Taking the tablets

Almost exactly a month since I posted about my new tablet.

I'll be taking it back today.

No, I haven't dropped it! Nor am I bored or disappointed with it. Far from it, especially since I discovered Miniclip 8-ball pool for Android which I've been playing every evening since downloading it a couple of weeks ago. Every evening, that is, except yesterday evening, when the Nexus flashed a low battery sign and turned itself off.

Funny, I thought. I'm sure I left it on charge last night. I plugged it back in and spent an hour watching Pointless and the news (national and local). You can get through all that in an hour when you're fast-forwarding through the boring bits. It's amazing how many boring bits there are when you're not listening to the TV in the background while playing pool.

After an hour, the Nexus flashed its low battery sign and turned itself off. I suspected it was failing to charge, so I left it plugged in overnight. This morning, it flashed...  well... you get the picture. The device is only just 5 weeks old and it won't charge. Not a good sign.

Ouch

I never learn. It's always when I'm most distracted that I ignore my little voice, and it never turns out well. In the past I've cut myself, broken an ankle, smashed crockery, shattered glassware, tripped and fallen, and each time I've had a prior warning via the little voice, ignored it, and come to grief. Over the years I've grown better at heeding it, but then there's some days, like today...

I was heading out to the dentist, intending to drop in at the charity shop afterwards and then grab a coffee and finish off this month's book club book while waiting for a later appointment at the doctor's (nothing major, don't worry). The book is on my Kindle app, so I was taking the iPad with me. Little Voice suggests it's probably not a good idea to balance it on top of a box of charity shop fodder, as it could slip off. In a hurry and not wanting to turn loading the car into a marathon, I ignored it. The iPad slipped off and took a nosedive onto the front path. A backward glance suggested it was OK so I dropped the box on the back seat and returned to pick it up. Then I noticed the shards of glass on the path.

Yeah. Apparently even Gorilla Glass™ isn't strong enough to survive a header onto a stone path from five feet up. Especially when it lands on one corner.

Never mind, I thought. Instead of nursing a coffee and reading in between appointments, I'll head off to the Apple Store and see if they can fix it. Can they fix it? Yes they can. That'll be £199 please sir.

Hmm. Well. Coincidentally that's only £1 less than our home contents insurance excess >sigh< so I'll be forking out one way or another, dammit. Apparently there are cheaper places to have your glass replaced than Apple, so I might suss one of those out, but right now I'm feeling very tempted by the Nexus 7. A whole new tablet that *isn't Apple*, and comes in at or below the cost of a new screen. All my apps are available on Android too. Seriously tempted.

How not to invest £6000

So*, we were at my Mum's** the other weekend and I decided to tackle the stair lift.

This'll be the stair lift she had installed in 2007, used approximately three times and then decided she'd move a bed downstairs and not bother going up there at all. We came across the bill for it shortly after she moved into the care home. £6000. I researched the company that installed it, hoping that they'd have a scheme for buying them back. Yep, you guessed it. A flock of pigs just flew past.

Worse than expected, not only did the company no longer exist, they'd been the subject of a BBC Watchdog investigation into the shady practice of selling stair lifts for way more than they were worth to vulnerable elderly people, often with dementia. Disgusting. As my Nan used to say: "their hands should drop off." Another brief stint of Internet research suggested she'd been overcharged roughly double what it should have been.

Back in June I was reluctant to write off such a massive amount of money. Surely someone could make use of what was effectively a brand new machine? OK four years old, but hardly used at all and still in perfect condition. Three mobility companies were advertising in the local paper. Two of them didn't return my calls, one said they were only interested if it was a straight staircase. Well, it isn't.

It turns right 180° at the bottom, and again 90° at the second kite wind further up. I found an Internet stair lift trading site, snappily titled stair lift trader dot com, and posted this photo there. I received two phishing replies within a couple of weeks, then nothing.

There was a brief flurry of excitement in September when someone telephoned to ask about the stair lift, but it was just one turn too short. The guy's upper landing was another three stairs and a final right turn away from Mum's, so no go.

