It was my birthday last week, and I was amused to receive two greetings emails from forums I've signed up to in the past which have stored the date and programmatically fired off happy birthday wishes to me at the appointed hour.
One is from a writers' forum I've used extensively in the past (although shockingly I haven't been back there much at all this year, since writing - even blogging - has taken a seat at the back of the bus while we've been on our magical mystery tour of home improvements, illness, death and... er... no. No famine. Yet.
The other made me laugh out loud. Because although I recognised the *name* of the forum in the email, I absolutely couldn't remember the subject. Until I checked it out. It's an online home for various distributed computing projects (like protein folding and SETI@home) that I hooked up with back in the day when Nikki's Dad was recruiting spare CPU cycles to his protein folding team. An unexpected, but not altogether unwelcome, blast from the past for my birthday.
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
It's beginning to look a lot like...
Yeah. Early exposure to Christmas has spilled out of the malls and department stores and infected commercial radio. Friday night we're listening to Smooth FM and here comes Bing bending our ears with his 1951 Christmas number, and it's still only November 26th.
It' s felt like a quiet couple of weeks but although at the time nothing seemed worthy of blogging, or I couldn't muster up the enthusiasm, looking back there's been quite a bit going on.
The big news is that Nikki decided she wanted livestock again this Christmas, after having plumped for tropical fish last year, so a week ago last Friday I took off for Yorkshire and left a deposit (in the nicest possible way) on this little guy.
He's about six weeks old here, and won't be ready to come "home" until a couple of days before Christmas, but we've been promised more photos between now and then, and the hunt is now on for a name. It's been a while since we last owned a cat, so his impending arrival prompted a trip to Pets At Home to stock up on supplies (a bed, scratching post, bowls, etc).
On the kitchen front, the news is that there's no news. No recurrence of the leak problem, granite guys haven't said when they'll be coming to fit that last short bit of upstand, electricians haven't said when they'll be coming to fix the intermittent fault on the lighting transformer. Only the flooring guy has come up smelling of roses, having said he'd pop round to add beading to those few places where we thought we were going to replace the skirting board but later decided it wouldn't look right, he DID pop round, exactly when he said he would, beaded as necessary and refused all payment. Top bloke.
It' s felt like a quiet couple of weeks but although at the time nothing seemed worthy of blogging, or I couldn't muster up the enthusiasm, looking back there's been quite a bit going on.
The big news is that Nikki decided she wanted livestock again this Christmas, after having plumped for tropical fish last year, so a week ago last Friday I took off for Yorkshire and left a deposit (in the nicest possible way) on this little guy.
On the kitchen front, the news is that there's no news. No recurrence of the leak problem, granite guys haven't said when they'll be coming to fit that last short bit of upstand, electricians haven't said when they'll be coming to fix the intermittent fault on the lighting transformer. Only the flooring guy has come up smelling of roses, having said he'd pop round to add beading to those few places where we thought we were going to replace the skirting board but later decided it wouldn't look right, he DID pop round, exactly when he said he would, beaded as necessary and refused all payment. Top bloke.
Sunday, November 06, 2011
Subtitles
Last week I was stuck in a hotel where BBC1 had been set to display subtitles without any apparent way to switch them off. This was annoying in the evening but the next morning on breakfast news it turned out to be hilarious.
One article about Russians doing a fake Mars walk ended with the presenter's comment "And all in the name of science!" which the subtitler translated into
"And all in the name of signs!"
Later, a package on the effects of bonfire night on pets included a comment by "some vets at one animal charity," which became mangled into
"Sunbeds at one animal charity..."
And in the same package when explaining that the nervous dog they wanted to "interview" was on his way into the studio but would be late on account of his owners' car having broke down, we got
"The owners kart broke down."
Being a big fan of Damn You Auto Correct I wondered whether there was a special site for subtitling howlers, but all I could find was a few blogs with examples - a bit like this one really :o) Digital Spy does have an interesting explanation about how they're done for live broadcast. An operator rereads the speech into voice recognition software, so that explains a lot!
One article about Russians doing a fake Mars walk ended with the presenter's comment "And all in the name of science!" which the subtitler translated into
"And all in the name of signs!"
Later, a package on the effects of bonfire night on pets included a comment by "some vets at one animal charity," which became mangled into
"Sunbeds at one animal charity..."
And in the same package when explaining that the nervous dog they wanted to "interview" was on his way into the studio but would be late on account of his owners' car having broke down, we got
"The owners kart broke down."
Being a big fan of Damn You Auto Correct I wondered whether there was a special site for subtitling howlers, but all I could find was a few blogs with examples - a bit like this one really :o) Digital Spy does have an interesting explanation about how they're done for live broadcast. An operator rereads the speech into voice recognition software, so that explains a lot!
