\\--Digamy--//

The corporate bonus culture

2012-02-09T10:14:00.005Z

It's quite sickening isn't it how in 1978 the chief executive of British Aerospace was paid £29,000 a year. Yet In 2010, the chief executive of BAE Systems, Ian King, was paid over £2.3m, a rise of 8,000%...... in real terms his salary should be £120,000 to be in line with 1978's reckoning on what he was/is worth.....

The problem is that the remuneration committees made up of some non executive directors etc decide their Chief Executive Officers pay..... and he in turn sits on a committee to decide their pay...In effect they decide on each others' pay. and they probably all go around to the golf club afterwards and have a damn good laugh about it.... meanwhile the axe falls on 3000 jobs at BAE Systems at the tax payers cost. While Mr King watches his interest mount up...... Greed is never an attractive thing to witness, and no amount of "but he's/she has done this or that or whatever" quite makes it right to be paid in most cases 400 times more than a normal employee.....

Look at Thomas Cook their share price tumbled to just 50p over a 4 year period and had to borrow £200 million to keep trading.... did their outgoing CEO get a boot up the arse and did he bang his head on the way out of the door ? NO !!! he got £1 million ....

It's utterly disgusting that idiots are being rewarded for doing a job that another person could do equally well for less pay AND still be comfortably off.... CEO's aren't "special" people, they aren't any different to any other person on the planet....They aren't uber intelligent, or gifted (although some like to think they are..... and I've met a few) they were just connected at the right time to the right people, or were in a particular school or club.... It's all about back scratching and it reminds me of pigs in a pen rubbing up against a post and each other..... except our pigs are running our economy and corporate businesses and they are getting fatter and more gluttonous as the months roll by whilst everybody else sees their hard earned cash evaporating......it's reminiscent of a feeding frenzy..... filling up their pot bellies with more and more cash....

Some CEO's are worth every penny and deserve to earn what they earn, but I personally would be uncomfortable taking that kind of salary no matter how good I was at my job...... The whole system stinks and I've got to be honest I hope it all collapses around their ears and with that I'll throw in the bankers and financiers..... The Hesters and Goodwins of this world who are deeply and unattractively greedy.... and that goes for anyone who takes a massive bung for just doing their job.......

MOT time is upon us again

2012-02-01T21:29:00.003Z

For those of you who don't know what an MOT is here in the UK it's basically a mechanical/electrical/emissions test which happens once a year for your car/van/lorry/tank if it's three years old or more.... the idea behind it is simple .... to keep death traps off the road....unfortunately it doesn't keep idiots off the road .... but that's another matter.....

Well after last year's MOT failure on emissions I finally got around to replacing our catalytic converter ... we are no long melting ice cubes in the Arctic regions and polar bears and penguins can breathe a sigh of relief .....

The beamer only failed on one headlight bulb which was replaced in situ and a new type MOT certificate was freshly printed..... another sigh of relief.

We are currently going through a rather cold snap in the weather here in the UK, for those of you who are in the UK BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

for those of you who are elsewhere (such as the Cayman Islands ....... you lucky cow) you miss this weather ..... go on admit it.....

On the family front Freya has a rather nasty ear infection for which she is taking antibiotics .... apparently her eardrum is perforated but she seems cheerful enough (when not tired).... the Sullen one (Lauren) is still at college and seems to be enjoying life (mostly), Xbox Boy is currently counting the days until he joins the Army on the 11th March... And FOMO boy (Andrew) is missing out on broadband today because his step dad can't be arsed to turn it back on for him (short story involving coal and the lack of getting and announcing he can't be arsed) ...... normal service will be resumed tomorrow once lesson has been learned :)

I'm seriously considering stopping updating this blog mainly because I'm getting rather jaded with soap-boxing because nothing ever changes in the world.... the jury is out on that decision at the moment ..........I will return at some point in the future and update you on this subject.....

I'm getting between 5 or 6 thousand hits a month so somebody is reading my blatherings ..... but I'm simply losing interest in it.... I initially started it so that my two daughters could find out what was going on in my life...... but a one way street wasn't my intention ............

There you go.....

(I can't even be bothered to put a picture with this post)

Patent Wars

2011-12-20T09:11:00.003Z

I've been reading the ridiculous patent wars that are currently being fought in courts of law around the world about how Android phones are infringing patents..... but if you look at these patents

PCT/GB98/03016 <--- for instance

They relate to the vaguest description of an idea, and in some cases like the one above, they talk about devices that have long since gone to landfill.... the one above was filed in 1998 and U.S. Patent No. 6,956,564 on "portable computers" (not previously asserted; Apple acquired this one from British Telecom in 2008) are suing HTC over some vague use of a touch screen as described in the patent and touch screens didn't even exist in 1998 not for hand portable computers as it's called in the patent anyway !!!

No make no mistake about this, this is about the inexorable march of Linux/Android into places where previously only bespoke software sat, such as the Apple iPhone and only now is Apple beginning to wake up that their market share is soon going to disappear especially in their stronghold America..... the iPhone is selling stronger in the States than anywhere else but Android is catching up, just like it's overtaken Apple in Europe it will do the same in the States.

So this is why Apple are buying up stale 1998 patents off British Telecom, probably because their legal eagles can see some mileage in them, after all stalling sales of Android phones anywhere in the world means lost profits for the patent losers and increased profits for Apple.... But personally I see no honour in wheeling out a stale old patent which was originally filed for the likes of Psion Series 5, and the HP320LX

As you can see neither of these dinosaurs have anything in common with a modern Android phone, and I fail to see how they can apply a patent for a device manufactured in 1998 by a COMPLETELY different company which has been simply purchased by another company on the off chance that it might be useful in fighting off a product which is better purely because of design and how that can be enforced in a court of law is beyond me...... The problem is though Linux/Android has SO many developers to push out a change takes only a few days and in some cases just a few hours, so they are behaving a bit like King Canute commanding the tide to halt

(although that isn't a very good example because King Canute didn't try to stop the tide to show how powerful he was as a king "Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws." In other words that other human construct...... God.....or as I like to call it "the fall back when nothing else fits" )

Anyway I digress, it's all delaying tactics the design cycle of Android is accelerating, Apple on the other hand doesn't have the resources to develop as quickly as Android.... hence the litigiousness we are seeing now..... or in plain speak "blind panic" .... Steve Jobs has gone !!!! what are we going to do now ???? Sue them !!! every last one of them !!!! damn it !!!!

Laughable......Muah ha ha ha ha ha ha

It's been a while

2011-12-16T10:18:00.004Z

I simply haven't had time to update my blog of late what with this and that happening....We've moved AGAIN !!! We are still in Laugharne, but we had the chance of a nice house with a huge garden and we jumped on it from a great height..... I've already hacked the garden to death to get some light into it because it had a lot of overhanging trees and we also have an Apple tree.... but gardening has ceased now because of winter but come spring I'll be back in there hacking away again..... we even have a small stream that runs right through the bottom of the garden.... it even has brown trout in it !!! :)

Anyway.... Hasn't the world been busy ???? Gaddafi brown bread and quite a few of his family.... well lets face it....it really wasn't going to end well, was it ? and now the UK and the US are turning their attention to Iran and their nuclear ambitions or is that their oil ? I always get those two commodities mixed up.... Then of course we have all the nut jobs who think the world is going to end as predicted in the Mayan calendar.....if it wasn't bad enough that Christians are under the delusion that there will be a second coming and a destruction of earth.....blah .....blah .....blah, and then of course we have the extremist Muslims who are blowing themselves up for their share of virgins ..... they must surely be running out of them by now ? .... I am sooooooooo glad I'm an atheist, I suppose I used to be as bad because I used to believe in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy.... but I grew up and saw sense.....

Then of course we have more sensible things going on like the sigma 2 discovery of the Higgs Boson particle at CERN or the GOD particle as it's been dubbed or basically the reason why everything has mass in the universe.... people don't seem to realise the significance of this discovery... but all will become clear.... Like I said I'm sooooooooo glad I'm an atheist....

Anyway after that quick catch up with world events... onto more serious things like Freya's progress at school.... The school have started something called Read/Write/Ink (I think that's how it's said) basically it's a new way of teaching kids to read & write and it's results are astounding.... In Freya at least, from what I can tell they use phonetics as SSSSS snake and IIIIII insect ... but it's working she has only just turned 4 years old and she is reading her first words like PIN, CAT, SIT, SAD etc it's almost like a light has been switched on in her head and it's amazing to witness :)

Andrea and I went to her nativity play yesterday at her school... historically I wasn't going to pick holes in the story and decided I was just going to take it on face value.... because I simply don't do religion in any shape or form, I find the whole subject quite distasteful in this day and age... but I have to admit Freya as an angel (human construct though it is) was pretty damn cute...

I'm going to let Freya decide for herself regards religion, just because I find it so ridiculous doesn't mean she will... although I'm aware that my views on it may well form her views on it, but I can't do anything about that....I'm not going to sugar coat any difficult questions she might ask....... in much the same way a "Christian" family can't stop their beliefs rubbing off on their children.... live and let live just don't force your views on me and I won't figuratively rip your head off with logic....

Anyway here we are nearly at WinterSolsticemas .... because that's what it really is.......

I will probably catch you the other side of the festivities

RIP Steve Jobs, 1955 - 2011

2011-10-06T10:57:00.003+01:00

I was fairly lucky in that I came into computing just in its infancy with the IBM 5150 and a few years later the Apple Macintosh hit the streets...that is when Apple hit mainstream businesses, there were a few before that namely the Lisa and the Apple IIe, but the Macintosh is the one that stirred the imagination.

Now although I'm not what you would call an avid fan of Apple Inc and their closed proprietary business model, I have to admire the man Steve Jobs, love him or loathe him, his single vision to simplify computers by removing them from the hands of geeks (like me) in darkened rooms and transforming them into everyday objects such as the iPod, iPhone and iPad, which to so many have become must have gadgets.... Back in the 1980's computers were mainly hideous things bolted together with self tapping screws, cumbersome and heavy and by today's standards incredibly slow...

Then along came the stylish Mac, first of all it had 128Kb of ram, but above all it gave the impression of something entirely different to the offering from IBM, it had a mouse !! now that wasn't a new thing the Unix world and X windows had used a mouse for some time, but Apple were the first to bring it mainstream, the monitor was infinitely higher resolution which was paper white with black characters, just like written pages... IBM on the other hand had green screen, low resolution monitors... on looks alone the Mac won hands down.... However in its early days it was seen as a toy, as most mainstream businesses used IBM and DOS (Disk Operating System) or the unimaginative A:> .... yes we were still using floppy disks in those early days, the first hard disks were quite a long way away, and the first ones that came out were hideously expensive.

I remember marvelling at the first hard disk when it had 5MB of storage it was enormous and heavy like a house brick, but WOW it had 5MB of storage on it !!!

a hard drive that size now could hold 9 or 10 Terabytes....

Apple did things differently their floppy disk drives had no eject button and they only had one drive, eventually hard disk started appearing in Macintosh's but Apple always were very expensive to buy in some cases twice the price of the equivalent IBM, so to many it was a luxury they could ill afford... they did however practically take over in the printing and graphics side of the industry, it took IBM compatible computers many years to compete with Apple on graphics and image manipulation, by that time Apple was so entrenched within that industry they could never be toppled.....He was also responsible for the first laser printer hitting the market the Apple Laserwriter...

However not all went well for Apple, Steve Jobs was fired in the 1980's because sales of Mac's bottomed out and slowly Apple lost momentum and market share... to the point where Microsoft had to bail them out with an injection of cash... but it was an entirely selfish act on Microsoft's part because if Apple went under Microsoft would come under the scrutiny of the monopolies commission and could/would be broken up as a result of Apple's demise...

Steve went on to found NeXT and he "dabbled" in a few other companies such as Pixar and he gained stocks in Disney, eventually Apple bought NeXT so that it could implement its technology into Apple products and a few months later Steve Jobs was back at the helm of his first company.... the rest is history and what followed can only be described as a slew of iconic must have devices which captured an entire generation, such as the iPod, iPhone, iPad.... but without Steve's involvement and his vision in the early years Apple would not have become what it is today....

So I'm glad I was around to witness the very first Apple computers and see the humble beginnings they came from, I repaired Apple IIe's and Lisa's and Macintosh's... I even reverse engineered their "Fat Mac upgrade" which at the time cost over £4000 to upgrade via Apple to 512KB of memory, which they were none too impressed about but could nothing about because their customers were willing to void their warranty to get it for £1000....

One thing I will never forget is how badly a humble looking Macintosh could send you flying across the room if you dared to ignore the EHT discharge warnings and accidentally touched the anode cap from the monitor in that tightly packed Macintosh case......even after you had discharged it you kept on discharging it because it seemed to get high voltage from nowhere.... many a time I was caught out with that....

I used to have a letter signed by Steve Jobs sent to the company I worked for at the time to "cease and desist" from upgrading Macintosh's I should have kept it......he was litigious even then....

But it's a sad day, the world has lost a great man, who's drive and ambition probably won't be seen again for a long time, and so young too, he had a lot more to give......

classic choon !!!

2011-09-25T00:32:00.002+01:00

A Classic 80's Tune !!!

brilliant

I predict a riot

2011-08-10T11:44:00.000+01:00

Well albeit after the event(s)... I've got to be honest I've found the media coverage of the recent riots quite sickening, it's as if this younger generation has completely lost the plot of what society expects of a young person, it's almost as if a troupe of wild baboons have been let loose in the cities, while the police look on not knowing what to do next.

Personally I blame consumerism and the endless get rich quick message that has been pumping out of our TV's for years now. You've got to have this phone, or these trainers, or this jacket or this bling ….ad nauseum...

But it goes back further than that, its roots were put down years ago when schools lost the ability to punish kids for wrong doing, they lost the ability to teach them that every action has a reaction or consequence. Instead that was replaced with kids have rights too and treating them with kid gloves.... this only brought forward the "You can't touch me that's assault" and that is what has brought about this lawlessness, the knowledge that they cannot be touched, coupled with alcohol and drugs being freely available.

By sparing the rod we have ruined a whole generation who have been spoon fed by the media that the idea of the only thing you have to do to be famous is appear on TV. How vacuous is that? We have kids craving after the latest bit of technology because their friends have it, and youngsters who are about to leave school who have no idea what they want to do when they leave who's lives revolve around when they can get drunk enough to not remember what they've done or where they have been. And some who count a successful night out on how many times they have vomited....