By the time the end of November was upon us, I'd pretty much resigned myself to having to write-off the majority of the cost of this damned device. But getting rid of it was another conundrum altogether. Professionals would charge for removal which was like throwing good money after bad. I decided to do it myself, so this particular weekend we arrived in Nottingham armed with a set of Allen keys, an adjustable wrench, Mole wrench and anything else I could think of that might help get it apart.

I'll spare you the details. It took me about six hours to get it down, starting on Friday afternoon and finishing on Saturday morning. The tricky bits turned out to be the "hidden" Allen bolt that held the rail sections together (one more bolt that the other 5 that had visible heads), and working out how the heck the seat/battery pack/motor/gear assembly was connected to the rail. But eventually it was a pile of (very heavy) bits. Nikki wondered whether there was a local scrap merchant who might be interested. At least we'd make SOME money back. Good idea! One Google search, one phone call and one short drive later and we were unloading the bits into a skip.

Skip was duly weighed, and the scrap man handed over our dosh. 102kgs of mild steel at £100 a tonne: the princely sum of £10.20.

*All the best posts, and replies to questions, begin with "So" these days. Just ask the Today programme. They've debated the phenomenon several times already. Usually followed by a package in which the interviewee begins all his or her replies with "So." So I'm only keeping abreast of the trend, before you start. What's that? You weren't going to start. I'm sorry. It must be the way you're sitting.

**Strictly speaking it's not my Mum's any more, of course. It's mine. But it still feels disrespectful to even think of it that way, so I think it'll be "my Mum's" for a while yet. Probably until it's sold and we don't have to refer to it at all.

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 :(

Wake up, time to die

The line, for those who don't recognise it (are there any? lol) is from my favourite movie: Blade Runner.

It's posted in honour of my dear old Fujitsu-Siemens PC, which I've had since December 2004 and which didn't wake up this morning. Since I've used it pretty much every day, apart from holidays spent away from home, in almost seven years, its "not waking up" had happened before.

Usually it means a crash has occurred overnight for some reason, prior to the sleep kicking in. This time a warm reboot didn't fix the problem, and neither did a cold reboot, which is usually enough to clear down any hardware registers that have got their knickers in a knot. No, this was more than just a "not waking up." This was the Big Sleep.

Fingers crossed it's just something like the video card, and not a hard disk crash and the loss of all that lovely data. That lovely, unbacked up, data. Who'd have thought I'm a 33-year computer industry veteran who doesn't back up? There must be thousands of us.

Down tools. Oh... they weren't up.

My inner planner (Yes, I do have one. Yes, he's well buried) has sat slightly on the irritated side of the fence throughout this kitchen refurbishment business. My estimates for how long things should take, and when (and in what order) they should happen, suggested an optimum elapsed time of between 6 and 7 weeks for the whole job.

This perfect, shiny, back-to-back plan was thrown off kilter as soon as we left the blocks when the builder offered July 9th as a date when he could come and alter the chimney breast. So effectively, we've been forced to live out of the dining room for a month longer than *absolutely necessary*. In an ideal world. But, as is often brought home to us, it's not an ideal world, and most of the tradespeople who have come and gone during the works have commented that the elapsed time we ARE achieving is still pretty good. All things considered.

But, you know, when "living out of the dining room" means this:

...and this...

Then it all gets a bit old after a few weeks. Still, it's not all bad. At least we still had a kitchen sink until the start of this week. The start of a week that had been even more carefully planned than usual so that it dovetailed perfectly with the start of actual kitchen fitting on Monday, thus keeping to an absolute minimum the time when regular living is even more of an obstacle course.

Plans, as we've proved over and over again with this project, can change with a single phone call.

In this case, the phone call from the kitchen unit makers, to say they were very (very) sorry, but they wouldn't be able to deliver the units for fitting on Monday. One of their main joiners had broken his leg in a motorbike accident and they'd tried everything but they just couldn't honour the date. We've been pushed back a week. The knowledge that this is much more of a disruption for the Actual Kitchen Guy, since he now has to twiddle his thumbs for a week and then explain to all the customers he has booked in that their fitting will be delayed a week too, is no consolation. It doesn't make us feel better to know that other people are affected too.

No, there's nothing to be done apart from suck it up, and live out of the understairs cloakroom for another week. So you'll understand why, having been slightly on the irritated side of the fence, I'm now well into the middle of the irritated garden.

