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Did not know that such a thing existed to intense desire for ownership in 0 seconds flat.

MONOCHRON – open source retro clock from adafruit industries on Vimeo.

Monochron.

So, I thought it was about time I posted something about our trip to Paris trip – since it was a week ago that we got back, and I’ve finally upload the pictures and sorted them into a sensible order, so here we go… (more…)

So I’ve given this cold almost my entire week off, and I’m still feeling crappy. I’m under strict instructions to rest, which for once I don’t need, because when I stand up or cough I feel like I’m going to fall over, or the back of my head’s having needles driven into it. Which is not fun.

I am, as you can tell, fully able to whine about it though.

Lord knows what I’d be like if I was *actually* sick.

I have singularly failed, as a side point, to achieve anything very much today. I’ve got stuff set up to finally get my passport changed to my ‘new’ name (only a year and a bit old), and might sling off my driver’s licence too. I have, however, watched several films – the last of which (The Borne Ultimatum) served to remind me just how really damn good the Borne series of films is.

The lack of sleep though – that’s been the killer – even the night nurse isn’t knocking me out – at least not for an hour or two. And today the paracetamol’s just taking the edge off the headache – making it difficult to achieve anything. And there’s stuff I want to achieve. The gramophone needles arrived yesterday – meaning the podcast is now within the bounds of achievable. Although I’ve still not picked, or created a theme song. My attempts with garage band left me uninspired – I could just use my creation from the first time I used it which was actually pretty entertaining.

Frankly I also wanted to go up and see how ‘becca’s progressing but I did receive some more photos from Jonathon – she’s got an engine! It’s quite cool in a way, I’ve bought a brand-new minor, essentially (well, apart from some rust lurking in seams that we can’t get to, which hopefully we can keep at bay with bucket loads of waxoyl).

I’m really quite keen to get her back and drive her again – which is a problem because financially we’re running a bit close to the wind as I’ve not received any more of my inheritence, and I was hoping to do a shift or two for the agency this week but have spent it lying on the sofa. Still, it’ll work out okay, I’m sure.

In other news, the builders have declined to repair the ceiling under their ‘warranty’, not that it matters I’m not convinced I’d’ve let them back in even if they had. I’m now trying to work up the energy to ring my mum’s builder and ask, nay beg, him to come to Slough because I’ve tried so many different builders here and they’ve all. been. shit.

Anyhow, I’m going to get back to doing sod all. I might perk up and write a post about our holiday a bit later – I’ve uploaded the photos here anyhow. They’re in a random order because the scanner at Jessops puts a seemingly random time stamp on the photos and doesn’t put them in order on the disk. I’ve no idea why. It also scans at a pathetically low resolution, but it’s the best I’ve got at the moment.

Olympus Pen* for me, anyone? (Yes, I know, I’ll save up and buy one, but you can always hope eh!).

* I still need to go and play with an Olympus Pen to see if it’s the camera I want. My ‘I won’t buy a new digital camera before we move’ resolve is weakening at 8 quid a throw to develop the film, and with such lousy photo scanning.

How to feel properly unwell:
1) Don’t get off the sofa
2) Place bin nearby for tissues
3) Suck down great quantities of tea
4) Watch TV and surf the net all day
5) When going to bed prop yourself up with as many pillows as you can lay your hands on
6) Be kept awake for a large chunk of the night by a fox(?) waling intermittently (WTF?!)

I’m now, and I think this falls within the definition of resting, going to go and poke through my records to see if I can find a title track for dead bug jumping, since I can’t record the fricking show because I sound like my head is filled with a giant goo ball.

I did have a title track in mind – a gramophone – but I’ve listened to it and it didn’t grab me the way I wanted, so now I’m off to hunt for something else. Nikki reckons I should make something, but she’s assuming a degree of musical talent I’m not convinced I had – although my dinking with Garageband did produce something akin to music.

The unfortunate thing about lurking on the sofa is I’m wont to look at e-bay and then I find…things. The worst thing is a copy of ‘cocktails for two‘ which I’d really like, but is in a batch of 122 78s. I don’t need another 122 78s, especially as some are definately duplicates. Bah.

thanks for fucking with me. Court case on my birthday? How *lovely*.

I appear to be entering the arena of the unwell. Bloody 3 hour walk in the rain, there I was thinking exercise was good for me :-/

I need to do a variety of things today… need? want? anyhow. It’s not going great so far. The weather is startlingly inclement, it’s gone from serious downpour to sheets of snow, to fluffy sludgy snow all of which really hasn’t enticed me out of the house.

I’ve rung the garage that I was hoping to get to fix Jejy to find that as usual, in Slough, there’s no desire to look at anything beyond what they know. Despite their flier advertising that they specialise in horizontally opposed engines, the fearsome prospect of a DAF – with it’s mere 2 instead of 4 cylinders made them quake in their little boots and proclaim that they couldn’t possibly even look at the damn thing.

Which means I need to get the exhaust off and welded up and see if I can’t tidy her up myself.