They are storing up huge problems ahead of them regarding authority, accountability and consequences, not to mention health.

I'm old school and I have to admit I'm proud of that fact, I know the boundaries and the moral implications of any actions I may take. I honestly think we have been too soft on this generation; admittedly not all of this generation have grown up to think they are free from responsibility or do not think of others before acting. But the horrendous things I've seen on the TV do not shock me, there has been an undercurrent of this kind of lawlessness for years, a blatant disrespect for authority or elders and other people’s property, it has over the years got worse.

For instance if somebody damages your car outside your house you can't give them a damn good beating because you'll be hauled up in front of the judge and charged with assault, and therein lies the problem, accountability there is none, and they know it.... there is nothing to stop these idiotic louts from running amok, as they have been doing.

The very fabric of our society is crumbling around us, and to be honest the only way I can see a thing changing is if an iron fist is used to deter these idiots whom we as a society by the votes we have cast in the past have created.

It’s going to be a long haul

The Summer Jollydays

2011-08-07T11:31:00.002+01:00

Freya enjoying the sun on Aberdaron beach

Well we've had our summer camping trip up to Aberdaron on the Llyn Penisula... and I have to say we couldn't have picked a better time to go, apart from one day that was a bit misty and the odd spot of rain for the greater part of our trip camping it was brilliant weather.... The car I'm afraid didn't particularly enjoy the trip up or back mainly because it was loaded down to the suspension stops with all of our gear.... and it's suffered because we have a failed rear shock absorber... although I have a feeling that was ruined driving around Edinburgh's streets when we went up there to visit family.... I do like Edinburgh but I couldn't live there mainly because I'm a country ~~boy~~ man at heart (and Welsh... not Scottish) I like cities but only to visit, I've lived in big places before such as Leeds and for several years as well..... and I hated it ..... I'd much rather live in a village or better still out in the middle of nowhere, where you walk out of your house and all you can see are rolling hills and trees..... That said Edinburgh is a beautiful city and we had a lovely time up there visiting family and friends.....

Getting back to our visit to Wales we even went to Abersoch (or Aversock as we called it) that place is seriously full of money, mainly from England as I barely heard a Welsh accent the whole time I was there and the prices were just short of extortion, apparently Andrea knows how expensive a place is by the type of shops it has.... I can't even remember most of the names but apparently for a place to have "those" shops then it's seriously minted....

Aberdaron Beach

Being a bloke I just went by the types of car that were there, like the Overfinch Range Rover.... the one that comes with two Purdey shotguns and an endless supply of whiskey in the back of it, or the several GT3 Porches and top end Audi's flying about the place.... not to mention the Gucci sun glasses and several other designer pairs which seemed to be on practically everybody's forehead....and the odd "Oh dahling isn't it lovely" comments

Anyway so now I'm searching for the cheapest set of rear shock absorbers for a BMW touring .... it's a simple job... fortunately they can be removed through the boot and the new set installed the same way.... either way it has to be done because the car skates around a bit on corners as the tyres bounce on the road and it will only get worse, so that's a priority.....

back to the drudgery of day to day life......

Phone hacking

2011-07-13T14:32:00.000+01:00

Unless you've been hiding in a cave for the past month or so, you'll have heard about the demise of the News of the World newspaper. Basically Rupert Murdoch quite happily sacked 200 or so staff to save one top executive Rebecka "the slapper" Brookes... she got the title "the slapper" from the publication Private Eye when she was accused of kicking seven bells out of her then husband TV hard man Ross Kemp...

You can imagine that she is a very driven person, competitive, cut throat and results driven... she could of course be the complete opposite of that...but that would be stretching the imagination a little far.

Once the rats had jumped the ship regarding the advertising it became an unstoppable juggernaut of destruction and damage limitation by News international...

But I think the rot goes much deeper than this and isn't necessarily contained to one media organisation.... How many times have you read "from a trusted source" in news articles? There is currently lots of smoke but I think the fire is under the peat bog and it's raging away.... I think there are a lot of editors out there currently sweating... We've only really seen the tip of the iceberg at the moment and this kind of thing has been going on for years like a bad attack of dry rot, all of it fed by higher circulation and money changing hands.

I've never been a reader of the tabloids I find them very low brow and sensationalist journalism (I use the word loosely...tittle tattle is probably more accurate), but it seems a vast majority of the population do like that kind of thing, and where there is demand, there is supply.

Anyway enough of the serious stuff I'm sure the ones who are supposedly in charge of this country will thrash out a deal with News International and it will be buried for an unspecified sum of money or a suitable donation.... or will last long enough until something juicier comes along...

Meanwhile in the real world our soldiers are still dying in Afghanistan for an unspecified reason and will continue to do so, fighting a completely unjust war with very little sign of an endgame.

Anyway... We're off on our jollys soon, we are camping up in North Wales for a week then shooting off to Scotland for a bit (not camping I might add)... hopefully the weather will hold for the week, but even so I'm reliably informed that not only does the Llyn Peninsula have outstanding views but it also has a glut of pubs, of which I intend to visit some of the better ones... Chris my mate has promised to visit considering its just down the road from where he lives... but his reliability has proven somewhat dodgy in the past... so I won't be holding my breath or getting a pint in unless he actually turns up... I'm also hoping to do a bit of fishing up there... which reminds me I must check if they have a decent bait shop up there

Anyway we are all ok both teenagers working decent hours down in Pendine and actually getting some money in their pockets.... Freya is the missing link in the Dinosaur fossil record in that she is living proof that the Stropasaurus evolved into a human female... although she does make us laugh with her constant singing and ridiculous statements like "nooooo you're Princess Kracka Lacken"

the only other bit of hilarity is Fomo boy's voice is on the verge of breaking, and his ridiculous warbling will only get worse as he gets older.... he doesn't really notice it but we do ...his voice box hasn't quite decided where it's going yet, but I'm sure it will pretty soon.... He's off to Andrea's Mum & Dad on Friday, So we'll probably notice his warbling more once we meet up with him and Hugo (Andrea's nephew) when we pick them up for carry on camping.......

When will we learn ?

The only worrying thing is that we will leave two teenagers with free reign over the house for ten days.. but they will be under pain of death (and quite possibly eviction) if anything gets trashed....

We shall see

Gotham City

2011-06-28T10:27:00.000+01:00

The bats are back !! well one bat or it could be two, they have decided that the gap between where our wood burner goes through the ceiling and into the roof space is an ideal place to launch themselves from come twilight....The only problem is that they launch themselves inside our house. I think it's a pipestrelle but I could be wrong it seems bigger than the ones we had in our previous house. Either way both Andrea and Lauren were hiding under a Charlie and Lola blanket like a pair of quivering girls... eventually I trapped it in the hallway and opened the front door and out it flew....alas later on it came back and had another fly past before I went to bed, I've named it Douglas after Douglas Bader the battle of Britain spitfire pilot. We've also found a baby bat in one of our bathrooms.... so it looks like they are breeding up there.....

Xbox Boy is in Zante in Greece for a weeks holiday with his friends which he can barely afford, but that's up to him, He does start another job once he comes back in Pendine, it's only seasonal but it's a better job than he had...

Lauren is working in the same place and she works hard.... I think it might be a bit of a shock for Stewart... but there you go time will tell. Stewarts work history thus far has been far from glowing.....Although Lauren got a dose of reality the other evening when she asked Andrea for bus fare to get to work a few days AFTER she had been paid... erm no...

FOMO boy had a nice birthday, he asked for money for his birthday and he put it towards something called an E-Pad, which is basically a HUGE android phone or a wannabe iPad... but without the phone bit... He broke the charger within a day.... I don't think it's going to survive very long if I'm honest, either the screen will get cracked or it will befall some other terminal damage, just like his DSi. call me cynical....

On the subject of technology as I predicted several months ago Lauren's brand new 12MP camera is on the verge of death, it's very obviously been dropped (probably more than once) and has an intermittent lens error... I see little point in buying Lauren any type of technology because she simply doesn't value it or look after it....In fact her answer to being questioned about it's lack of working properly was "Well you should have got insurance with it" "Erm no.... You should have bloody well looked after it, insurance is for genuine accidents not stupidity" This Christmas I think it will just be cash....In fact I will insist upon it.. at least that way I won't get predictably upset when it gets trashed, which of course it won't because it's cash.

Andrea is still running, she was out last night on a club run and she's out again tonight in Lampeter on another run, she enjoys it and it keeps her fit and trim so who am I to complain ?

We are planning on going camping in North Wales in July, so hopefully the weather will hold... but knowing our luck it will tip down, because thus far this summer is turning out to be much like the summers we've had recently....par for the course it seems.

The only news that has made me chuckle recently was the prediction that our Sun is going into an unpredicted solar minimum when it should be entering it's solar maximum now, and this minimum is along the same lines of the little ice age of the middle ages when the river Thames froze over predictably every year and they held winter festivals on the frozen river.... That has to hack off the Anthropogenic Global Warming zealots, because it cancels out the predicted rise in temperature because of CO2, and the ONLY way to counter the impending freeze (if it happens) is to pump out more CO2 to warm the Earth up.... You've got to laugh, they haven't got a clue and if anything it shows how little they know about climate... I also had to laugh at the IPCC when they stated that renewables would provide most of our energy by 2050, a paper written by a guy in the IPCC who is Greenpeace, but worse than that they let him review his own paper... and NOW governments are using this data as fact.... erm no epic fail

2011-06-10T20:33:00.001+01:00

So true......

Bugger !!!

2011-06-05T10:37:00.001+01:00

Our car developed a seized front right disc brake which was causing the disc to heat up alarmingly, not only that it was costing us money in petrol pushing the car harder to gain the same speed.... So I bought a brake refurbishment kit which replaces all the seals and rubber bushings....

It's not a hard job to do, you just need to remove the brake caliper from the wheel and push the piston out and clean everything up in there, replace the seals and away you go..... normally ......

The piston proved harder than I thought to get out... I eventually reverted to pushing it out via hydraulic pressure on the existing brake line.... and at the moment the piston left the piston chamber..... I was doomed :( but I didn't know it then.... I only discovered how doomed I was later...

the worst part was figuring out that you can only put the dust seal on AFTER you have pushed the cleaned and lubricated piston all the way in which took about an hour after various combinations I was ready to fit it back on the car and bleed the brakes......

But it wasn't to be....... I was defeated by a minuscule bleed screw which had last been opened in about 1998... it was rusted solid into the brake housing/piston chamber..... it didn't matter what I tried I couldn't get it loose or get it to even move.... I could have used brute force but all that would have done was ripped it clean off the piston housing......

Which presented me with a problem.... without being able to bleed the brakes they wouldn't work as they are intended....So the only thing I could do was to fill up the piston chamber with brake fluid through the tiny hole where the brake line attached (not an easy thing to achieve) and "try" and make it air free.... then reattach the brake line and hope the braking on that disc was good enough....

unfortunately it wasn't although they work there is a lot of travel in the brake pedal and the brakes fade.... naturally because they aren't air free....

My father is arranging a visit to a blacksmith to remove the offending bleed screw by welding a nut onto it and getting it out....and putting a new bleed screw in if that fails it's a new caliper I'm afraid and they ain't cheap :(

Which has more than hacked me off because I've already spent more than I wanted to on the refurbishment kit and pressure bleed system.......

Moral of the story..... Always have a exit strategy before embarking on something which might not work.....

Mortality

2011-05-29T20:58:00.005+01:00

See the guy at the back of this picture ? Dean Partridge a bloke I served with in the Royal Signals at 11th Signal Regiment, sadly died in April, he shared the same birthday as me and he was born the same year as me, from what I can tell he died of cancer @ 48 years old !!! I have some excellent memories of Dean, we laughed and grafted together and got through basic training together....

A sad day... I only found him a few months ago when I started a Facebook group about Ouston and 11th Signal Regiment where we did our basic training and he popped up out of the woodwork, I had no idea he was terminally ill, but that's Dean for you.... I'm glad I got back in touch before he passed away..... RIP Dean Partridge 9th March 1963 - 28th March 2011...

We're not on this Earth for long .... so make the most of it while you can because it's gone in the blink of an eye...... My basic training with Dean is still fresh in my mind it only seems like yesterday...those 10 mile runs around the airfield, the change parades, the immaculate bulled boots the sleeping in freezing trenches..... S/Sgt Mold beasting us.......it's 32 years ago now .....WOW ....(I'd do it all over again if I could)

Gone in a flash

(And yes... that's me flicking the V's)

Certa Cito Dean.....QBG.....QEF

Bonny Scotland

2011-05-24T15:45:00.000+01:00

Well Andrea made it back in one piece and her time for the marathon was 4 hours 34 minutes, which is pretty astounding considering she had a lot of time off training because of her leg injury... She had a lovely time up in Scotland and came back positively buzzing.... however her buzz has left her now and the early start she had this morning to catch her flight has hit her on the back of the head and she's wimped out and gone to bed.....

I'm immensely proud of her :)

I'd also like to welcome a reader of my blog called Claire, knowledge is power even if it does leak out..... ;¬) What I have learnt about Claire is that don't ever going shopping with her she is a walking security tag apparently ....(private joke probably only appreciated by Claire and Andrea).... I'll get my coat....

Andrea escaped the big blow over Scotland by an hour as all flights were cancelled an hour after she left for Cardiff, by the looks of the news they got hit pretty bad, with large trees uprooted and at least two people killed which is awful, we on the other hand had a bit of a breeze and a light spotting of rain in sunny Wales.

The car is playing silly buggers again with its ABS whereby it activates at slow speed usually when rolling up to junctions at under 10mph... I'm determined to crack it, mainly because it's so bloody annoying .....I suspect it's the rear ABS sensors thinking that one of the wheels has locked up, considering the front ones were replaced recently AND have new reluctor rings on its hubs when I replaced the bearings. Although I think I will have to remove the drive shafts from the back to have a look see..... I also have to refurbish the front drivers side disc brake because it's starting to show signs of grabbing the disc, which means it isn't retracting properly, but that won't be expensive (£20+time+swearing+spanner rash)

A man has to have a hobby ;¬)

I don't mind repairing the car as it saves massive amounts on the garage bills which is always good.... plus I'm not going to add anything to the bill I didn't do or in fact fit. Not that I don't trust garages....

