayment charges on a loan, so my debt is now a loan. I must not take the credit cards with me anywhere.
    – I didn’t buy the Nikon D70s I saw. I’m even not buying it now, despite knowing it’s quite a good price.
    – On a smaller scale, I didn’t buy lunch. I bought a drink (‘cos I was thirsty after leaving uh…an hour earlier than I needed to (yes, I’m stupid sometimes)).
    – I went and dropped off my prescription at the doctor’s – so I should be able to get my new nose-spray on Monday.

    I’ve also been good:
    – Yesterday I fixed the car’s exhaust. Well. Improved. Fixed might be an overstatement. It’s now only fouling the suspension at extremes of travel. Having beaten crap out of the bit that you can’t replace for about an hour I managed to move the 45 degree joint by about an inch and a half – a good chunk of the two inches I needed. I think it’s leaking less now. Not quite sure how to get it that last half inch tho’.
    – I got the iPaq working on the Mac. Well, technically it’s working through Windows 2000 on VMWare on the MacBook. The GPS bit should work, and so before we go to Ireland I need to fork out for a new CF card for it – a much bigger one – then I can have Europe maps…and an MP3 player in the car again. That would rock my little world.

    Also good:
    Royksopp’s new video. Many people seem to have missed this, and it’s excellent.

  • Ka Faen

    Apparently that means “WTF! What kind of foolishness is this!” which seems pretty apt. I’ve spent the morning dinking with the iPaq (which when it boots proclaims it’s September 2001), and which, with VMWare and ActiveSync I’ve managed to get connecting, sort of, to the Mac. I’ve reinstalled TomTom 3, and remembered that I need a much bigger CF card. The 64Meg card it’s got in it is only enough for 1/4 of the country. A few Gigs should sort that out.

    Not this month though!

    Need to check the GPS unit in the car still works.

    It’s taken about 2 hours to get that bit all working.

    And now…now I’m trying to install a dinky MP3 player on there (called ‘todayplayer’) – which is 188k. To do this though, I have to install DX9 on my Win2k install*. So far we’ve failed to pass windows validation, not because it’s not a valid copy of windows but because the genuine validation checker won’t run on my Win2k install. Ironically, if I run it from MacOS and it uses the VMWare install, then it will run, but because I won’t allow Windows to access the internet it falls over.

    They stopped the free support for Win2k server (which is what I own), and therefore I don’t have virus protection. Since I’ve no desire to use Windows except to run the iPaq (yes, really) then it’s a bit pointless investing in Virus Protection for it.

    But I’m hoping that the Dx9 I’m downloading from a free-software site (reputable one) will install on my aged Win2k.

    I have to say it’s pretty cool, running VMWare on here.

    I’m thinking a BBC Emulator would be fun too.

    If I could get an RPC emulator and have SuperFoulEgg and Bloxed I’d be entertained forever ;)

    It’s amazing how clunky Win2k feels now. After 8 years of software development the interface feels messy and things that bugged me before seem even more dumb. Although it remains my ‘favourite’ version of Windows (well, WinNT4 was my ‘favourite’ because it’s the only version that remained reliable for me, but Win2k wasn’t bad and had USB).

    Incidentally, copying music to the iPaq is a great system:
    [EntMacStorageServer (OS X 10.4)]->[MacBook (OS X 10.5)] -> [VMWare virtualised install (Win2kSP4)] -> [iPaq 3660 (PocketPC)].

    Simplicity itself.

    It’s taken about a minute and a half to copy one file. It’s just a proof of concept tho’; then I’m moving because my back is killing me from sitting on the floor. Then I’m going to sort out e-mail. Then I’m going to shower and sort out the Minor (assuming the weather stays blue skies).

    *This turned out to be a lie. I’d downloaded the wrong file. Now have the right file…

  • Post Spam: First post

    First post from the Shiny, and y’know what, it’s Shiny in here.

    Need to dink with settings now…but one interesting thing, I finally got the pictures off my phone. Bluetooth does, apparently, work on it. And y’know what? The SonyEricsson T610 can be said to have an attrociously shonky camera. Or at least mine does.

    Anyway, I must go dink.

  • Post Spam: Ok, I’m still a geek

    So, the shiny arrived today. And my, isn’t it shiny. A big, cold, milled block of aluminium, and a huge multi-touch touchpad. A keyboard that reminds me of early ’80s computers (but is, to be fair, somewhat better).

    Having carefully opened the box containing the box, and slipped the box out, and cut (carefully) the tape holding it closed I removed the laptop [not cutting or breaking any of the plastic, or indeed the ‘read the licence’ sticker] and sat down. Having run through the tail end of the installer and got to the desktop, I dinked for about 2 minutes, and then put in the install disk, and rebooted.

    That’s right. I get a shiny new laptop and the first thing I *actually* do with it is nuke the existing install, repartition the disk, and then reinstall (two partitions, one an ’emergency’ install for when I screw up the main install). Then I’ve got a pile of software to install on it, once I actually get an operating system back on there (it’s nearly finished installing the ’emergency’ one).

    What I can say though is it’s deeply shiny. And the screen makes the Dells aged LCD look somewhat pale.

    I, apparently, am still a teensy bit of a geek.

    Ra.