Saturday, November 05, 2011
Unwired
Virgin Trains, eh? It's been a while, but this week I had occasion to delight in their services again. Since I last travelled they've been plastered with WiFi stickers. HotSpot (they shout): fast, reliable, wireless internet. Log on now.
Love to mate. But not at £4 an hour. And not when you're already stiffing me (well, my company) £142.50 for a single ticket to London. Our local cafe, which charges £1.99 for a cup of coffee, can offer me free WiFi for as long as I continue drinking. The least you could do is match this with free WiFi as long as I'm travelling. I guess you don't get to be a millionaire by giving shit away, huh?
Love to mate. But not at £4 an hour. And not when you're already stiffing me (well, my company) £142.50 for a single ticket to London. Our local cafe, which charges £1.99 for a cup of coffee, can offer me free WiFi for as long as I continue drinking. The least you could do is match this with free WiFi as long as I'm travelling. I guess you don't get to be a millionaire by giving shit away, huh?
Friday, November 04, 2011
Leaky
When we arrived home, having taken a slight detour to Bolton en route, Nat was at work, so there was no-one available to explain the towel on the kitchen floor.
Dropped by accident? Left over from the last load of laundry? Who knew. Didn't take long to discover it was there to soak up the water seeping out from under the corner of the cupboard unit housing the oven. But where was it coming from? It continued to seep out slowly overnight, so the following morning we called Kitchen Guy. He was round within the hour. Removed the plinths, revealing evidence that the water had been there for some time. Wet footings under the tumble dryer and washing machine, but which was at fault?
And why had it taken so long to manifest, when neither machine had been used for a week?
He pulled out the dryer and sat it on a table protector to avoid damaging the floor. We ran a programme through the washer. Nothing. We dried a wet towel in the dryer. Nothing. We let the dishwasher run an empty cycle. Nothing. The mystery remained.
After an hour or so he had to leave, but we agreed it was sensible to leave the dryer out and see what transpired. The answer was... pretty much nothing. We'd brought a suitcase full of laundry back from the Lakes, so Nikki attended to all of that - three loads; washing and drying. No further leak. We loaded up the dishwasher with the Sunday pots. No leak.
The dryer sat in the middle of the kitchen through Monday, Tuesday, until on Wednesday morning Nikki discovered a small puddle on the dryer's mat. On closer inspection the puddle was larger than first thought, having seeped under the mat. I tilted the dryer to let Nikki wipe under the wet side, and more water pissed out on the other side. Where was it all coming from? The dryer hadn't been used since Sunday!
I checked the configuration of the drains and spotted what I thought was the problem. The dryer was connected to the same outflow pipe as the boiler condensate. I figured there was some siphon action going on when the boiler was pumping out. We called the plumber. He looked sheepish, and extended the home-grown standpipe he'd installed to take the dryer output, so that it had more than 1" of head above the condensate outflow. Sheesh.
For the time being, we've left the dryer out to prove the solution, and I'm left wondering if we'll ever have a job done in this house without something going wrong :(
And why had it taken so long to manifest, when neither machine had been used for a week?
He pulled out the dryer and sat it on a table protector to avoid damaging the floor. We ran a programme through the washer. Nothing. We dried a wet towel in the dryer. Nothing. We let the dishwasher run an empty cycle. Nothing. The mystery remained.
After an hour or so he had to leave, but we agreed it was sensible to leave the dryer out and see what transpired. The answer was... pretty much nothing. We'd brought a suitcase full of laundry back from the Lakes, so Nikki attended to all of that - three loads; washing and drying. No further leak. We loaded up the dishwasher with the Sunday pots. No leak.
The dryer sat in the middle of the kitchen through Monday, Tuesday, until on Wednesday morning Nikki discovered a small puddle on the dryer's mat. On closer inspection the puddle was larger than first thought, having seeped under the mat. I tilted the dryer to let Nikki wipe under the wet side, and more water pissed out on the other side. Where was it all coming from? The dryer hadn't been used since Sunday!
I checked the configuration of the drains and spotted what I thought was the problem. The dryer was connected to the same outflow pipe as the boiler condensate. I figured there was some siphon action going on when the boiler was pumping out. We called the plumber. He looked sheepish, and extended the home-grown standpipe he'd installed to take the dryer output, so that it had more than 1" of head above the condensate outflow. Sheesh.
For the time being, we've left the dryer out to prove the solution, and I'm left wondering if we'll ever have a job done in this house without something going wrong :(
Thursday, November 03, 2011
R&R
Never have I been more ready to spend 7 days in the Lake District with our mates than this year. Two significant deaths in the family, two months off work with stress, three months major upheaval with kitchen fittings, an emergency trip to Canada. Exhausted doesn't even begin to describe it.