Anyway onward and upward

Dean Mead from Carmarthen

2011-05-17T13:25:00.010+01:00

I never met Dean Mead, but both Stewart and Lauren have and counted him as a good friend, they were both deeply shocked when they heard of his untimely death in Afghanistan by an IED.... I was very moved by how well he was thought of by his fellow Marines.

I won't replicate the comments out of respect, but I suggest you go and read them.....here

A fine young man cut down in his prime doing something he loved.

"They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them."

RIP Dean Mead 1991 - 2011

Imagine

2011-05-14T14:22:00.002+01:00

Andromeda Galaxy our nearest neighbour

Fitting our Earth inside our Sun, how many Earth's could you fit into it ? Well you could fit 1 million (1,000,000) Earth sized objects inside of our Sun.

Now let’s take that a stage further. Imagine that our Sun was the size of a grain of ordinary sand that you would find on a beach.... Then imagine that all the stars in the universe were that size as well.... There would not be enough sand on our earth to equal the amount of stars in the Universe.

That gives you an idea of how many stars there are out there which is one of the reasons why I have great difficulty believing in any God, Why would a God create such a massive and vast expanse of basically nothing, then fill it with trillions upon trillions of stars... and then on one spiral arm of our Milky Way a pretty insignificant galaxy by all accounts, would he create an unremarkable star (our Sun) and several planets and on one of those orbiting rocks create the Earth.

It seems a little too far fetched for my liking. With all of those trillions of stars and all of those orbiting planets formed from the remnants of enormous exploding supernova over billions of years. It's more likely that we came about by pure chance. After all the numbers are pretty high, we just happen to be the lucky planet where it happened a place where all things fell into place to allow life to thrive......I’m sure there are many trillions of other planets where it didn’t and all of this over a massive time scale to humans, but to the time-scale of the Universe would be a minuscule amount of time.

Religion in my opinion is an easy way out, it's the lazy man's blind acceptance of what must be for people who don’t want to think too hard about it. An all encompassing explanation of everything in one easily digestible book, it's the comfort blanket where no real comfort exists, it's all in the mind. It's the world as man thought it existed thousands of years ago... We are a bit more up to date these days.... it's akin to opening a book about medical cures in the Middle Ages compared to the latest MRI scans of today...There is no mystery only an elusive deity backed up by blind "Faith" Of course "some" religions have valuable lessons to teach such as morality, love etc... but I think we are all born with these things or at least we have the ability to take on board these ideals and make them our own, without the need of religion....

You could believe that the Sun won't rise tomorrow. The probability would be that you'd be wrong, but that is something tangible that you can prove. You cannot use rational arguments about faith or religion with a believer, faith isn't rational or logical. Although a believer would argue that point...

I have some very good friends who believe in God and I respect them for their belief, and would defend their right to believe in what they wish.... but I can't help thinking they severely restrict the way they see the world (meaning all things relating to our existence) mainly because of their belief which hobbles their thought processes at the starting gate. Anything that questions the existence of God is dismissed or given a very simplistic explanation, and if the question fits neither of those explanations, then "Faith" is rolled out.

But if they are happy about that then who am I to question it? I would no more expect to pummel them with facts to disprove their faith than I would expect them to try and convert me. (But it’s fun sparring with believers, because I do like a lively debate ;¬) )….

Man in the human sense of the word, has an enormous capacity to think, we have massive brains and it's only really since the 1920's that we've discovered that galaxies existed outside of ours, when the Andromeda Galaxy was proven to exist at vast distances outside of our Galaxy. So it is only relatively recently that we started to realise how vast the Universe is...

Furthermore the light from the Andromeda Galaxy hitting Earth now left the Andromeda Galaxy before man existed on Earth...(and no that wasn’t 6000 years ago biblically speaking) we are but a mere speck in a vast expanse of space.... and the more man knows about the Universe the less places there are left to hide a God.

They have recently proven one of Einstein’s theories in that a massive object (Earth in this case) would bend space and time, they have measured it's effect on the Gravity B probe

And that is what has prompted this blog entry... the more we know the less humanity will need a God

A Palindrome

2011-05-11T15:44:00.000+01:00

Or something which is the same backwards or forwards for those who don't know or possibly even care what the date is it's 11/5/11 .... of course it's not a "proper" palindrome because the date is 11/05/2011 but in its shortened form it is...

Anyway I've decided to add a bit of useless knowledge to each of my ramblings the palindrome wasn't it but I suppose it could be included.

No.... my useless bit of knowledge for today is quite stunning really in that the fissionable material in the Atomic bomb which destroyed Hiroshima amounted to just over the size of a UK 10p piece, and although the bomb contained 60 kilograms of U-235 only 1.38% of it was actually fissionable.... So something the size of a 10 pence piece destroyed Hiroshima which is quite astounding really, that something so small could cause the loss of so many lives. Of course the argument still stands did it shorten the war ? I think it probably did, but at what cost?

I think the years that followed during the cold war pretty much cemented the idea that the use of atomic weapons wasn't something to be taken lightly considering the more modern weapons were many times more powerful and many times more efficient than the first two dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So if any leader considered the use of them the mutually assured destruction of their own country pretty much put an end to their use, and they remained simply a deterrent that could never be used.

Anyway changing the subject slightly I'm now going to rant on the subject of TV.....or the lack of good TV.....I see the rights to "Big Brother" have been bought up and that they will be reviving the tired old horse this year.... it's something I won't be watching, I knew it was too good to be true for it to have gone forever, obviously some TV executives think it still has legs... hopefully it will fall at the first fence and break all four of them...

I'm also not too happy with the offerings on TV of late, what with "The Great British Hairdresser" (YAWN), "The Apprentice" (DOUBLE YAWN) and the whole slew of other utterly mindless drivel they pump out these days for consumption by the morons of our society... chewing gum for the masses. Whatever happened to informative, educational TV ???? TV seems to have turned into some entertainment box in the corner, which I'm not against but ALL of the time ? Surely it would be nice to ACTUALLY learn something new every now and again ???

There are a few programmes which stand out but they are few and far between.... I don't know maybe I just don't fit into the demographic of the typical TV viewer these days. I don't watch soap's they are borderline fodder for idiots and completely unrealistic (even the writer of Eastenders admitted that only today), if my own life was half as miserable as most in Eastenders or Hollyoakes for instance I would have booked myself into Diginitas years ago and popped the barbiturate smoothie... gladly.

Thankfully it isn't.... Anyway I've rambled on long enough I'm sure you've got something better to do like watch Eastenders or something ? ..... ;¬)

Skype

2011-05-10T15:45:00.000+01:00

Has finally sold out for a substantial amount to none other than the evil empire itself ....Microsoft

I can see people leaving in droves myself included, which is a shame because it "was" a damn good VoIP application with excellent security, once Microsoft get their hands on it, it will be turned into some pay to speak bloatware application, or worse still the call quality will be reduced on the free side and if you want better call quality or video then you have to subscribe to a "premium" rate version.

I think there will be a hole in the market for another "Skype" soon.... it is a sad day indeed.

Not a lot news wise, except the Sullen one has been banned from having more than one friend over unless it's a special occasion such as a birthday or similar mainly because her bedroom is directly below ours and this weekend just gone she had about 4 or 5 friends over and the racket into the early hours was completely unacceptable and I didn't get to sleep until gone 4am being the light sleeper that I am.... mainly it was loud laughing but some of them could be heard quite clearly just with them talking and then there were the doors being banged shut every 10 minutes.... on a few occasions I very nearly got out of bed and threw the bloody lot of them out....But thought better of it because Andrea had said they could stay.... but it's simply not happening again, if she wants to have a random party she can go somewhere else to do it....I won't lose any sleep over it.....literally....

Xbox boy is still waiting for the green light from the Army after they told him he was a nervous wreck on anti depressants after getting his medical records mixed up with somebody else.... To be honest it's dragging on a bit now, but he knows if he doesn't get in the Army then he has to find another place to live, He's nearly 20 years old he should have fled the nest years ago. When I was 16 I wanted to get out in the world and explore it and find my own feet....despite having a very comfortable life with my parents at the time.....It seems this generation aren't quite so keen to do that, I don't know why....

Freya still has an ear infection although it's not as ragingly bad as it used to be, but she's on antibiotics again.... poor thing.

FOMO boy still hasn't learnt his lesson regarding answering back, but we are keeping up the pressure...he seems to have taken up one handed juggling with anything he can pick up, be that a phone, a bottle or anything in fact....highly annoying (and he knows it)….He’s also got the habit of picking up other peoples phones and using them…. A habit we are trying to get him out of, considering other peoples phones are private….something he doesn’t seem to grasp yet.

Having said that he did learn a valuable lesson yesterday after he took a teddy bear off Freya in the car insisting it was his and he wanted to play with it....I tried to remind him that he was 11 years old and that Freya was only 3 but his bloody mindedness kicked in and he refused to give it back to Freya who was in floods of tears in the car, and because I was driving there wasn't a lot I could do about it....so I waited until we got home and I turned off his internet access on his computer.... it took him about 10 minutes to realise it didn't work and when he shouted down that "his" computer didn't work I corrected him and said "it's my computer and I'm playing with it" .... I think he got the point rather quickly... I'm a firm believer in punishments that can be understood easily... :) I did turn it back on again but only after he gave up and fired up Xboxboys Xbox 360.

We WILL win, he just doesn’t know it yet……

How Ludicrous

2011-05-06T14:29:00.001+01:00

The United States Government have said they will not release photographic evidence of Osama Bin Ladens date with death...

Personally I don't particularly want to see Bin Laden's corpse, I shouldn't think there would be much to see with a bullet wound to the head. All this will do is fan the flames of the conspiracy theorists who will see this as proof that he isn't dead or that he died in 2001, and it seems that not even the US administration can get the story straight as to whether he was armed or unarmed....Either way I don't see how not releasing photographs will not inflame anti American feelings... EVERYBODY knows the Americans did it....

You also have to wonder why when they had 40 minutes on the ground and probably a lot more travelling to and from Bin Laden's compound the Pakistani air force failed to scramble to intercept the encroachers in Pakistani air space. Regardless of the anti radar coatings and stealth helicopters used......they wouldn't have been totally invisible....

It smells of fish to me, there is something that isn't quite right with the story, I'm not sure what and we'll probably never know why there are differences in what is being told to us...Ah well

Of course the sick jokes have started flowing the funniest one I've heard thus far is that Osama bin Laden's name if you turn it into a pseudo anagram is .... wait for it ......

Lob man in da sea

quite a creative one I think

Xbox boy isn't flavour of the month with me at the moment, mainly because the Army sent him a letter saying he had been rejected/deferred due to being prescribed anti depressants and his history of anxiety attacks...

WHAT ????

The letter had spelt his first name wrong so we assumed they had got his records mixed up, so he was told to get a letter off his doctor to prove he had never been on anti depressants or suffered from anxiety attacks......

but he didn't have the money to pay for the letter (£20) so we paid for it, he came back with the letter and it had our old address on it, but he said that it didn't matter because that’s the address the army had anyway (rolls eyes in disbelief)....

Fair enough (or not).... anyway fast forward to last night and low and behold he has had a picture taken of his latest tattoo on Facebook, which quite frankly looks like its design was chosen whilst eating a kebab and tanked up on beer. Now I'm no fan of tattoo's at the best of times, but he had a rather good one on the same shoulder which (in my opinion) has been totally ruined by this random scorpion... I guess it's his skin to do as he pleases with ..... it's him who has to live with it for the rest of his life... but that isn't the point.

He didn't have £20 spare to sort out his Army medical records cock up.... it seems his tattoo was more important than his future career....

So I'm less than impressed with him at the moment....on his lack of priorities

Sullen one is still limping around with a leg brace on after her rugby accident, but seems to be coping....In fact it's not really fair to call her Sullen one anymore because she's not quite as sullen as she used to be these days.....

On the other hand unfortunately FOMO boy is still wearing boots which are too small for him, and he is seriously going to have to watch his attitude, and curb the desire to answer back..... Andrea is dealing with him at the moment quite successfully, she isn't quite in need of a full on air strike and artillery barrage just yet.... but he's within range and target is acquired.....

Freya is well just Freya, she is getting over a rather nasty ear infection which treatment was delayed because of the bank holidays but she is responding well to her antibiotic banana medicine which she hates.... You can usually tell when Freya is ill the volume control gets muted for the duration of the illness....

Not much else to report really except Andrea is preparing for the impending Edinburgh marathon, which she is excited about, but by her own admission isn't at her fittest because of her Quad injury, but she seems confident she'll get around it... it will be a nice break for her and she'll get a chance to see her brother and his wife up there...

As for me... I'm plodding along as usual....

Laden, Cooper and Windsor

2011-05-03T11:03:00.001+01:00

Well it's been a rather eventful few weeks,

A Royal wedding, Osama Bin Laden and Henry Cooper.

The first one I really couldn't care less about and I don't honestly see what all the fuss is about with two people getting married.....Royal or not.

Osama Bin Laden's demise however is a bit of a multifaceted nightmare on stilts. I cannot see how taking out one man who albeit is the head of the terrorist organisation will somehow quell the zeal of the religious nut jobs who think nothing of blowing themselves and anybody within the blast radius to bits. I think it is a bit early to say Al Qaeda is dead in the water much like it's leader. I am pretty sure they will have a back up plan should their leader be killed, and it will only be a matter of time before somebody steps in to replace Osama Bin Laden and some other atrocity is executed.

Then of course if you're a cynic like I am there is always the possibility that Bin Laden was already dead (circa 2001 in Tora Bora) and this has just been staged as a political vote winner for the next presidential election, and of course slotting Bin Laden is worth millions of votes....In much the same way the Falklands War won Margaret Thatcher another term in office here in the UK......but of course there is always oil in the background......

It is strange how quickly he was executed, removed from his compound taken to a ship then buried at sea to follow Islamic burial rites....however Muslims are only buried at sea in the most extreme of circumstances and only then if they are encased in a clay burial coffin it is preferred they are buried under ground with their faces pointing towards Mecca....You could argue that they didn't want his burial place to become a martyrs grave, but wherever you bury somebody if they are a martyr in their followers eyes it doesn't really matter if they have a grave to visit or not.