Ribbit, and rip it

21-day tape, it said. Masking tape has a "day value". It's meant to be the number of days you can leave the tape in place and still be able to remove it without damage to the surface. My Frog Tape has been up since yesterday morning, and today, after completing the second coat of Willow Tree, I took it down. My previous traumatic experience in the bedroom has been on my mind a lot this weekend and I was determined not to leave the tape in place a moment longer than necessary. The "oldest" piece was up for about 27 hours.

Do not use on paint that has not been properly cured, it said. Leave it at least 3 days, it said. I left it 7.

Click on the photo to see the full extent of the damage. True, it was nowhere near as bad as the bedroom. Only somewhere between 10-15% (linear) of the ceiling had its paint pulled off. With the old blue tape it was closer to 90%.

A six-fold improvement is, however, still not perfect, and leaves me with a patch-up job to do next weekend. On the positive side, Frog Tape's clever system of a polymer gel (or something) that expands as soon as the emulsion paint wets it, sealing the edge of the tape and leaving a perfectly clean line, did work very well in those areas where the tape came off without damage. I'd definitely use it again.

Shelving of the Underworld

Quite why the IKEA marketing department thought it was a good idea to name this after a Greek god escapes me for the moment. I mean, I could understand it if Hermes had been the God of Storage, but as it is, he's, according to Wikipedia, "... the great messenger of the gods [and] a guide to the Underworld."

He was, apparently, "... the patron of boundaries and of the travelers who cross them, of shepherds and cowherds, of the cunning of thieves, of orators and wit, of literature and poets, of athletics and sports, of weights and measures, of invention, and of commerce in general."

Hmm. Absolutely nothing there about storage. I guess if you chose to keep books in the unit there'd be a tenuous link to literature, but that's about it.

Wikipedia continues: "His symbols include the tortoise, the rooster, the winged sandals, the winged hat, and the caduceus." Not a cupboard then?

So I'd written the whole of this (extremely witty, I think you'll agree) post about our new shelving unit when my gaze alighted on the empty box propped up against the wall and I realised what a complete waste of wit it had been. The damn stuff isn't called Hermes at all. It's HEMNES.

Bloody Hell

I've had a gmail.com email address for almost exactly two months. Two months and two days, to be precise. I've never, so far, used it for anything. No subscriptions, no web forms, no purchases. I've only even disclosed what it is to very close family and friends, none of whom has ever used it.

I was spammed on it just now.

How does that work then? I only created the bloody thing as insurance against the day (rapidly approaching) when I'd have to abandon my main addresses at johnberesford.com.

It's about time something sensible, serious, and technologically impregnable was done to sort out flippin' spammers once and for all.

A series of sorry tales

I've been shopping on the Internet for over a decade, almost without incident. It seems either I've been very lucky, or I was saving all my bad luck up for our latest project.

We've been having an en-suite shower room fitted and our online purchases have, to say the least, not been straightforward. My previous successes in the area of online retail have definitely lowered my guard, to the point where I never even think of checking for adverse reviews before using a new supplier. More fool me. I can't work out whether the plumbing supply trade has more than its fair share of incompetents, but such has been our experience so far.

Problem #1: Broken shower tray; strange approach to customer service
We ordered a Coram shower tray and door from a supply company who quoted up to 5 days delivery. I gave the builder an estimate of arrival, to which he worked. It didn't turn up. To be fair, this was partly my fault for misreading the delivery details. It meant 5 *business* days. Buried even further in the small print, news that this countdown didn't start until after the products were shipped, and it had taken them two days to process the order and pick the goods from the warehouse. Hardly Internet speed that, is it?

But the problems didn't really start until the tray arrived. I should have been suspicious at the haste with which the courier dropped the goods off and presented his electronic device to record my signature, but a cursory glance revealed nothing amiss so I signed and he left. Three hours later, when the plumber came to remove the packaging, he discovered a huge chunk missing from one edge of the tray. A piece had been broken off and was rattling around inside the polythene sheet. I thought at first this had happened in transit - a result, perhaps, of heavy braking and the tray careering into another package in the van - but closer inspection showed that the package had previously been opened, and there was no waste trap included with the tray. It looked like a returned product had been recycled without being checked.