But a week spent looking at scenery like this...
...enjoying the company of good friends, excellent meals cooked in turn by each of us, or taken in the delightful ambience of local hostelries (of which The Strands Hotel in Nether Wasdale deserves special mention), taking the occasional stroll around a lake, or on a beach, was enough to scrub away the gloom and lift the spirits. It's been two years since we last did this, and we all agreed it will not be the last time. Hall Flat Farm is "our place", almost ideally suited to four couples relaxing together or separately and one in which we've created many special memories.
But a week spent looking at scenery like this...
Wednesday, November 02, 2011
Christmas is coming
For a few years now - pretty much since our first Christmas in the last house - we've been decorating the Christmas dinner table with all sorts of gold sprinkly bits. We've gone through flying cherubs, "Merry Christmas" banners (which were a bit useless as they tended to get bent and clump together), snowflakes, etc, but the favourite by far are those little gold stars.
They're easy to spread about, and they tend to stick together when they're new, in clumps of between two and seven, so you can while away the time between cracker jokes separating the clumps.
Their only drawback is... they get EVERYWHERE. And it's a standing joke in our house the way they keep turning up throughout the year, in the most unexpected places.
But this year has to be a record. 1st November yesterday, and I found this one on the stairs. From last Christmas.
They're easy to spread about, and they tend to stick together when they're new, in clumps of between two and seven, so you can while away the time between cracker jokes separating the clumps.
Their only drawback is... they get EVERYWHERE. And it's a standing joke in our house the way they keep turning up throughout the year, in the most unexpected places.
Tuesday, November 01, 2011
Sign of the times
I had an appointment in the city (Manchester, not that London) this morning at 9.30 to attend a "probate interview."
That was annoying enough in itself. To manage an estate you need a Grant of Probate. A certificate, effectively, that officially states to anyone who needs to know "this person is allowed to handle all the affairs of this other, dead, person."
There are two ways to get one of these. You can engage the services of a solicitor, who fills in the form for you and pays the fee, and everything goes through on the nod. Because solicitors are trustworthy people aren't they? And if they sign something, then it's right and proper and true. This alternative, you won't be surprised to hear, is expensive.
Alternatively you can fill the form in yourself. It's not complicated. Because you're not a solicitor you'll have to pay an inflated fee - roughly double what the solicitor would have paid (or, more accurately, what you would have paid through your solicitor) - but the really galling part is that you then have to attend a meeting with a representative of the Courts & Tribunals Service to make a formal declaration that what you put in the form is the truth. Because let's face it, since you're not a solicitor you can't be trusted and have probably made it all up. Despite having proven who you are, and being the person named IN THE WILL as the one the deceased chose to handle their affairs.
Still, all that is not what this post is about. I just got carried away a bit. Sorry.
Since the Probate Registry offices in Manchester are in the Civil Justice Centre (an imposing steel building in the Spinningfields area) I parked in one of the central car parks. One of those with a "pay before you leave" machine. Returning to the car after the brief meeting (I was in there a total of five minutes) I was urged by the machine to "Please insert your ticket."
And the second language the machine gave this prompt in?
Polish.
That was annoying enough in itself. To manage an estate you need a Grant of Probate. A certificate, effectively, that officially states to anyone who needs to know "this person is allowed to handle all the affairs of this other, dead, person."
There are two ways to get one of these. You can engage the services of a solicitor, who fills in the form for you and pays the fee, and everything goes through on the nod. Because solicitors are trustworthy people aren't they? And if they sign something, then it's right and proper and true. This alternative, you won't be surprised to hear, is expensive.
Alternatively you can fill the form in yourself. It's not complicated. Because you're not a solicitor you'll have to pay an inflated fee - roughly double what the solicitor would have paid (or, more accurately, what you would have paid through your solicitor) - but the really galling part is that you then have to attend a meeting with a representative of the Courts & Tribunals Service to make a formal declaration that what you put in the form is the truth. Because let's face it, since you're not a solicitor you can't be trusted and have probably made it all up. Despite having proven who you are, and being the person named IN THE WILL as the one the deceased chose to handle their affairs.
Still, all that is not what this post is about. I just got carried away a bit. Sorry.
Since the Probate Registry offices in Manchester are in the Civil Justice Centre (an imposing steel building in the Spinningfields area) I parked in one of the central car parks. One of those with a "pay before you leave" machine. Returning to the car after the brief meeting (I was in there a total of five minutes) I was urged by the machine to "Please insert your ticket."
And the second language the machine gave this prompt in?
Polish.
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