You could of course argue that they did a DNA analysis with his sister's brain who died.... but then that only works if you believe everything a government tells you.

It could well be true that it was him but in light of recent governmental skull duggery I tend to not believe everything I read or see on the news.

Oil prices escalating out of control, Libyans still very much are killing each other, general unrest in the Arab countries further hiking up oil prices.... and ohhhh now look Osama Bin Laden slotted... The dollar rises, oil prices drop and the added bonus Obama gets another term as president.....

Some of us weren't born yesterday.

But now onto more important things like Henry Cooper's death, A truly magnificent boxer in his day with "Enry's Hammer" that iconic left hook which completely floored Mohammed Ali (Cassius Clay at the time) and left him hanging on the ropes, or the fight he was wrongly defeated in with Joe Bugner....A wrong decision if ever there was one.... A true gent and a boxing legend gone at the age of 76... It seems you get to a certain age in this life and all of the people you were aware of growing up start pegging out for want of a better word.... I guess that's just the way the cookie crumbles, the older you get the more aware you are of how little time you have here on earth to make the most of it.

The Camping trip

2011-04-25T09:52:00.000+01:00

It initially started well, we got down to Morfa Bychan pitched our tent and settled back to a relaxing chill out in our chairs.... Then Freya decided it was time to go to the beach (literally 200 yards from where we camped) so off we went, we were there for less than 15 minutes when it started to rain lightly so we started to make our way back, but it soon turned into a monsoon and the rain was coming down like stair rods, we eventually got back to our tent soaked to the skin.... At least it stopped the kids riding around on their trial bikes and quad-bikes.... and it rained and rained.... we eventually got to bed and the rain even put to death any other festivities going on including the thumping Bob Marley coming from somewhere around the beach....

Freya didn't have a very good night, looking back now she was having stomach cramps and woke up feeling very miserable for herself, we had a decent breakfast and waited around until the trials bikes started up again then decided to shoot off to Folly Farm, which was a complete wash out, not weather wise, just our poor Freya she was feeling very peaky, so eventually we ditched Folly Farm after about an hour and on the way back Freya threw up in the car, fortunately she gives plenty of warning and we got it all....

That decided it for us and we got back to the tent only to find even more bikers and chavs had descended on the beach, so we started to pack up the tent and left....

I think had Freya not been poorly we would have stayed because the weather improved, but when you've got a 3 year old there are certain things that come first... we got her home and her temperature rose to 39C at one point, we don't know what it was she had but by the next day it was on the way out.....

Anyway we have our camping gear to hand now and I'm sure this summer we will be out doing it again at some point....

Free !!!

2011-04-21T12:14:00.001+01:00

For a bit at least.... Sullen one and FOMO boy have been packed off to their dad's for five days, which should be nice for them, we were getting a bit worried he'd forgotten about them. Having said that we will miss them, I'm sure they will have a lovely time down in Bodmin, So we only have Xboxboy ~~to get rid of~~ at home and little foghorn Freya.... We are hoping to go camping for a few days if the weather holds.... only local and close to a beach but it should be a nice change.....

The weather over the past few days has been glorious it hit 24c here in Laugharne which for April is brilliant. The Laugharne festival went well from what I've heard, we bumped into a few famous people namely Lily Allens father (Keith) and Roland Rivron, when I say bumped into Andrea got her foot stepped on by Keith Allen outside the Rugby club, and we walked past Roland Rivron and his family and had that "is that who I think it is" moment as we looked at each other.....the kids were oblivious of course..... apparently there were other famous people in Laugharne over the weekend but I didn't see anybody else.... Neither Andrea nor I get star struck, I once gave directions to Pierce Brosnan in Laugharne he was looking for the boathouse, the only thing that struck me was how tall he was, next to me a short arsed Welshman at 5ft 9" ....sigh

Anyway getting back to the Laugharne Festival, We didn't pay to see anybody (being locals and very tight).... we did however sample the atmosphere around the various pubs, and had a good night at the Cross House Inn at the Grist with a Rat Pack Crooner who's name escapes me, but he was very good.

That about covered the Laugharne Festival for us, it was a very good atmosphere overall and no trouble.... well except at around 3am on the Saturday with a few drunks putting the world to rights outside our house... other than that it was very enjoyable.

Anyway that about covers the news from our end. My phone is still unusable, and I'm loving the nice weather :)

Till next time :)

UN Resolution 1973

2011-04-20T14:24:00.001+01:00

Or to put it another way the current Libyan civil war, I suspect the recent announcement to send ten serving officers of the British Army and a similar ten from France to Libya to organise the rebels, will increase although it will fall short of an "occupation force" no doubt there will be soldiers out there using laser designators on selected targets. It honestly wouldn't surprise me if there are already "British troops" out there in a non official capacity.

I don't think the current no fly zone is working, hence the military guidance requirement, sure Gaddafi's forces have taken a hammering, but this guy isn't going to go without a very bloody fight. The situation is simply too fluid with very little to distinguish the "good guys" from the "bad guys" hence the recent friendly fire incidents...

Personally I think UK/NATO/France/US want more accurate intelligence as to what is actually going down on the ground at the sharp end, and the only way to ensure that is to put military people at the sharp end......

However it smacks of....

November 1, 1955 — President Eisenhower deploys the Military Assistance Advisory Group to train the ARVN (South Vietnamese Army). The rest as the saying goes is history.

Although Libya is not even in the same ball park as Vietnam, you would think lessons had been learned. It's a difficult situation and what do we as a nation think we should do? Turn our backs? Or try to minimise the death of innocent civilians?

It's a difficult call to make, and everybody knows that air strikes/bombing do not overly effect a war, of course it can demoralise the other side, but many times in the past it's been proven that air strikes alone cannot win a war.

Make no mistake about it the UK is getting dragged into this despite certain politicians saying there is "no mission creep"

But the really insulting thing underneath all of the "protecting civilians" banner carrying and jingoism is the real reason

OIL

It’s a plain fact and more cost effective to help rebels wage a war against a dictator than watch your country suffer financially with spiralling oil prices.

It’s very simple maths when you look at it cynically

It's starting

2011-04-19T10:08:00.014+01:00

Apple sues Samsung

Apple is running scared it seems, as I predicted in a post a while back on here, basically they are taking Samsung to court over "blatant" copying of the iPad and iPhone. The fact that Samsung supply a LOT of hardware to Apple to make their iPad and iPhone including memory doesn't seem to matter.... This smacks of a company that can see their profit tumbling and are pulling out all the stops including legal ones to try and stop the erosion of their market.... but it won't work.... Android is too big to squash now. Apple has felt this downturn in profit first because they are smaller. Microsoft to be honest have never had a viable product porting their bloatware across to a phone that requires the computing power of a small planet to run it at any decent speed, so any erosion of their minuscule market share probably won't be felt as harshly as Apple's.

Lets face it you can have the best designed bit of kit on the planet but if its pegged at the wrong price it won’t sell next to something equally well designed but at the right price.

Android is approaching critical mass after which it will be impossible to stop and the only thing Apple can do is bring something else out that beats the competition at the right price point. But I can’t see that happening to be honest…..

Click to see larger road map

The ironic thing is that both the iPhone and the iPad run a variant of FreeBSD, whereas Android is a fork of Linux which is clean in that Linux isn’t derived from any other operating system, but follows POSIX standards, it did adopt “some” features from Minix but it’s kernel is clean. So they come from the same stable so to speak.

In March Apple sued HTC alleging patent infringement over the iPhone. if that isn't a company running scared then I will eat my hat.... (if I had one)

I can see a bumpy ride for the likes of any company in the phone market that isn’t Android and eventually all that will be left are the crumbs that Android didn’t want

This Google trends graph shows that Android apps (blue line) have already overtaken iPhone apps I can see the blue line going way past anything Apple ever managed and that's even AFTER apple released the iPhone 4 to market.. it's just a steady decline for them.... hence taking Samsung to court...... too little..... too late a classic example of a company resting on its laurels....by pricing their kit too high (consistently....) they excluded a vast swathe of the population and now it's coming home to roost with them......

Addendum:- Apple has just posted record profits for the iphone.... that may be the case, but considering Android phones outsold iPhones it's a drop in the ocean comparing one companies profits against several.... Apple would have to seriously sell some iPhones to compete with the Android market.... it's slowly slipping down the league tables, and when you throw in Apple sueing Samsung (their only serious tablet competitor) and their recent case against HTC.... they are digging in their claws to hang on to the emerging robot.....

Oh and look as of today 25th April "The Register" has reported the very same thing .... I'm way ahead of them ;¬)

It had to happen

2011-04-15T10:19:00.001+01:00

I bought Andrea her new Android phone and the day after I walked into the corner of my desk (with my phone in my pocket) and completely smashed the display on my phone... all you can see on the display is a crazed multicolour pattern with nothing showing except what looks like a supernova explosion.... ahhhh well... I don't make a habit of destroying phones in fact my last one was lost by my wife which she replaced with this one..... but I can quite honestly say I've never "lost" a phone, and as far as I can remember this is the only one I've killed outright personally... it still works as in that it takes calls, but that's about it. My memory isn't good enough to remember how the menus worked and sending a text would be purely guess work, so it's a no go.

So for the time being don't expect any calls from me until I replace my phone... not that I ever made any calls on my phone, I'd say the majority of use I made of it was to send SMS messages.

We've had our first phone bill in our new house and after sitting down and hyperventilating for a short spell, I fired off an official complaint because we had been told that as long as the new house had a BT socket there would be no connection charge, and considering the BT Openreach engineer took all of 10 minutes to reconnect us on our old line and number .... £93 extra seems a little steep....So we shall see what my complaint produces. I'm very draconian when it comes to utility bills especially ones which are wrong, as the £512 one we got off British Gas for our last 2 months of electricity we allegedly used at our last address, it turned out they read the wrong meter and the bill was really £138, but had I not queried it and put my foot down when they rang to ask if we were paying it anytime soon, I asked for the final bill only then did it surface the bill was wrong and had we not queried it we would have been none the wiser.

on the Marathon front Andrea went out running last night for the first time in about 2 weeks because of a quad injury she seems to have managed it without crawling back into the house screaming in pain, so hopefully it's on its way to getting better. Living with an injured runner is like living with a heroin addict who can't get their fix.

The only other news is that my parents went away to Jersey for a week, and Andrea and I had been plotting to clear their back garden while they were away. Now my father is a hoarder, he's from the generation where nothing goes to waste, or that something will come in handy at some point, needless to say the "handy" things build up, and build up until you find yourself hopping and picking your way through the "handy" things in the back garden.... now we knew that this was not the "ideal" situation for my mother who likes nothing more than to sit in the back garden and relax with a cuppa, but when you've got old workbenches and bits and bobs strewn over every open bit of ground, it kind of detracts from the "relaxing" bit... So before they left Andrea "interrogated" my mother in the back garden asking what plant was what and saying things like "ohhhh this place needs a tidy" prompting my mother to spill the beans about what she would like done.... needless to say they left on the Sunday morning and we where there a few hours later digging and filling rubble sacks, all told we spent about 6 or 7 hours up there over the space of a week and filled 30 rubble sacks and got rid of countless brambles and bits and bobs.

We waited for them to come back, and eventually the phone rang with a very tearful mother, who seemed to appreciate her garden being sorted out... We wanted to do a lot more but what we might have liked she might not have liked, so instead we said if she wants anything else doing she only has to call us and we'll come up and strain some more muscles…

Life is good :-)

Android

2011-04-13T13:54:00.010+01:00

Or to put it another way, an operating system founded/forked from Linux for mobile devices, I myself have drooled over the HTC Desire phone (mainly because I can see the display), but thus far I haven't been able to justify the expense of getting one. I have however managed to get an Android phone for Andrea's birthday today, admittedly it's not from the HTC livery but the LG Optimus GT540.... apparently it's a mid range Android phone. She seems very pleased with it... The good thing about Android is no matter which Android phone you have the interface is very familiar, and the range of "Android Apps" is mind bending at over 320,000 of them, some are free others are not....want your phone to become a metal detector ? (your iPhone won't/can’t do that !!)

Make no mistake about it Android is the Apple iPhone killer, as of last month they outsold Apple iPhones for the first time, and it can only get better as phones beef up their CPU Ghz and memory capacity, Andrea's phone has a 600Mhz CPU and 130MB of storage built in but can be upgraded to 32GB for about £30...... 10 years ago that would have been a top end PC let alone a phone...

The problem with Apple's and Microsoft's closed source model is that you have to live with what they think is right for you, and for some people Apple or Microsoft is right for them, but for a growing minority it simply isn't…. including the price for the privilege. You "lease" software from Microsoft/Apple.... once you've finished with the software try getting a refund off them !!!! Linux isn't based on corporate gain once you experienced the freedom of Linux there is no going back. This is why Linux has had the media light shone on it and people are beginning to wake up to what Linux can do for them ...for free.

Long term Microsoft and Apple will have to radically change their business model to survive, once open source reaches critical mass there will be no stopping it, Desktop PC's and Laptops and now Phones powered by Linux have been increasing year by year, and now with the meteoric rise in Android phones it only shows how adaptable and reliable Linux is.

I personally would never go back to anything offered by Microsoft or Apple, to use an analogy it's like putting on a straight jacket to play a game of pool... with Linux you get the chalk and the pool cue and a pint, you just need some balls to switch from Microsoft/Apple that's all ;¬)

There are so many different ways to do things under Linux and once you start using it seriously it's like a light going on in your head....

Anyway I shall have to wait for my Android phone along with my Aston Martin DB9 and my private Caribbean island.....

Oh look

2011-04-04T15:26:00.000+01:00

The latest and greatest computer virus infection

with not a visible Linux distro in sight

(Source Symantec)

Déjà vu

2011-04-01T11:50:00.002+01:00

Cast your minds back to the early days when Afghanistan kicked off and the then USSR invaded and stamped down hard on the rebels.... Then remember how the United States supplied arms and expertise to the then Mujahedeen and ran a very successful guerrilla hit and run type war with the then USSR, and how the USSR eventually pulled out of Afghanistan due to heavy losses... and then remember how Osama bin laden (ex Mujahedeen fighter and leader) popped up who had been trained by the United States and went on to become enemy number one on the US hit list through his various atrocities across the world mainly aimed at United States interests.

