One borrowed mitre saw (from Ian), some glue, and a bit of swearing later, it is done. The bathroom project is nearly complete; there are just a few snags remaining to tidy up.

Seen in Oxford today. "Masterplan: Step 1: Destroy the planet. Step 2: ??? Step 3: Profit"

A few weeks ago, I mislaid my National Trust membership card. After searching my wallet, my files, my stash of infrequently-used wallet-cards and other places around the flat, I concluded that I must have done something stupid like shred the new card instead of the old one and asked for a replacement. When the replacement arrived, I rediscovered the original - right in my wallet where I had left it, but hiding, stuck to another card. The NT card is very thin - almost invisibly so - and has a plastic finish which appears to have retained some of the stickiness which had formerly attached it to the letter it came on.

I wrote to the NT's membership people to thank them for the replacement, to explain the circumstances of rediscovering the original, and suggest they consider changing the thickness and/or finish to obviate this in future.

They wrote back with what appears to be a form letter about recycling of membership cards, evidently completely failing to have actually read my letter. "... Please be assured," they write in closing, "that the Trust does take the issues of recycling and all its environmental responsibilities seriously." Huh?

How many baths will a cloud fill? This question came up at the weekend. (Deep philosophical questions of our time, one of an occasional series.) ( Read more... )

After a discussion along these lines in the pub last night, I've decided it's time to make some changes in my (virtual) life. ( Read more... )

AC and I went over to Seething at the weekend; the return was my leg, in which I made good use of my new-found freedom to go cloud-dancing, and I passed him my camera to take some snaps.

The cloud base was variable FL40-50, tops around FL60, so we ended up cruising at FL70; in this photo, we are maybe 15 miles from home, not long into our descent into the soup. It was bright but hazy below the clouds, as ever; beautiful brilliant blue above.

I have two 1Gb DIMMs of PC2700 (333MHz) DDR memory, which I've just wasted £20 on. (DDR was all the rage about 4 years ago.) Unfortunately, they are ECC memory, meaning they are incompatible with the majority of consumer-grade motherboards. Nevertheless, it's just possible that somebody out here might have a use for them? Drop me a line if so...

I seem to be lurching towards an overhaul of my personal computing platforms. (Not too bad in terms of churn - the previous time was nearly four years ago, and before that was late 1999.) ( Read more... )

Many thanks to all who made it last night, it was a great party. Vicky made me this fantastic cake!

It's a big, scary round number. Three decades. Many thanks for all the birthday wishes.

By way of marking time, I note that half a terabyte of storage now costs under 50 quid. A gigabyte of fast shiny DDR3 RAM costs something similar. My first upgradable computer (bought for me in 1994) had a 160Mb SCSI hard drive, and I remember saving up for ages to upgrade its RAM - with a single 32Mb SIMM, for somewhere over a hundred quid. (Not long previously, SIMMs had been around £30/Mb. Of course, winding the clock back further, my Dad's business had a computer as far back as the 70s - an Olivetti Audit 5, with programs on magnetic cards, for which a 4K memory upgrade was bought costing, IIRC, the order of 50p per byte. Touché.) Also, this autumn's new intake of undergrads will, by and large, have been born in the 1990s.

Having knocked off work early, I now realise I have no real plans for this evening. I might be persuadable into a pub, but at the same time I might just go catch up on Doctor Who - just in time for this weekend's episode... (Turn Left was good.)

As seen on IRC:

<r> i'm engaging in agile debugging.
<D> you're hacking up a quick fix, and he is flailing randomly without a clue ?

Thanks largely to the sterling efforts of _hypatia_ I now know why I've not received any emails from the DWcon membership or newsletter systems. My hunch was right; their database has a 40 character limit on email addresses, apparently silently truncating anything larger. The address I had used to register? 41. Oops. (I'm apparently not the only one; they're now digging through to figure out which others have fallen through the cracks.)

In other news, I collected my new car today.

On Friday, ceb, aardvark179 and I went off to sunny Wolverhampton for ConRunner. Being temporarily carless, I checked the costs and hired one instead; it still worked out cheaper than the train, not to mention more convenient. When I picked it up, they said that they'd run out of the class of car I'd booked, so upgraded us for free to the next one up - a large, black, shiny battle tank masquerading as a Skoda Octavia. I won't say it was fun to drive, but it was at least pleasant (side note: this is about as enthusiastic as I have ever been about driving) and we were grateful for the air-con.

ConRunner was a good gathering. It was very useful to get some inside info from experienced hands and to network a bit. There were all manner of topics, too many to enumerate here (and, besides, the_magician is working on summaries). When I poked my head above the parapet in the "Fresh Blood" discussion (theme: how to get more people into conrunning), the room descended into a swirling mass of "join ussssss", all directed at me :-).