I returned to the supplier's website to look up the customer services number and was horrified to find they didn't have one. Policy. To "keep costs down" all customer complaints were handled by email. I emailed them, and proceeded (belatedly) to search out online reviews of the company. What I found sent a cold chill down my spine. Appalling reviews seemed to be the norm, and numbered in the hundreds, with only a handful of notes from satisfied customers. Late, incomplete, or totally absent deliveries, damaged goods, money taken from accounts before goods were shipped and never refunded. Lack of response to complaints. The same story told over and over again.

And then I received a reply to my customer services email. They handled (they said) all contact in the order of receipt (i.e. no attempt to prioritise urgent problems), and my ticket was #126 in the queue. I would receive an update on its progress every two hours until it was answered. Two hours later, I had moved to position #110 in the queue, but by now it was 3pm and they only work until 5. And this on the Friday before Bank Holiday weekend. I passed on the bad news to our plumber and builder, who began the process of scratching heads to work out how they could rejig their schedule to cope with the lack of a tray for what would probably be a minimum of another week.

The day after the holiday, the email countdown resumed. By then we had already investigated alternative suppliers. No local outlets carried stock and it soon became obvious our only recourse was to wait for the original suppliers to deal with the issue. This turned out to be a good thing, as my first contact with the support department that WASN'T a countdown informed me that a replacement would be despatched immediately. I replied that if this second delivery was going to take 9 days, like the first, that was unacceptable. "As a gesture of goodwill" they agreed to upgrade to next-day delivery and sure enough the replacement tray arrived the next day.

So a good result, eventually, but not without a deal of angst and I still wouldn't use them again. If I'd been able to talk to someone on the phone it could have been sorted on the Friday and a replacement delivered Saturday.

Problem #2: "Pedestal" Sink
We ordered a washbasin/toilet combo which came complete with pedestal. An easy assumption then that it had a standard fitting (wall mounted) to go with the pedestal. Wrong! The version supplied was designed to be fitted atop a vanitory unit. Luckily our builder had dealt with such a situation before, as none of us could face another trip around the complaint/replacement loop.

Problem #3: "Chrome" robe hooks
We chose a small (300mm wide) heated towel rail for the small return wall at the side of the shower, and I wanted some robe hooks to clip onto this similar to the one we already have in the main bathroom. I found two suitable designs but the one from taps4less, which because it was "chrome" came in considerably more expensive - like five times - the other, was exactly what I had in mind.

Delivery was swift, as was the disappointment when I opened the package to find the hooks (two of them in the deal) were not solid chrome, nor even chrome plated brass, but that awful faux-chrome plastic that they use for kiddies toys.

A brief sojourn in the online forums yet again revealed one awful review after another, with no evidence that anyone had ever had any satisfaction from long months of complaining. I decided to swallow it. Yet another company I'll never deal with again.

More bad news on the carpet front

Looks like we'll be camping out in the study even longer than anticipated.

The irony is not lost on me, that I put together a detailed plan to ensure that we'd be on the sofa bed for as short a time as possible. The plumber, the plasterer, and the decorator (me) were planned and scheduled to the nth degree, every day for four weeks, and we all kept rigidly to that plan.

Then, on Monday of this week, the plan fell apart. And today the carpet suppliers inform me that there is no stock of this particular carpet left anywhere in the UK (something I find hard to believe, since they are one of the UK's largest floor covering firms) and we'll have to wait for more to be imported. Due on September 6. I'll believe it when I'm walking on it.

What a difference a foot makes

Having spent the weekend tidying up the loose-endy type of jobs on the front bedroom - refitting the power sockets; replacing floorboards; checking for squeaks; pushing the lighting cables back into the ceiling void and refitting the light; caulking the skirting boards to avoid draughts; etc - we sat back this morning with excited expectation to await the carpet fitter.

He arrived mid-morning and within minutes of dropping his tool bag in the bedroom was wearing a worried frown.

"It's 570 this."
"That's right"
"I've only got 540 on the van."

Those being linear measurements, in centimetres, of the room and the carpet respectively.