You can't help getting a feeling of Déjà vu over Libya, although you can almost feel the lack of commitment with the United States over this ongoing power struggle, and rightly so, they've been tarred and feathered by Arab countries, such as Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. Hence them wanting to hand over control to NATO of the Libya situation, almost like they’ve picked up a hot potato at a barbecue. They are very stand offish...and so they should be.

I'm all for getting rid of despotic heads of state who have very little compassion for their own people and wouldn't think twice about murdering innocent civilians, I'm also all for democratic governments, where corruption is a thing of the past... but lets face it even the UK isn't immune to Politicians being caught with their hands in the Government coffers...So corruption it seems goes hand in hand with political power.

Or in other words the more powerful you are the more you can get away with, or to quote Joseph Goebbels

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."

Now old Mr Goebbels knew a thing or two about propaganda considering he masterminded taking in an entire nation and then as history records went on to wage World War II along side Mr Hitler.... now I'm not a fan of Mr Goebbels or any Nazi, but that quote above all, resonates even today within the halls of power.

Take the UK banks for instance, no I mean it take them and drop them into the Mariana trench and to make sure they don't come back up chain the Ark Royal to their feet and scuttle her... The banks have had a massive bail out because they were too "big" to fail and yet they are still handing out billions of pounds in bonuses to the very people who caused their bailout....and we (you and I) paid for that why are they rewarding utter failure ? Since when do you give a pat on the back for falling flat on your face? The logic fails.

Anyway getting back to the point of Libya, Libya only supplies 2% of all the oil in the world, yet the civil unrest (civil war?) there is costing everybody in the world dearly in increased fuel costs that in turn will force up the price of food, because it doesn't get to your supermarkets under its own steam, because as we know a camel coughs in the desert and petrol forecourts put the price of petrol up by a couple of pence...... and we are now over £6 a gallon or £6.21 a gallon to be precise ..... when you convert from litres to gallons if you're of a certain age it hits home how much petrol has risen....

Make no mistake about it the "intervention" in Libya is about stabilising oil prices, somebody somewhere is making obscene amounts of money on the back of the Libyan crisis and they will also make obscene amounts of money when the crisis is over by selling their shares in oil, and move onto the next big money spinner, our world has a vast parasitic element (the financiers and speculators) who's only purpose it seems is to make money off the back of other peoples misery.

There is a massive undercurrent of dissent building in this country. The recent demonstrations in London for instance and you only have to go on YouTube and watch a few video's about statute law vs common law and de-registration of vehicles from the DVLA, people are waking up (albeit slowly) to how we are slowly being hock tied with our freedoms, the Digital Economy Bill for instance, people do not know how far reaching this is in controlling what people can and can't do on the Internet, it's nothing to do with copyright or protecting it, it's about control. Similarly we can no longer protest at or blockade fuel depots its' against the law (statute law)....

A prime example of control is a simple one did you know that you NEVER own your car? Even though you have paid for it ? The government own your car which is why if you don't tax or insure your car or declare it SORN then they can take THEIR car and crush it? The simple act of "registering" your car with the DVLA gives them title to it, it never belongs to you while ever it is registered with the DVLA....

The DVLA will of course give you statute after statute to back their claim on your car, but statutes are not the law, common law is the law and it has higher authority.

By registering the birth of your child you are making them subject to the statute laws of the land....and you can be fined if you don't...... but you've consented to that, just like you've consented to register your car with the DVLA.

Don't misunderstand me I'm not some raving anarchist hell bent on bringing any government to its knees, far from it I believe in democracy, fairness and honesty, but democracy has been tainted along the way and yes we elect our leaders freely, but it's what they do when in power that does the damage, chipping away at our civil liberties bit by bit.

Some of us are just walking blindly and unknowingly into less personal freedom like sheep trusting those who lead us, trusting that they are doing the right thing. When in a lot of cases they simply aren't. The devil is in the detail......

Anyway watch what happens in Libya over the next few weeks/years.... they never learn and it seems political memory is a bit shorter than that of a goldfish.....

Goodbye Microsoft Windows

2011-03-22T11:09:00.002Z

I have severed the final remnants of Microsoft Windows from my pc last night, I copied off all the important data from the old windows partition, then deleted it, I then expanded my Ubuntu/Linux partition to swallow up the enormous space left by the bloatware called Windows. So what used to be a dual boot PC is now purely Linux.

I have to admit I haven't actually used Windows on my PC for nearly 18 months, so it seems a little silly keeping it there, if the truth be told I was only using the Windows partition as a data store, so it made sense to convert it to purely Linux/Ext4 a far superior file system that doesn't suffer fragmentation like NTFS does.

I used a GNU utility called Gparted, which you download as an ISO image burn to a CD then boot from, it's basically Partition Magic but free and works as well as, if not better than Partition Magic.

Linux isn't bound by the rules Windows uses in that it doesn't need a primary partition to boot from, you can boot it from anywhere. So I expanded the extended partition which contained my original Ubuntu installation and left it to get on with it, it took about 2 hours to shift all data left over the massive expanse of empty disk left by the now defunct and banished Windows. The only problem I encountered was the fact that if you move the directory /boot your pc won't boot because grub2 has the location of /boot (stage1) hard coded into it...

But that was easily fixed by booting my Ubuntu 10.10 live cd, dropping to terminal and mounting the new expanded partition to /mnt then binding /proc /sys /dev under /mnt and then chroot'ing to the /mnt drive and re-installing the grub2 bootloader.... basically the same as using the fixmbr switch in fdisk under windows...That re-wrote the position of /boot and all worked just like it said on the tin.

I've got to admit It did complain because I had forgotten that I had hard coded the NTFS drives into fstab so that they automounted on boot, obviously Linux was looking for them when it booted, but that was easily fixed by simply deleting the entries for the previous two NTFS drive... and all was well in my world :)

So I have reduced Windows now to a Virtualbox Virtual Machine, just in case I need it for anything or possibly just to fire it up and laugh at it in the future.... fair do's though XP is an old operating system and it's still in use today, but it's dated and limited, but it paid a fair few of my bills in the past... if I had been installing Linux from day one, I probably wouldn't have made as much money from supporting it because it just isn't flaky like Windows is ;¬)

Other news is that Xbox boy's Army selection is looming fast, I think he's got mixed emotions about it all, excitement mixed with a bit of fear of the unknown, all perfectly normal... He's a bit upset that his other step father isn't that interested in his chosen career and he suspects that the lack of interest is because he (other step father) thinks I've encouraged him to join the Army, which couldn't be further from the truth, it was Stewart who one day walked into Army careers and started the ball rolling, without any help or involvement from me... When he's asked about what it was like in basic training or actually in the Army I've told him, I've given him the undiluted truth, but I've never pushed him to join. I think Xbox boy will last a lot longer than his other step father did in the Marines allegedly of course, although not making it through basic training because of an alleged back injury in the first weeks doesn't mean you've been a Royal Marine, or maybe it's because he doesn't want Xbox boy to succeed where he (allegedly) failed ????? who knows....or in fact cares..... All I know is that I'm immensely proud of his decision to join up and will support him as much as I can, while I can :)

The Sullen one is healing nicely after her operation and is back on fine form... it was quite a quick bounce back to be honest, her voice has changed slightly but that will come back as well eventually.

FOMO boy is starting to get a little too big for his boots at 11 !!! I've kept out of it (mostly) as Andrea is managing it absolutely fine at the moment.... I'll only get involved if some serious discipline needs enforcing, I'm more of an artillery bombardment or missile strike to Andrea's more focussed rifle group, she's keeping him pinned down enough at the moment....He's stretching his wings to see how far they can go that's all, but there are limits and defined boundaries which he is pushing.... so for the time being the red dot is on him and the missiles have acquired their target, should they be needed.

Freya is getting a little bit demanding at the moment and has learned (probably from school) that little girls who pretend to cry sometimes get their way....except of course in our house, it's pretty amazing how they change once they get to school and mix with other kids... I suppose it will all come out in the wash eventually....

As for Andrea she's fighting fit, she did the Rhayader 20 mile race last weekend and knocked a very respectable 30 minutes off the last time she did it, which is no mean feat considering the terrain around that place....

As for me.... I'm doing ok, now the better weather and lighter nights are here I'm going to get out on my road bike and get some miles under my belt... I do enjoy biking and there are plenty of places around here to cycle to and from... the only problem is breaking the legs in again…. And that’s going to hurt….

Faithless.....

2011-03-17T12:05:00.001Z

I had a "Take That" moment last night, my favourite ever dance band "Faithless" have split up.....(or are in the process of splitting up) NOOOOOOOOO.

Maxi Jazz, Sister Bliss and Rollo have decided to call it a day and return the book to the library as he put it, it's not like they have dropped out of popularity, they consistently headline festivals and command massive crowds of fans when they perform, but I guess after 15 or so years of performing and touring it makes you want to move on with something else. Even so it will leave a massive hole in the dance music scene.... I would have loved to have gone and seen them one last time, but alas they aren't performing near here....sad day....

Anyway on a slightly brighter note (for me at least) I have fixed my computers strange habit of overheating the CPU by replacing the CPU with a Fleabay bought second user CPU for £30 !!! which is actually faster than the one it replaces by a large margin and now runs incredibly cool even when all four cpu cores are run at 100%....In which case the heat sensing diodes on my old CPU must have been brain damaged when the cooling heat sink fell off.

It's a bargain because it's still current and retails new for over £250.... I don't think they knew what they were selling... Oh well my gain their loss, all is fair in bidding and auctions....

The Japan nuclear situation is looking very grim indeed, they are dropping sea water on the reactors now via helicopter, which brings back memories of Chernobyl, needless to say if they have to drop it by helicopter then it's pretty safe to say that they've either lost containment or that radiation levels are too high to risk putting people in there.... A very grim situation, I've seen a few anti nuclear lobbyists venting their anger with a "told you so" attitude on the TV.... but in Japan's case what alternatives did they have to supply energy to their people ? They knew it was a risk putting nuclear reactors so near to a major fault line but like all the "experts" have been saying this recent event is a once in a 100 year event, and you can't design out every eventuality or disaster, you can try but there will always be something that comes along to destroy the theory. It's a truly awful triple whammy they've had and I can only see things getting worse.

The Law

2011-03-16T12:12:00.000Z

This subject always fascinates me, I recently came across an article about council tax and a group of people who are refusing to pay it because it's not lawful, it's a very complex subject involving statutes and common law, but basically it boils down to this.

Councils around the country are producing their own summons to appear at the magistrate’s court, which is illegal under common law and recently a test case was tried in Wales where a lay advisor refused to recognise the courts jurisdiction and asked the magistrates if they were under oath and wanted to be tried under common law. The court tried to "trick" the witnesses into accepting jurisdiction by asking them to leave the court but the simple action of standing up to leave would have meant they accepted the courts authority and could have been held in contempt of court.

Three times the clerk tried to get the lay advisor and his witnesses to leave the court and three times the lay advisor asked if the magistrates where under oath, they refused to answer, eventually the police were called and the lay advisor asked if the attending police officers where there under oath to uphold the law, they replied yes, that ensured that the lay advisor could stay in court... It would also have been assault if the police officers or any court official had tried to physically remove the lay advisor.

To cut a long story short eventually the magistrates left the court for the final time, at which point the lay advisor under common law was the highest authority in that court and he therefore dismissed the case.

The whole point of the exercise was to point out that a statute is not a law and magistrates/judges who will not admit to being under oath in a court of law are not being unbiased and do not have to uphold the law and are there purely for a summary judgement.

It turns out that no liability notice could be produced which meant there was no legal requirement for the accused person to be there, and it also means none ever existed and that the council were hiring the time and courts/room to execute these summary judgements to the ignorance of the general population.

It also means the council in question were acting illegally by producing their own court summons and basically lying to gain payment.

It makes you wonder who's side the court system is on doesn't it ? Especially if you are ignorant of the law and especially common law, and knowing the difference between a statute and the law. Laws are there to protect us, it seems statutes are there to control us.

Japan

2011-03-15T15:05:00.000Z

What can you say about such an awful natural disaster ? apparently Japan has moved on average 4 metres to the east after the earthquake. I know I've been glued to the TV and Internet broadcasts over what is unfolding over there, it's very hard to imagine first of all your house very nearly being reduced to rubble then in some coastal places being swept away by a 35 metre high tsunami... I'm guessing the loss of life will be much higher than current estimates.... but then to have a nuclear disaster thrown into the mix as well... it doesn't really get much worse than that.... I just hope they don't get another big quake a few months afterwards like New Zealand did, that would just be the final nail in the coffin for some I should imagine....

No doubt the sick jokes will start to circulate soon, as they always do when either somebody famous dies or a huge natural disaster strikes... it seems to be par for the course these days... I'm a fan of black humour having been in the forces but even squaddie humour has it's limits especially when so many people have lost their lives, and I think we can be pretty certain many thousands have, and possibly many more to come.

The crackpots on the internet have surfaced saying that Nostradamus predicted this event.... No he didn't, no doubt David Icke will have something equally ridiculous to say on the subject.

All I can say on the matter is that all I can do is offer my sympathy to all those lost, but more so to the ones left behind who have to pick up the pieces....

Truly horrific

Pain and Sweat

2011-03-04T10:15:00.001Z

We're getting our first delivery of seasoned wood soon, where we are going to stack it is a problem we will face when we get there, My father has been clearing some trees down at the boat club and he's offered us the trees ready cut up for the wood burner, although we won't be able to burn them until at least Christmas...

The sullen one has had her tonsils out yesterday and is feeling very sorry for herself, but as long as she keeps taking her painkillers and keeps eating it will be manageable, I remember very well how bad it was when I had mine out, at least she had visitors after the operation.... unlike me, but that's another story and in a different world.....

She's going to be off school for a couple of weeks but at least she won't have to suffer the awful recurring tonsillitis she's been getting month in month out... that will be a thing of the past.

Andrea is running the Llanelli Half Marathon this weekend on Sunday and is in training for the Edinburgh Marathon at the end of May this year, she's not a happy bunny though because she is nursing a calf injury and runners who can't run very well or at all are officially the most miserable people on the planet, probably up there with a heroin addict not getting their fix....but obviously slightly more healthy....