I’m sorely tempted to chuck her on e-bay as she is, just to be rid of the sight of her, especially since Rebecca currently seems to be nearing completion. I may do that. I shall contemplate it some more.

I need to do another run of e-baying anyhow. The last lot seems to have gone off quite well – and now there’s another box sat on the kitchen table awaiting my attention. Anyhow, having finally dragged myself through getting dressed, staring at ‘Money Claim Online’ which I might be able to use for my case against the first minor ‘restorers’ (I need to read through it more thoroughly) and rung the useless garage I’m contemplating heading off.

Into the wet.

To buy some paint (& collect a letter, develop some film, pay in some cash, buy some flour, and head home)

To paint some skirting…

So we can have our lounge back, because currently it’s full of scattered shelf contents.

So, before we went away I set the thermostat to “we’re away, stop the house from freezing”. We got back at around 0130am yesterday and the house was at a wacking 9.5 degrees C. Fortunately, our duvet is superkeen thick and lying under it, curled around Kathryn kept me warm.

So anyway, we piled into the Volvo after my nights, flowing from the house pre-packed bags, et al, and hurling ourselves down the Motorway. Kathryn drove because she’s lovely and I’d obviously just come off a night shift. We made it to the ferry with about 45 minutes to spare, changed money at an extortionate rate, and trundled onto the ferry where I singularly failed to sleep.

Now, because I’m a pilchard I didn’t want to go on the toll roads, a decision that sadly cost us a lot of time. We struggled through back roads of France, and my sleep deprived navigation didn’t exactly land us where we wanted to be. It was very pretty though. Having landed up in a little French town in the middle of no-where we swapped, and Kathryn navigated while I drove. We made it to about a mile from our hotel and then got totally and utterly lost. Google maps directions were slightly misleading and the whole thing was a bit frustrating.

Thankfully though, some utterly wonderful people running a little grocery store put up with our pigeon-French, drew us a map, explained, came outside and pointed, and we discovered a few minutes later that we’d hit one roundabout from our hotel.

The next day we spent in Versailles, and after that we headed to Paris, all of which I’ll cover properly in a later post. It was quite lovely though, and despite various people saying how rude the French are, the majority of French people we encountered were incredibly nice, polite and kindly put up with our atrocious and weak French.

Anyhow, I’ll do a proper post in a few days, and we may – or may not – have photos. I shot 4 rolls of Film over there, but quite a lot of what I shot was covered under ‘pushing my luck’. Large aperture, long exposure, no tripod shots were kind of the norm because it wasn’t very bright…

At one point I realised I was shooting 200mm zoom with a 30th a second exposure…and I’d shot a few photos at that speed/zoom which is somewhere beyond pushing it, in my head at least. So we’ll see. It was an unfortunate decision to have 200ASA film though, I could have really used something much faster.

Double plus unfortunately you don’t get photos today because… Sainsburys weren’t doing 1-hour photo development today.

One thing that has come out of this holiday is the decision that I do, indeed, want a micro 4/3rds camera. I loved the flexiblity of my AE-1, but got really fed up with the weight and luging around a huge bag. The idea of having a nice near-SLR with a lens or two with me – that’s nice. Not, of course, that it’s within the bounds of affordability. I need to go and play with one next time I’m in a proper town though, see which ones I get on with.

In exciting news, I’ve got some new jazz gramophone records, some 1950s french Rock and Roll and some new vinyl.

I also lucked out and found some original 1960s Soviet fiction translated and printed then as a second hand book in Shakespeare and C^o. Anyhow, I’m going to have a doze…

Teh G4; if one were to get a fastish G4 (800Mhz/faster) – do we think it could deal with Video + internet and Vimeo stuff? Kathryn’s G4 Mac struggles with Vimeo files…

I ask this because there are a couple of things I’d like to do with the Ent Mac that really require it running a newer OS.

And it can’t, ‘cos it’s a hackintosh; so a cheap old G4 seems like a possibility.

In other news, Flattr sounds interesting.

So, I’m trying to fill in the ‘Allocation Questionnaire’ which came back from the Small Claims Court.

Simple it is not.

Well, I suppose it’s only a few tick boxes, but the one sentence legalese explanations of what’s meant to go in the spaces and what, the fuck, I’m meant to do for some things – and the fact the entire internet is occupied with claiming money back from your bank for unfair charges means that I’ve been unable to work out what, exactly, I should put for ‘proposed directions’, and a couple of the other sections.

It is, I feel, pretty sad that the ‘simple and easy’ Small Claim Court process is such a fucking nightmare to find out how to navigate. So far, the Court & the CLA have declined to give me advice because (a) the court is not able to give information on legal matters, and (b) the CLA have no expertise in this area. Thankfully the solicitor I spoke to finally gave me some advice stating that I was right, there is no applicable pre-action protocol – and so I just have to say ‘no, there isn’t one’. Which is all I wanted to fricking know.

Although now I want to know what the ‘proposed directions’ should be, the alledged support form won’t come down from HMCS, and so I’m resorting to making vast assumptions based on the one-sentence description of what it’s meant to be.

Can’t we manage to come up with something a little, teeny, tiny bit more user friendly.