Now I've made many mistakes in my life, but one of them definitely isn't measuring a room and getting the length out by 30cm. That's very nearly a foot. An inch and I might have accepted responsibility, but a foot? No way. So what's gone wrong? Seems to me either the salesperson made a mistake converting my Imperial dimensions to metric, or (more likely) when keying it into "the computer" she's hit the 4 instead of the 7.

But as you might expect, no-one is owning up to that, so we have two options:

1. Accept a join in the carpet, a foot from the window end of the room, using a piece cut from the side which would therefore have its "grain" going in the wrong direction. Not a very attractive option. 
2. Wait for a replacement piece of the right length, and pay for the (slight) extra yardage, plus a cutting charge for the mistake. Their mistake. Earliest possible return visit by the fitter? Friday. Might be next Monday. Also not a very attractive option, but slightly less unattractive than #1.

So that's what we've done. Guess we'll be on the sofa bed for at least another four nights. >sigh<

The mask of doom

Masking tape and I have never quite hit it off.

However, since my worst experiences from years gone by have been with the older, traditional "beige" tape, the more modern painter's tape is specifically designed for the purpose and supposedly does a MUCH better job (quote from the main website: "This is the advantage of using low-stick tape: you can press it down very hard without worrying about the tape pulling the paint up."), and Nikki had expressed a preference for edges that were considerably less wobbly, I put my reservations to one side and applied a few metres of the tape - as reported yesterday.

I should have known better.

It's my own fault really. For not sticking to my guns in the first place and, worse, for not abandoning the idea after a very early indication of likely failure (I'd had to reposition the second piece of tape, and it took off some of the ceiling paint when I moved it).

So after slapping a second coat of Armagnac onto the chimney breast at lunchtime, I spent an increasingly frustrating 40 minutes this evening removing the tape, and an even more frustrating 45 minutes painting over the holes it left in my lovely white ceiling. Not a single piece of tape came off without some damage, and at a guess I'd say around 90% of the total length of tape used came off with some ceiling attached. Even more annoying, much of the paint removed was right on the edge, so repairing the gaps - sans tape - meant the reintroduction of wobbly edges, thereby rendering the whole exercise a complete waste of time.

I spent much of the rest of the evening with my grumpy face on.

A search of online information sources reveals a possible reason for the problem: "Normal Blue Painter's tape should not be used on faux, delicate finishes, lacquer or new paint finishes that have been done less than one month." What? Who in the world suspends a decorating project for ONE MONTH while one half of the job cures to the point where masking tape can be used? Tch!

Windows 7

We've been running Windows 7 at home for some time, but yesterday I was scheduled to have it installed on my work's laptop as part of an internal pilot. There's been a few horror stories floating around from those who have already undergone the transition, so I wasn't expecting the upgrade to be glitch-free, and I wasn't disappointed. What should have taken a little over three hours turned into an overnight job as the rebuilt machine failed to get its encryption keys from the central server - the request stuck in a queue 11,000 items long with no way of reprioritising. Poor design, which has resulted in me having to go back in (thereby wasting an hour and a half from an already packed day) to collect it this morning.

I can only hope the works build is more stable than that on my home PC. Since upgrading I've been suffering regular blue screens (three or four a day sometimes, but usually at least two on the main occasions I wake it up from a sleep) in a video driver - atikmdag.sys. If you can be bothered, you can Google that for yourselves. I have. Pages and pages of forum entries bemoaning the problem, stretching back as far as Vista's first release in 2007, and still - three years later - no fix. It's a problem with a feature introduced with Vista known as TDR (Timeout Detection and Recovery) which was intended to allow the OS to recover from video card/driver timeouts without blue screening but which, when it fails, er... blue screens.

The failure has been attributed, at various times, to having two memory sticks instead of one (which can increase the risk of memory timeouts), Windows Aero features, hardware overheating (seems strange, because I always experience it either immediately after boot, or on wakeup, when the hardware is cold), hardware fault, or graphical driver errors. I've disabled Aero, but I still have two 1GB memory sticks and I may well have a transient video card fault, but I'd be willing to bet on the driver being the real problem. I had some similar issues on XP before upgrading the driver. Unfortunately I'm already on the latest W7 driver, so if that is the problem, at least for now, I'll have to put up with it. :(

At least W7 loads a heck of a lot faster than XP! (lol - but it's a humourless, hollow lol)

Oil spillage

No, I'm not going to add to the thousands of blogwords written about the accident in the Gulf. We're talking spillage on a much smaller scale here - the oil that's been leaking out of my car since it was about a year old, the sad revelation that you can't even trust the tradespeople you think you can trust, and the unlooked for benefits that can accompany an enforced change of tradesperson.