Xbox boy did his mock selection in Cardiff over the last couple of days and apparently did very well, he was particularly impressed with his first official army breakfast on the second day. He has said that in all probability he will be put forward for real selection very soon, so he "may" be in the Army for real this summer fingers crossed.

Selection in itself hasn't changed very much, they still get you to carry jerry cans full of water, they still get you to do chin ups and the 1.5 mile run is the same, along with the circuit training, I suppose if it ain't broke then don't fix it.

What does puzzle me however are these "mock" selections I remember mine vividly and I was just given a date to turn up and a train travel warrant and you just did it, and you either passed or failed, I didn't have any mock selections or prior warning of what to expect, I'm wondering if that's to do with the lower level of fitness of teenagers today ?

I remember I wasn't that fazed by any of my selection process and found it particularly easy, but then I was a lot more active than Xbox boy at his age, climbing rocks, cycling, walking everywhere. I blame it on gaming and broadband... we didn't even have mobile phones when I was 16 and I didn't see them appear in their first brick like form until the early 1990's. Xbox boy was telling me that some of the lads on the mock selections had done four of them and still hadn't been put forward for their real selection because they weren't fit enough... bizarre

Anyway hopefully he'll be put forward relatively soon so he can get on with his chosen career of square dancing on minefields ;¬)

I'm hitting the big 48 in a few days..... the less said about that the better....equally bizarre because I don't feel a day over 30 and haven't for years....

Eco Friendly Heat

2011-02-24T10:51:00.002Z

Well we have the wood burner in situ after much buggering about by Messrs Bodgit & Scarper the builders...(Styled after the best Laurel and Hardy silent film stars all they needed was a piano and not a cast iron wood burner) quite obviously Mr Bodgit had a spirit level but had an epic fail in it's proper use because our flue is off at a jaunty angle there must be at least 2 or 3 inches difference off the level....or the wall is wonky but thankfully you only notice it if you stand side on to the fire...other than that it's fine..

Anyway we fired up the wood burner and the stove paint started to cure giving off a blue hazy smoke which I knew would happen but of course set off our "array" of smoke alarms, and of course being the Brabrook household nothing is ever simple....

Most normal smoke alarms have batteries as ours do but the problem was all the smoke and carbon monoxide detectors are wired together into the mains and if one goes off they all go off as we found out when we removed the batteries after numerous resets failed to silence them and they still continued to pump out their shrill ear bleeding noise.... one is bad enough but when you have four of them pulsing away the noise is beyond deafening... to not be woken up by them would mean you were probably already dead... which is comforting to know that we won't burn to death or succumb to carbon monoxide poisoning but it will be a very rude awakening to say the least, which is no bad thing I guess....

Anyway the only way to reset these smoke alarms is to ventilate the house and keep resetting them until they fell silent.... so we opened as many doors and windows as we could and shared our smoke alarms with the quiet neighbourhood until they ceased...which took quite some time....

I've reduced our storage heaters to one on low and completely disabled the sullen one's because even after trying to ~~drill it into her brain~~ explain how storage heaters work (I could tell by the blank expression that it wasn't registering) she still thinks of it as if it's an "instant on" source of heat and fails to understand that she can't turn it off during the day/evening after it's been charged up the night previously.... so I've simply disconnected it considering she had to have her bedroom window open the other night to release the stifling heat it produces... which of course is a complete waste of money flying out of her window.....besides the house is plenty warm enough with just one storage heater because of its open plan style and if we get a bit cold we can fire up the wood burner....We aren't cold because since moving in there hasn't been a blanket in sight on the sofa ..... We haven't had our first electricity bill yet but I'm guessing it's going to be much lower than the £100 a week as it used to cost us....

Xbox boy is going for his second mock selection in a few days as he failed his first one, we've been trying to get him out running and generally getting fit for it but he seems to be alarmingly relaxed about it all, I've told him that passing selection just means you have the basic level of fitness required to START basic training, it doesn't mean you'll get through it....so scraping through (which he hasn't done yet, mock or otherwise) just isn't good enough. He has ~~absolutely~~ no idea how hard it is..... I've told him he needs to fly through selection otherwise he will find basic training extremely tough if not impossible ...Plus they won't keep putting him through mock selections forever, this is probably his last chance before they turn around and tell him to ~~bugger off~~ go away permanently because he isn't fit enough..... but my advice seems to be falling on completely deaf ears....hey ho not a lot more I can do really....

Well so far

2011-02-18T15:21:00.000Z

I've managed to fall off the last step of our stairs three times with a full cup of coffee and splash a large proportion of it on our nice marble floor. I seem to manage it with irritating consistency usually at around 7:30am ish, and only it seems on the way down them, not on the way up them, which would be ten times worse because it's a light coloured carpet and I'd like to keep it that way...

I have figured out why I'm doing it though, the hand rail/banister ends before the last step, so in my sleep deprived head my hand reaches the end of the rail/banister and my brain assumes like most normal stairs that the stair also ends at that point....so my brain engages the autonomic function of expecting the hard ground beneath my feet when in fact there is just air and a 12 inch gap of air at that... hence my almost drunken lunge forward and madly wheeling around like Max Wall trying to stop my coffee from slopping over the side and failing very miserably ....

No doubt I'll get the hang of the stairs in a couple of years, that or I'll end up breaking my ankle a few times.

but on the up side I have become expert at deftly swabbing the floor with a tea towel and extended foot.

on the heating side we're getting a lovely wood burner fitted next week (allegedly...if they bother turning up, we all know about the Pembrokeshire promise) so that should cut down on our reliance on the storage heaters.... although I've calculated that even if we put storage heaters in our old house we would still have spent less per year than heating oil, so my guess is in our super "A" rated insulated house our bills will be considerably less than the monthly money burning ceremony to the fossil fuel alter we were used to in our old house....

this weekend I intend to be considerably less busy and physically broken as I was last weekend... I've decided !!!

We're in....

2011-02-16T12:05:00.001Z

It took two days to move and a further half day to clean the old house to a respectable standard, thanks to the diligent cleaning skills of Andrea... I was the muscle along with a sterling effort by Xbox boy, FOMO boy managed to do practically nothing regarding the move only eclipsed by the sullen one's lack of help... FOMO boy lost interest slightly quicker than a bored puppy and had the odd poody when asked to move or do anything... The sullen one managed to get out of any heavy lifting completely by managing to get some casual work (planned or what ??)..

I have to admit that I had a complete sense of humour failure on day two on a few occasions... The main fuse blowing session was after a hard days slog moving furniture and beds and everything else.... when the sullen one refused to sleep in her bedroom with just her bed in it... in other words she was expecting us to carry on dragging her stuff from her old bedroom to her new one when she hadn't lifted a finger to help...(plus it was late in the day)

I'm very much of the mind that if you don't pull your finger out and help then don't expect anybody to help you, Andrea is a much softer touch than I am, and I ended up going the extra mile for Andrea not the sullen one...whom I would have quite happily let sulk in her new bedroom with just her bed that night and not cared in the slightest.... :) ... needless to say the "friends" of the sullen one didn't turn up to help... shock horror....Although Xbox boy's new and much improved girlfriend did and proved very useful...

We are now getting our heads around the uncontrollability of electric storage heaters which require the ability to know how warm it is going to be the next day and if you get it wrong you either fry yourself or freeze yourself...thus far we've managed both... we are having a wood burner fitted which should give us some control over when we have heat rather than it either being either there or not... one thing for certain we can at least be warm in the new house, something which evaded us in the old one except on the warmest of days....

I can see the xbox being bandwidth throttled to stop inanely excitable one sided conversations being overheard in the large open plan lounge, FOMO boy very nearly got throttled himself last night if I had heard "Cameron !!! Get in the lift, GET IN THE LIFT !! the zombies are coming" one more time... thankfully Xbox boy came home and kicked him off it before any throttling was required...

Although Xbox boy got a roasting for leaving his bedroom resembling a land fill site only slightly untidier, which brought the wrath of Andrea on his head.... on top of which he's had his working hours reduced which I'm beginning to wonder if that might suit him down to the ground a little too much, if you get my drift....or to put it another way the absolute minimum effort required to remain classed as a working individual....Hmmmmmmmm

Hopefully the Army will get their hands on him soon and they will knock him into shape... literally.... one thing for certain his xbox days will be a thing of the past...A sweet distant memory of fruitless and often inane entertainment....

Some kind person

2011-02-10T11:33:00.003Z

Probably bladdered from booze from the local pub smashed the rear window on our car last night, which is going to cost us £60 to fix it... it beggars belief how or what they got out of throwing a piece of masonry through the rear window...(the MOST expensive window).... I suppose the only "up" side is that they didn't damage the bodywork....

Had I caught them, I would have added to their experience of window smashing and very probably put them off smashing any further car windscreens for life, and they quite probably would have ended up with a fear of dentists....

luckily for them we didn't hear it being smashed or I would have been out there like a scolded cat and cracked a few pavements with their head... or anything else I could find to bang off the pavement.....although banging their empty head off the pavement would probably have been a pointless past time....

Mind you in this day and age had I done that I would very probably been arrested for assault in this upside down world we live in, where the criminal can claim to be hard done by, whilst the victim bears the cost and the blame. So it's probably for the best that I didn't hear it....because I would have found it extremely difficult to turn the other cheek...

It really annoys me this senseless destruction of other peoples property. Where has all the respect gone ? but I guess when you've only got two brain cells sozzled with booze to rub together thinking beyond the here and now is beyond them...

I will be setting the car alarm in future and they had better be fast runners.....

M-Day Approacheth

2011-02-09T15:03:00.004Z

We've done most of the "must do" stuff such as broadband/phone and electricity and the rest we'll do once we are ensconced in our new abode... tomorrow night we will dismantle the beds ready for the move and sleep on the mattresses... I've managed to get hold of a friends van to assist us and on Thursday night we get the keys, so my guess is the move will start Thursday night (knowing Andrea) for a few hours then re-commence on the Friday, we should be done by the end of Friday all being well....

We have two teenagers and one on standby to assist although I'm guessing all three of them won't excel with their spatial ability at all and will have to be told to breath in and out to keep going....

My only real worry is Xbox boy's sofa bed which has the combined weight of a lead lined coffin and a wheelbarrow full of wet sand... plus it's wider than the door it went through and requires the spatial capacity of several humans and the brute force of at least two silver back gorilla's to lift and manoeuvre it out of his pit and into the street and onto the van.... I might just remove the bed part which would make it lighter to move around the sofa bit than the last time when I very nearly bust a blood vessel moving it....

The only problem I have in moving house is that I don't like to hang about discussing things I'm a bit like a guided missile in that I carry on flying until I hit the target....(that bit I get from my father I think)

I have a cunning plan regarding the teenagers in that their bedrooms will be the last to be moved and the laziest of the teenagers will be the one who has their bedroom moved last (it wouldn't be fair to name her)..... thereby giving them no excuse to bugger off once their bedroom has been moved...(as happened the last time)

We are NOT being left to do all this by ourselves again and I can see all hell breaking loose if we get a repeat of last time...

there will be blood on the moon make no mistake about it.....

The joys of house moving

2011-02-02T10:22:00.000Z

We will be redirecting our redirected mail which will then go to our new house, complicated I know but you never know what will slip through the net if you don't .... I've contacted Post Office broadband which were most helpful but they failed to identify that the house has a phone line and BT socket... which it does... both can be plainly seen.... so we shall see if we get slapped for the £112 new line fee, which will shortly be followed by a "over my cold dead body" letter of complaint.

We will move in on the Friday and the new wood burner arrives on the Monday.... The fact that they've had nearly a month to get their act together is neither here nor there... you'd think they would want to install it before we moved in .... but alas no....that would be too simple it seems.

We have a contact near Laugharne who will supply us with logs for the wood burner but I should imagine it's multifuel so it will probably burn soft coal as well... so our options are open. Lauren's happy because her new bedroom is beyond toasty so for the first time in months she'll not need to dress up like Capt Oates to venture into her small part of the arctic she calls her bedroom. But in the new house she will be in great danger of losing her computer speakers if she continues blasting out inane Rihanna "beat me to death with a length of lead piping because I like it" type songs....

Xbox boy isn't as happy he has an open plan bedroom but he will have a new home soon in the Army so it's not much of an issue but at nineteen years old he'd be out on his ear anyway. Both Andrea and I left home way before nineteen so the sympathy is thin on the ground...

We aren't ones who agree with children/teenagers hanging onto their mothers apron strings much past eighteen and if I had my way it would be seventeen or possibly earlier, when I hit sixteen I wanted to be out in the world finding my feet myself.... it seems this generation are dragging theirs.....probably because it's a bit too comfortable methinks.....

The new house is a lovely converted chapel (with parking!!) I remember it from when I lived in Laugharne as a boy it was used as a large workshop then repairing and modifying rally cars...so it's very open plan and airy but more importantly it's warm !! our old house used to have brass monkeys when we moved in but they've all left now for a house that remains slightly above freezing even when the oil burner is running like a Tornado GR4 jet engine on afterburner for most of the day...to say our old house is difficult to heat is an understatement. I think if we set fire to our furniture in the front room it would barely get comfortable in there ....and whoever planned the radiators for that place was probably having a laugh it's like lighting a match in a tent... comforting but pointless...

We knew the house we are in now was short term, and we took it because we needed eyes on the ground in Laugharne to see if anything popped up that was suitable for our tribe and we've come up trumps!!! :)

So we shall see how things pan out... I'm sure everything will be fine...

The only other thing I can report is that I averted us being blown to bits last night because I couldn't sleep mainly because Andrea couldn't sleep so I eventually tutted and made my way downstairs only to find a strong smell of gas in the kitchen, I resisted the temptation of turning the lights on and opened the back door then went to the hob to find that one of the gas rings was on but not lit... I vented the room and checked Laurens room and it was gas free... That could have been a nasty wake up call when the oil boiler fired in the morning... I suppose the only silver lining would have been that the ensuing massive gas explosion would have tidied Laurens bedroom for her....