Back to the car dealer today; my pet garage have had a look at the Micra, and there's nothing untoward to report, so I'm going ahead with it. Having now also taken it for a slightly longer test drive, I have slight misgivings about the amount of cabin noise at 70[0], but it's comparable to the Polo. Ultimately, if I really don't get on with it I could always look to sell it on. Whilst I need a car for some of what I do, in a way I'd prefer not to; cars are expensive toys.

[0] this was later found to be due to a wheel bearing on its way out & was replaced by the dealer before I took delivery of the car.

Car shopping this afternoon.

Four likely candidates came up, of which there was a clear outstander from a maintenance & reliability point of view - a 2002 Nissan Micra (before the last revamp, so only 2* NCAP rating). The price is a little more than I had thought I wanted to pay, but it seems in good nick and it has all the toys.

No chickens counted yet, but I'm going back tomorrow to put down the deposit. (All subject to a successful HPI check and a mechanical inspection by my pet garage.) And, when I stopped by the garage to pick their brains about the candidate cars, the first thing he did was press £25 into my hands - turns out he did manage to sell the Polo on as a project (what a project!), and it's not going to be euthanised in the foreseeable after all.

In this thread on atreic's journal, auntysarah asks me, why not Ebookers? I was going to reply there, but recounting the tale - from 2005 - turned out rather longer than I had intended. ( Over 2400 words of woe... )

The garage got back to me yesterday afternoon. The news was not good. (Aside: I think I need a car userpic.) ( Read more... )

And so I bid farewell to car no. 2. (#1, the Rover 1.1, sold privately for £1100, which just about covered the money I had spent on it in the previous year. This time, I have at least bailed out early enough.) I still feel as if I've killed a puppy - even if euthanasia was probably the best option from my point of view. I know I'm a bit of an emotional squish at times, and that it's strange and irrational, but it was hard for me to say goodbye to it.

To Eynsham on Saturday, to visit the lovely rustica. Unfortunately my car developed a problem with its gearbox en route, nearly leading to my calling out the AA; it threw its metaphorical toys out of the pram and refused to let me shift into gear. After collecting myself I found I was able to get there, carefully; drive home yesterday evening was OK right up until I left the A14 at Milton, whereupon it decided it was going to throw another tantrum. Limped home; as luck would have it the car was already booked into the garage this morning for its service and MOT. Limped to the garage this morning (still recalcitrant) and explained the sorry tale. They're going to look at it first and ring me, but warned that if the gearbox was knackered, either an overhaul or a swap-out with a reconditioned unit would cost in the region of £800-£900.

I'm in two minds about this. Whilst that's a lot of cash, and by applying one of the rules of bangernomics I could get a replacement banger for less than that money (or even spend twice that on a halfway plausible one), my car is certainly not a banger; it otherwise runs well and I know its history. Who's to say that, having hypothetically dropped two grand on a replacement motor, it won't turn out to fall over in short order with more expensive work needed? (But who's to say that mine won't...?)

Meh.

A transient moment here on Union Lane. Leys Lodge is all but completely pulled down now; before long they'll begin construction of the flats which are to replace it.

So, having not had any time at all to get stressed about the test (the perils of being one's own boss!), I booked a slot this morning and got myself to the airfield in plenty of time.

Extra super fun today: runway 05 was active, which I hadn't done before. (If you saw a Cessna over south Cambridge around 4:30 this afternoon, it could well have been me.)

Extra extra super fun: the ADF was playing up again. However, today's approach controller was radar qualified and operating his scope; at about the time I noticed that something was seriously up, he called me to point out that I was a bit off track outbound. Still, I got through it well enough to the examiner's satisfaction; it would have been landable-from. (Of course, in real life, we'd have used a different approach and different tactics; but we soldiered on as best we could for the purposes of the exercise. And also, in real life, I'll be using a different aircraft which has more avionics *sigh*.)

A bit more fun also ensued with the position fixing. I hadn't done this for a while. "Well," I thought, "this must just be the same as on the initial PPL test, right?" Yes, but it's a bit trickier to keep up the ol' instrument scan whilst fumbling to grab one's plotter from within one's kneepad, then having to part-unfold the map to allow one to make a good plot from the VOR station... (I would have cross-cut the resulting position line against what I got from the ADF, but with the obvious problem; ended up getting a true bearing [radio-based direction finding from the controller's console] from Cambridge. They didn't hear my request at first, leading me to think even more choice words whilst fearing a comms failure!)

Still, I didn't disgrace myself. I've spent 22 hours on the course, which is pretty much spot on what my instructor reckoned I should have allowed for. Onwards and upwards! :-)

Final revision session today. NDB tracking, a couple of holds, and generally being bossed around the sky by my instructor, followed by a quick handful of solo circuits to polish my landings. Then I rang the club's attached examiner, with the aircraft booking sheet in front of me. I explained who I was and what I needed; he asked if I had any particular days or dates in mind (I didn't). "How does tomorrow afternoon sound?" he asked, seeing as he's in tomorrow anyway for another test earlier in the day.

Well, carpe diem & all that. Wish me luck...!