When I first noticed I was having to top up the oil quite frequently, I mentioned it to my mechanic on my next service visit. I forgot to ask him about it when I picked the car up, and it was a couple of months before it became obvious that it was still using oil. Even so, the loss rate wasn't enough to nudge me into making a special visit to the garage so it was another year before I had the opportunity to mention it to him again. And this time, I remembered to check with him whether he'd fixed it.

"You don't have a leak," he insisted. "Modern engines do burn oil, you just need to keep it topped up."

Being among the 99% of the population who don't understand the first thing about "modern engines" I didn't question this, but carried on adding a pint of oil every 8-10 weeks from that day - probably around the start of 2006 - until earlier this year when the closure of my regular garage forced me to move to another mechanic. Closer, but slightly more expensive.

And it's only about a week ago that it occurred to me I haven't had to top up the oil since. That service was back in February and ordinarily I'd have gone through at least two pints of oil by now. So yesterday, I dipped my stick out of curiosity. The oil level was only one notch below full. In other words, there HAD been a leak after all, my original guy couldn't be arsed to fix it, but the new guy spotted it and put it right without even mentioning it to me, or charging me any extra.

A study in false economy. That first garage may have appeared cheaper, but over the years he cost me around 300 quid in replacement oil that I could easily have avoided.

The unkindest cut

News of US TV's autumn schedule reached these shores yesterday, bringing with it the now inevitable stories of the "canning" of two series we've been following.

Heroes had its share of problems over four series, but the most recent outing seemed to us to be back on track, having solved the issues with way too many characters and yawnorama powers, and introduced a credible villain with an interesting goal to rival Sylar. We'd started to enjoy it again just in time to see it disappear forever.

FlashForward, on the other hand, has never been anything but intriguing. It didn't have a duff series, or a doldrums period, it has a wealth of subplot, well-drawn characters, and good writing. But it too failed to fire the US public's imagination in sufficient numbers for the network to consider keeping it going.

So these two highlights of our viewing hours join the swelling ranks of good sci-fi that has ended before its time. Firefly, The 4400, Farscape, Stargate: Atlantis, Invasion, Surface. A swift Google is all that's needed to find other similar stories, and forums stuffed with legions of fans bemoaning their loss and asking why. Those last two on my list are another example of series that were paired in our house - we watched them in parallel and we saw them die in parallel, killed off in the same season a few years back. We never even had chance to get into Firefly on broadcast media before it was killed off, discovering it on DVD long after the dust had settled on one of the most inventive,original and widely-missed series ever.

So how long can US TV remain broken like this? Time after time creating and then pissing off multiple fan-bases that stretch all across the world? Would it really be so hard to solve a problem that arises solely from the intersection between the short-termism of the producers and commissioning editors, and the relatively recent attempt by writers to introduce multi-series story arcs (Lost the most obvious example) without being able to fill them with TV compelling enough to command audience figures that will satisfy the networks? At the very least let's have some degree of completion at the end of each series (to hedge our bets against the "rest of the story" never being made) or a commitment to always allow a one-off "special" to be made to tie up any loose ends.

It may be too much to ask that US TV networks wake up to the notion that it may not even be possible to sustain audience figures when there are so many other avenues of entertainment open. Even the most popular UK TV shows have seen audiences dwindle in recent years. If our TV was produced along US lines we'd have seen the end of many of our longest-running shows long before now.

Storm warning

Recently we found out about the opportunity of a lifetime... which, ironically, we may be JUST too late for.

Storm the Charts is a campaign designed to repeat the success of last Christmas's campaign to get Rage in the Machine to the number 1 chart spot in preference to Simon Cowell's "traditional" X Factor winner, who in recent years has been a shoo-in for the Christmas #1 on account of the cynical and exploitative timing of the show.

Only this time, instead of just the number one, the campaign is trying to take over the entire top 40.