Freya's curiosity

2011-01-28T11:12:00.000Z

Freya looked up at our mantelpiece last night and pointed out a picture of Emma one of my other daughters and said
"who is that?"
and Andrea said

"it's Emma, your other sister" ...
"Ohh did she come to my house ?" ....
"No you haven't met her" ....
"Will she come to see me later at my house?"...
"We don't know what she will do Freya"....
"Why?..She is my sister like Lauren is my sister"...
"Yes she is..."

”Maybe she will come and see me soon….”

Turned away from the picture and settled down to sleep cuddled up against Andrea…..

There isn't a lot you can give answer wise to a curious three year old when she asks about her sister(s), we didn't even mention Rhiannon her other sister, she was confused enough as it was not having met her other sister who belonged to the mysterious face on the mantelpiece…

Running & Stuff

2011-01-25T11:18:00.000Z

Well the running was done by my uber fit wife who smashed her previous half marathon record at Helsby and did it in under 2 hours... which is no mean feat...Well done Andrea :)

The stuff bit is driving her to Newtown with two kids basically a two hour drive up through mid Wales on the twistiest roads imaginable dropping her off at Morrisons car park for Roger her dad to drive her up to Liverpool with just enough time for a drink of coffee and a sticky bun then ground hog day drive back for another two hours....Thankfully Freya remained asleep for practically all the way up but woke up about half way back and I got the incessant "are we there yet ?"

The worst part though was having to do it all over again the next day.... it's the train next time for my uber fit wife.. it was quite possibly the worst 8 hours I've had to endure in recent history....never again (and not in a Sean Connery Never say never again style.... comebacks are always bad news).

We stayed overnight at our friends house up near Newcastle Emlyn and I attempted to fix their brain damaged computer... it started when they got infected with some trojan downloader a few days previously, So after talking Nicola through running some software something equivalent to bleach, it got rid of the viruses but they had damaged the operating system quite badly......

So I installed Ubuntu 10.10... but it didn't want to behave Linux is far more picky about integrity than Windows and you know immediately if something is wrong and after testing the memory it failed on several blocks.....

So I advised to get new memory what I didn't realise was that the computer had been stored outside in the damp prior to its recent history and rust flakes had developed on the bits of mild steel that were in close proximity to the motherboard...

I'm guessing it was disturbed when the new memory was installed some of these rust flakes were scraped off and nestled in amongst the tightly packed electronics and were causing it to freeze...

I tried everything to sort it out but I had to admit defeat eventually.... the last resort was to advise taking it to a garage with a high pressure air hose and blowing all the crap off the motherboard and hopefully whatever was shorting it out.... Although knowing Nicola she'll probably just buy a new one.... either way she's another convert from the dark side of Microsoft Windows and now runs Ubuntu 10.10 as does her son on his laptop.... well considering the majority of their problems were caused by viruses that will be a thing of the past...

Personally I wouldn't EVER use a Windows pc for banking or any electronic transactions even with up to date virus protection and if people knew how insecure Windows is they wouldn't either ....they are just too open to attack and very insecure in comparison to Linux.... Although a Microsoft fan boi might disagree on that one....whatever...

Katie Price splits from Alex Reid

2011-01-19T15:32:00.000Z

Anyway onto more interesting things in that we are moving (again)... We knew the place we have now was only short term until we could find somewhere permanent, thankfully the new place is only just down the road (literally about 200 yards) so at least we won't rack up 180 miles on 16 or so trips... I'm hoping to get some of Lauren's friends helping as well as the two teenagers because they were conspicuously missed in the last move, which won't happen again....because I nearly did myself a mischief the last move, way too much lifting over too long a period...

Where we live now is hideously expensive to run heating wise at nearly £100 a week in heating oil and what with the cold snaps we've had recently I'll be glad to see the back of it, not to mention the endless Himalayan stairs upto our bedroom on the top floor....

Xboxboy won't be with us for much longer he will have moved onto more exciting things in the Army, so our family is shrinking in the near future, he's going to army fitness twice a week to build up his stamina for his selection, I think he's beginning to regret his sedentary lifestyle over the past few years....ahhh well

The sullen one has had her date for her tonsils out but she has to wait six weeks, which is a good thing really because she has raging toothache and has been to the dentist today (that and another one has to be taken out to allow for a brace) obviously too many teeth... although she's going to a Swansea clinic to have them out because dentists freak her out... so it's a rubber mallet to the back of the head and a pair of molegrips.... if only she knew how much more brutal they are when the patient is out cold, she'd opt for an injection any day...

Andrea is off to Helsby Half marathon this weekend, I'm dropping her off in Newtown and her dad is picking her up there and taking her up north...and all three of them are running it that being Andrea, Roger and Dorothy.... myself and the kids are going over to a friends house and I'm fixing their computer and having a few vino's (much more civilised)

FOMO boy still hasn't ridden his new bike he got at Christmas because he refuses to wear a bicycle helmet....(so uncool apparently...of course being in hospital with a smashed in skull or dead is way cooler) it's something he isn't going to win... they never do win anything these days.... you'd think they would have got that by now

Getting Beasted

2011-01-14T10:36:00.001Z

Xbox boy is having his first beasting today, on the first part of his Army selection... he has to run 1.5 miles in 11 minutes which for somebody who's only exercise since leaving school has been running for a bus when late for work or flicking his thumbs to "call of duty" on the Xbox...

I'm sure he'll do ok he's a long streak of lanky bacon, fairly fit.... at least I hope he is... Andrea took him out the other day at the pace he wanted to run at and he came back quite a bit knackered, and that was at 12 minutes to do the 1.5 miles, but I guess he didn't have the big bad beasting bloke shouting at him (which he will have to get used to during basic training)...

Anyway I'm really proud of him having finally made a decision that will change his life for the better... but he's far from out of the woods yet, he's got a long way to go before he can call himself a soldier.... but I'm sure he'll make it.

Andrea joined another running club last night called TROTS based in St Clears, it makes sense really she had a long way to travel to go to her other club in Newcastle Emlyn and being much closer to the St Clears club it just made sense to join them. Anyway she really enjoyed last night even though it bucketed down for most of her run.

I'm suffering from a touch of post viral fatigue after my wrestle with the swine flu virus, I was shattered yesterday I could hardly keep my eyes open....I've got to say I wouldn't wish it on anybody it is a really nasty Flu... the biggest problem I had was trying to sleep at night and when I was coughing every half hour to the point of nearly vomiting it's not a pleasant experience nor is it easy to get any shut eye.

The rest of the family are ok, Freya started playschool last week and she seems to be enjoying it, although we are getting a bit of attitude off her from time to time but nothing we can't handle.... she has the most delightful turn of phrase such as "conkernuts" which of course is coconuts and "sosseridges" which of course is "sausages".

She has such a vivid imagination and likes nothing better than to get her doctor kit out and ask "are you poorly?" ..followed by.."I said...are you poorly daddy?"... then she insists on using her plastic stethoscope on you with the V of the stethoscope pointing up wards on top of her head... she then proceeds to remove bizarre things from your body with a spoon or any other implement she can find in her doctors case, the other night she pulled a butterfly from my thigh and announced "there you go Daddy all better now I've taken the butterfly out of your leg"

She is quite barking mad that little girl but an absolute darling with it.....

Bring out yer dead......

2011-01-13T22:46:00.000Z

You may have noticed that I have placed an IPv4 counter on my blog... What does this mean ? Well are you sitting comfortably ?

Then I'll begin.....

A long long time ago (around 1970) when the internet was but a wee spark of an idea in some dope smoking Unix guru's hush puppy wearing head.

(hey man that's just a galactic idea...I mean whoa computers talking to each other over thousands or miles ....far out man groovy baby .... pass the joint....)

They didn't envisage that it would be only slightly less popular than breathing or water in the years to come.....Consequently they only thought that the addressing scheme used by most sites now would be more than fine.... and in it's time who would have thought it would take off the way it did ?

Currently it's defined in something called Internet Protocol version 4 or IPv4. This has an address space of about four billion entries..... Yup and in a time honoured fashion just like those near sighted hippies of silicon valley underestimated how many bits would be required to count up to midnight on 31st December 1999.... we've hit the same digital wall as the millennium bug but on a much much much larger scale...

We are quickly running out of numbers.....

Unless you've had your head stuck in the sand for the past 3 or 4 years you might have heard something about IPv6 which doesn't have this trivially small 4 billion limit....

So how many addresses can IPv6 handle ?

The short answer is: lots. The long answer is: an unimaginably huge amount. in fact a mind blowingly mahoosive number that makes you reach for the paracetamol each time you try to get your head around it....

It has been calculated that the IPv6 address space can handle about 340 trillion, trillion, trillion addresses. That's enough for every person on the planet to have trillions of IP addresses without any fear of that pool being exhausted. Or to put it another way that's "about" one IP address for every square millimetre of the Earth's surface (including under the oceans)....

So at some point this year there will probably be some media outcry that the internet will grind to a halt.... and that McDonalds will go out of business (one can hope) .....much in the same way jet planes were going to fall out of the sky on New Years Day 2000..... However the truth is that it might get a bit patchy....some sites won't be accessible if they switch over to IPv6 and you're still on IPv4...until they iron out the crinkles......

This means ISP's will have to get their fingers out and upgrade all their equipment to support IPv6 and in the interim we (meaning ADSL and Cable users) will probably be NAT'ed (network address translation) which will mean some bit of fancy kit will translate the IPv6 numbers into IPv4 numbers and vice versa .... although eventually we will have to migrate to native IPv6....

I can see a bumpy ride on the horizon :)

It passed the MOT

2011-01-12T19:40:00.001Z

What a shock !!!

none of the advisories
none of the faults

Moral of the story is

DON'T USE KWIK FIT FOR ANYTHING !!!

And I saved loadsamoney !!! :)

The Kwik Fit MOT

2011-01-11T19:38:00.006Z

A word to the wise..... DON'T !!!

it failed on three points

1) Rear Coil Spring (Fair enough)

2) Emissions

3) Brakes (balance)

SET RANT MODE = ON

Now I knew the catalyst had to be at temperature to "light up" and start working and it seemed the MOT tester was blissfully unaware of this fairly important point needless to say it only just failed on his emissions tester....

Now I've been and witnessed a fair few MOT's in my time and I was starting to get a little suspicious of this testers motives, but lets recap for a second

it failed on a rear coil spring, Emissions and brakes

Call me a cynic but isn't that Kwik Fits bread and butter ?? The rear coil spring was a given it had snapped off at the bottom, no arguing with that one, but the brakes ?? when it had only recently had new discs and pads fitted less than 6 months ago ????...

So not being one to lay down and take the bill for new discs/pads and a catalytic converter even though I was warned that if I drove it away I would lose the "special" prices .... I went to my usual MOT tester whom I couldn't get an appointment with previously hence Kwik Fit..... and told him the sorry tale....

He agreed the rear coil spring was a given, but he doubted the other failures..... so he told me to whazz it up the road for about 3 miles in third gear at high revs to really toast the catalytic converter and then he would put the gas analyser on it ....

low and behold it came out as a pass, not only that it came out bang on the manufacturers specifications, he also inspected the brakes and said there was nothing cosmetically wrong with them and that light surface rust was not a failure of any braking system and was more to do with the amount of road salt about than anything else....neither was it a fail nor should it have been an advisory.....

So I'm off to my usual MOT tester tomorrow and he says as long as the rear coil spring is replaced (already done that today as was the front wheel bearing) it will pass with flying colours and the other advisories are purely cosmetic rubbish in order to get in business for Kwik Fit....

And as a small footnote, I knew the nearside front wheel bearing was shot..... it sounded like a Wellington bomber over Dresden, and despite the MOT tester wiggling the wheels and rotating the wheel whilst jacked up he didn't spot it, not only that he took the car out for a drive with it sounding like a Wellington bomber and still he came back and didn't mention the bearing noise (and that would have been an automatic fail)

I had the new bearing on the back seat ready to fit after the MOT thinking that it would fail on the bearing alone .... but alas he couldn't even spot that....

So another recap.....it failed on all the things Kwik Fit make their money on, the only thing he couldn't fail were the tyres because they are very obviously brand new....

I am appalled that an MOT tester is allowed to operate like this and am wondering if a freedom of information request into Kwik Fit would highlight if the MOT testers were actually on commission for any failures that get fixed that day....

Had I stupidly agreed with him the costs would have been

£165 catalytic converter (that's normal price not Kwik Fit price)

£86 for two discs (nothing wrong with them)

£25 for pads (nothing wrong with them)

£276 + 20% VAT .... FOR NOTHING !!! they would be removing perfectly serviceable parts !!!!

I am seriously underestimating the prices here I was hearing £500 - £600 on the phone to other customers who's cars had failed the MOT with similar problems one guy was quoted £375 for a set of discs and pads because they were scored NO NO NO scored discs are NOT MOT failures.....

Give them a very wide berth.... my advice at a push if you desperately need a tyre fitting then go, other than that forget it.....

Anyway here's the complaint I fired off to ~~rip off~~ Kwik Fit central I will have to see if it bears any fruit... but I won't hold my breath.....

SET RANT MODE = OFF

"I had my BMW booked in at 12pm today at Pensarn in Carmarthen for an MOT and everything went well until it failed on emissions, it also failed on a broken rear coil spring. I was however suspicious when the tester stated that my brakes were imbalanced and that my discs were borderline/in need of attention, he soon retracted that statement after I told him that the front discs and pads had been changed less than 6 months ago at a BMW garage, they are in fact gleaming as you would expect at only 6 months old, he then stated that maybe they just needed a little clean up, rust on discs or pads are not covered under the MOT as long as they pass the brake test which he seems to think they didn't when they both equally pulled 220 kg is beyond me, not happy with his findings except for the broken rear coil spring, which I accept I went to my "usual" MOT tester based in St Clears, low and behold it passed it's emissions after having it's catalyst warmed to the correct temperature and not only did it just pass it was well under.

I am in two minds to get VOSA involved in this because it's disgraceful that a car other than it's broken coil spring, which has now been replaced is failed because the tester didn't know what he was doing. He didn't even know what a mass air flow sensor was when I was questioning him about the emissions failure.

I would appreciate a full refund of my £30 MOT fee as it will go towards a MOT test centre which isn't swayed by commercial profit, had I accepted his findings I would now be considerably out of pocket having to buy the discs/pads and probably catalytic converter in order to pass the MOT, I'm surprised he didn't fail the tyres as well but that would have been very hard considering they are new. Dick Turpin was at least honest in that he held a pistol to your face before asking you for money.