And this time, instead of the profits STILL making their way to Sony BMG (who ironically own the rights to the Rage in the Machine single and therefore still made money on the back of the Christmas campaign), they're choosing unsigned indie bands who have never charted.

Bands, in fact, like Beresford & Wallace.

How cool would that have been? Mere weeks after releasing the album, to have Spin Doctor charting, and downloaded by thousands of people who only a short time ago had never heard of us?

Unfortunately, there is an application deadline for bands wishing to take part of March 23. And in order to apply, our music would have to be already available from iTunes. Even though iTunes is the quickest online retailer at processing new music, they still quote 1-3 weeks as the lead time to load up new stuff, so even if we could get it to them today we'd still only have a slim chance of meeting the deadline, and that's without taking account of the delays introduced by our chosen digital distribution partner.

No, sadly, we're gonna have to take a back seat this time round and miss out on the fun. BUT - if the campaign is successful and captures the UK music-buying public's imagination in the way the organisers hope it will, then there'll almost certainly be another go later. You can bet we'll *definitely* be there next time round.

Flat

Set off to take Nikki to work this morning and I knew instantly something was wrong. That familiar heavy feeling of driving with a flat tyre.

Sure enough the nearside front was pancaked. Luckily the forecast rain hadn't yet set in. Changing the wheel on a road with a heavy camber, in the dark, is hard enough without having strong Manchester drizzle to cope with as well.

After twenty minutes we were back on the road, Nikki using her iPhone to consult the opening times of local tyre fitters and me hoping the spare had enough air to get me there and I wouldn't run over anything (else) sharp on the way.

Arrived back home an hour or so later, almost a hundred quid poorer after the discovery that those three measly feet of travel on the completely flat tyre had wrecked the sidewalls and a repair was out of the question. At least, that's what they tell you.

*sigh*

My email has been spammed.

Nowt so unusual in that, you might think, in a world where well over 80% of the entire email traffic is spam, but having learned my lesson with my very first (publicly accessible) email address back in 1997, I'd taken great pains to protect it and... until yesterday at least... been pretty successful.

I've owned my own domain for several years and, having never entered either of my main email addresses at that domain in any forums, online forms, or anywhere it might have been harvested, have managed to stay blissfully spam-free.

Indeed you may remember me mentioning back in September that the aforementioned original email address had bitten the electronic bullet, which reduced my spam count from the low teens per day to one or two per WEEK. It didn't half feel quiet around my Inbox I can tell you.

A few months ago I did get a hint that the honeymoon was over, as a small trickle of spam started to arrive. I was lulled into thinking it might be a passing phase, as numbers remained small and far between. I should have known better. Having made it onto one list - I have no idea how - it was only a matter of time before the list was sold on, and the heavy spammers started to hit me. That time came yesterday, with over a dozen invitations to visit an online drugstore in the space of five minutes. The pile has been increased today, to the point where I've had to create a new rule or two.

Sad, but inevitable I suppose. And yet a small part of me retains its heated indignation that, when the email servers of the world are kicking out their metric tonnes of CO2 by the second to no other purpose than sending reams and reams of shit flying around the planet so that yet more servers can apply carefully crafted algorithms to delete them again before anyone reads them, no-one has yet considered this to be a serious enough problem to actually do much about it.

The old boiler

...is not that old actually. The first money we spent on the house when we moved in (October 2006) went on a new boiler. Three years is not old, particularly for such a high-spec and well renowned boiler.

Last night, it developed a fault.

The last hour of TV viewing had become increasingly uncomfortable even though we'd had the fire on, but I'd put it down to the extreme weather. Forecasts predicted it would be even colder in parts overnight than yesterday, with some areas dropping to -20° - same as the South Pole - and that fire always was more decorative than practical.

But when we walked into the hall and discovered the temperature had fallen two degrees below the supposed minimum, we knew something was up, and the flashing blue light on the front of the boiler (and the flashing error code beneath the cover) confirmed that this almost-brand-new boiler had chosen the coldest period in 50 years in which to turn up its toes. Great.

I'd been holding off booking a service expecting our heating engineer to be snowed under (haha!) with emergency calls, but it looks like we'll be another to add to his list now.