Sincerely

Derek Brabrook"

MOT time is with us again

2011-01-10T11:22:00.003Z

It was booked last week with Kwik fit mainly because they had a deal on for £30 which isn't bad, alas like all things car related once the car knows its going to be tested it starts to selectively fall apart our BMW was no exception to this rule...

on the day of the test I did my usual quick run around the car checking the lights and the last thing I checked was the screen water jets... needless to say they just dribbled.... "Ahhh no problem" I thought it's probably out of water....NOPE

so ensued a mad dash around various car parts emporiums in Carmarthen to track down a new washer pump which ended up in GFS car parts in Swansea.... I told him the registration and he chirped "we have two types in stock" so I told him to get both and I selected on the type of connector...went out to the car and started to remove the offending washer pump only to find that it wasn't going to be that simple....in fact it was completely different to the one I was taking out.... Bugger !!! What is worse is that the old pump when it was replaced WORKED PERFECTLY !!!.... so I took the replacement part back in and got a refund and raced back to Carmarthen for my 11am appointment with the MOT inspector ....

I presented myself at the front desk gave my name and registration number and announced my 11am appointment only to be stared at blankly and told no you don't have an appointment today.... "have you checked the date on the booking form?" so I rang Andrea and after a bit and a moment of silence she announced "it was yesterday not today"

I apologised to the Kwik Fit man who I suspect spoke some Mandarin to me in reply (just like the one in the advert) Well I think it was Mandarin and left.... Oh Dear

"Never mind" I thought ~~shit~~ stuff happens, mistakes can be made and laughed it off....after all what is the point in getting upset about things you can't change ???? ~~you idiot~~

It turns out the washer bottle had algae in it and every time the pump sucked it got a big mop of plant life blocking it.... so I bleached the tank to death (and unfortunately my favourite Nike green hoodie) and refitted it .... problem solved....

However......

Roll on the next day after we had rebooked our appointment at no extra cost and on starting the car and rolling down the road we had the familiar Dresden bombing raid sound.... yup our nearside front wheel bearing was on the verge of shuffling off to the wheel bearing place in the sky....FAN-FRICKEN-TABULOUS...

So I've spent the weekend finding out the part we need at the cheapest possible price and I will have to dust off my spanners yet again.... The only problem I can foresee is that I haven't got a bearing puller and I'll need something to pull the internal race off the stub axle other than that it should be a fairly straightforward job.... being an old hand now at bearing removal and re-fitting......at least I won't need a 50 ton press to press the bearings in......

So lets hope the MOT man doesn't spot any play in the bearing or its a fail :( it's more about avoiding the retest fee than not getting the bearing replaced !!! fingers crossed :)

in fact I might just take it back to the ~~rip off merchant~~ garage that fitted the ABS sensor in the first place on that side because it's making the noise from that very same wheel and make him squirm .... hmmmmm not that the abs sensor is RIGHT behind the bearing housing ......

Vorsprung durch Technik .... bugger that's Audi not BMW ...... in which case

Haufen Scheiße Deutsch

Well.....

2010-12-26T23:05:00.003Z

That's Christmas out of the way again.... I was rather shocked and surprised that Andrea had bought me a 19" wide-screen TFT after my near death repair experience with my old Dell 17" monitor (which is working perfectly now I might add) .... but the new 19" wide-screen is very nice I must say....

Fomo boy got a brand new bike complete with front and back suspension and an adult sized cycle helmet after his face skidding exercise outside the Laugharne doctors surgery on his old bike... amongst some other trinkets such as a fusball table (sp) etc etc...

The sullen one got a Nikon S3000 camera as advertised on "Hollyoaks" well done that ad man it worked....

Xbox boy got a Samsung ES74 digital camera as his main present which he seemed pleased with...

Andrea got a necklace and bracelet and a scarf from me (how bad do I feel after opening a 19" wide screen TFT monitor ???) Ahhhh well we hadn't discussed ground rules.... fatal I guess

I'm currently recovering from a VERY nasty cough/man flu/pig flu episode, I'm even on the red smarties from the doctors to knock a chest infection on the head ... I think it's working time will tell .... needless to say I'm not getting much sleep and last night I spent the best part of the night sitting up in a chair as that seemed to reduce the incessant nocturnal coughing.... Normally I would have gone downstairs but my father in law and mother in law were struggling with a slowly deflating air bed in the front room at temperatures more akin to the Arctic than South Wales....

However we did have a very good Christmas dinner which went down very well with all that attended and it was washed down with copious amounts of wine and beer... although I didn't partake that much being prone to retching/coughing fits that seemed to drag on forever....

No arguments or disagreements overall ... things went rather well and harmoniously....

The only blip to the proceedings was Andrea's ex doing his usual last minute arsery at Christmas time insisting that several hundred answer phone messages had been left on our "blank" answer-phone and Andrea's mobile and that apparently the "expensive" annual drop off at Gordano services had been arranged months ago.... (not)..... as usual it was last minute and totally unacceptable considering we had guests arriving for Christmas.

It was made worse by Andrea's ex's new woman (follow me ?) texting the sullen one and saying how unreasonable Andrea was being about not wanting to fork out £££'s so that her ex could see his kids....That did grind a bit and it's blatantly obvious that his new woman is being fed one line and his kids another....There are no secrets in our house everybody is fully aware of how things are and have been from the start and he isn't doing himself any favours with the kids.... there is no wool being pulled over any eyes.... whatsoever.....

To be perfectly honest I'm quite a bit fed up of all this pussy footing around, I've always been very much tell it like it is...... I have no beef with her ex wanting to see his kids, in fact I actively encourage it, I would be the VERY LAST person to stand in his way as would Andrea......... and I wish I had the opportunities he's had.....but I don't see why we are some how seemingly and erroneously on his part duty bound to fork out any cash for him to see his kids....

That is his responsibility not ours..... We pay for everything else they require and need for the remaining 360 odd days they are with us, with ~~bugger all~~ NO financial burden upon him whatsoever, I suppose if he was paying any maintenance then we might be more "agreeable" to sharing petrol costs..... but as it stands ....no....simply no.....not happening....We have enough outgoings without adding to them and especially for someone else’s benefit.

I can see the day that if he carries on pulling arsery/stunts like this that things will be a changing.....He's lucky the CSA haven't got him in their sights ... but that's probably because his ex wife isn't as ~~deranged~~ draconian as mine.... and she managed to get the house for a knock down price, the kids and several thousand pounds via the CSA.

but he's pressing ALL of the wrong buttons at the moment....

Anyway ......

Happy Christmas !!! :)

This has truly shocked me

2010-12-13T20:36:00.002Z

Tesco and a few other big retailers have been selling Halal meat without telling the public, all of Tesco's New Zealand lamb has been slaughtered following the Muslim method which is as follows :-

"According to Islamic tradition, the animal is brought to the place of slaughter and laid down gently so as to not injure it. The blade must be kept hidden until the very last moment while the jugular of the animal is felt. The conventional method used to slaughter the animal involves cutting the large arteries in the neck along with the oesophagus and vertebrate trachea with one swipe of an non-serrated blade. Care must be taken that the nervous system is not damaged, as this may cause the animal to die before exsanguination has taken place. While blood is draining, the animal is not handled until it has died. If any other method is used its meat will not be halal."

Disturbing video showing how inhumane halal prepared meat is

(don't watch it if you have a weak stomach .....seriously ... don't)

Now I know halal slaughtering is allowed in this country to satisfy the Muslim beliefs but personally I know it's not a very humane way to kill an animal, it will be conscious through the whole process until it's brain is starved of oxygen via the massive loss of blood.

That said what the hell does Tesco and the other supermarkets think they are doing selling Halal meat to non Muslims when ALL of their New Zealand lamb is slaughtered using this method but has not been labelled as halal ??? I'm sure if the general public knew that all of their Lamb was "halal" and how it was slaughtered their sales would slump.... apparently one third of their chickens are also halal....

You can be sure that the Pork is most definitely ok though ;¬)

First off I'm 100% Atheist and I wouldn't want any of the meat I buy blessed to Allah or any other God, but what I find completely outrageous is that ALL New Zealand Lamb at Tesco's is halal !!!

Christians in particular would be horrified to know this because they aren't allowed to eat any offerings to other God's

It's true animals are bred for food and as such we have a duty to at least give them a dignified and painless death without them thrashing around on the floor whilst their terrified heart pumps their entire circulatory system over the floor until they lapse into unconsciousness ....

I for one will not be buying Tesco's or any other supermarket's lamb until the EU labelling comes into force forcing them to label halal meat as such...

I'm not anti Islamic at all there is enough room on this planet for everybody Christians/Atheists/Agnostics/Muslims/Buddhists .... I do however take offence when I and probably many others are misled like this and not given a choice in the matter !!!

Christmas is looming (again)

2010-12-13T15:48:00.000Z

I'm not generally known for my enthusiasm for Christmas in fact what makes it worse is that it's hyped up to be Jesus's birthday when in fact it's nothing of the sort. It was a pagan festival which was hijacked by the Christian religion of times gone by so that it would be more readily accepted by the heathens of yesteryear....

Now I'm not denying that a bloke called Jesus existed because he did according to Roman history but I simply do not believe he was the son of a god, I think he was an ordinary bloke who had a bit of a god delusion going on....I cannot understand why Christians get so excited by Christmas when they must know that Jesus was born in or around July...

If it's symbolic then fair enough but then how much else of the Christian faith is purely symbolic and how much of it is actually based on hard facts... Ahhhh don't get me started ... I'm suffering from pre-Christmas stress syndrome.... where everybody runs around manically buying presents for each other which will sit in a cupboard or drawer and not see the light of day until they visit several months later....

I'm not a fan of Christmas, never really have been... but Freya will enjoy it as will the other kids/teens I'm sure and I certainly won't pour water on their fun.... :)

so onward and upward to celebrate this most British of traditions of excess and waste :)

Near death experience

2010-12-12T11:04:00.000Z

Well ok slightly exaggerated there, but close... I'm composing this on my Dell 17" monitor which "used" to have the annoying habit of it's raster (screen) collapsing to a rather funky ) ( sort of shape... I knew what was causing it because a well aimed thump on the top of the monitor cured it for either a few hours or a few minutes.... but it was getting progressively worse as the months have been dragging on .....Sometimes it was like playing the Dell monitor bongo's at times trying to keep the screen from what was rapidly becoming it's natural state of ) (

So eventually I had my "Right that's it" Basil Fawlty moment and decided to take it apart and resolder the offending bad/dry joint....

All well and good I thought until I removed the several hundred self tapping screws that kept the back of the monitor on and I opened up the monitor to reveal a monitor made by the now defunct Russian Lada factory.... the whole circuit board was encased in a metal shroud made from second hand razor wire from the Inner German Border fence... so after slashing my finger within the first two minutes I wasn't holding much hope out of being able to take this Philips made monitor apart....

Eventually I figured out what I needed to pull apart and did so disconnecting about 15 or 20 leads... Eventually I had the back of the board in front of me and I started inspecting it for the tell tale ring of solder around the larger joints... I've got to be honest I couldn't see any.... switching it on was a no no because I had disconnected so much of it to get to the back of the board... so the only thing I could do was solder everything that looked a "bit" dodgy....

Now I'm a trained electronics bench engineer and I have repaired so many of these old CRT's that I could at a push do it blindfolded and that's where complacency creeps in... You are "meant" to discharge the anode of the CRT (it's the big rubber sucker device you see on the back of the tube) by taking a hefty screwdriver and attaching a equally hefty piece of wire to the metal of the screwdriver then you attach the wire to the chassis and slip the tip of the screwdriver under the anode cap.... as soon as the screwdriver tip comes to within arcing distance there is this big flash and bang and the CRT tube is discharged and safe to work with...

I skipped this step thinking "well I won't touch anything I shouldn't so I'll be fine" ..... mistake number one !!!

I moved around the board with the soldering iron making sure the iron touched the board first in case of any latent electricity then I would touch the solder to the part I wanted to re-solder .... I got quicker and quicker until eventually I got it the wrong way around solder first then the iron... unfortunately for me it happened to be one of the only ones that was carrying the full 35,000 volts off the anode cap... The flash was quite spectacular for the instant my brain had to compute what had happened the next instant can only be described as being hit by a freight train at 50 mph and finding myself half way across the floor....35,000 volts through the arm is quite probably the most refreshing experience anybody can have..... it certainly wakes you up...

Luckily for me I don't have a defective heart.... as I found out in 2002 when I was submitted to the hospital with a suspected heart attack...(yes I drove myself there whilst my ex stayed at home....caring individual as she was) it turned out my heart was fine and the only thing defective was my ex wife...which was solved later that year..... I had just suffered a panic attack....

Anyway I digress I pulled myself together and carried on re-soldering cursing myself for not discharging the CRT... and eventually I got the monitor back to together and it has stopped doing it's funky ) ( dance and I no longer have to play the bongo's on the top of it.... So result.....

The moral of the story is :- No matter how good you are at doing something never take any short cuts because it will come back and bite you on the arse

The Anthropogenic Global Warming Cult

2010-12-07T20:30:00.004Z

Or in fact any global warming zealot, they are not dissimilar in their strength of belief to that of any devout religious person...In that it simply doesn't matter how much evidence there is against them, they still continue to believe blindly .... but I guess that is faith for you, you can't counter it with science no matter how overwhelming it is ....

I've been reading some comments on Richard Blacks Blog on the BBC and although I don't agree with him I have to admit I love reading the comments other people are putting on there.... they are hilarious.
It is almost as if AGW/GW is a new cult where complete belief is required or quite simply you are a denier, a blasphemer, a person willing to strip mine all of the national parks for their coal,oil and gas reserves... and/or murder future generations of children.....and a few polar bears thrown in for good measure.....

It seems now that their previous computer models were wrong and for the past 15 years there has been no discernible increase in global temperatures, well nothing that would tie in with the famous hockey stick, even some of the hottest media zealot scientists whose bread has been amply buttered on both sides since this latest green scare reared it's ugly head are starting to admit, that the climate isn't behaving in the way they have predicted and that they cannot explain why the Earth's climate simply isn't heating up....

Even the IPCC have given guidelines that any computer model must be able to predict our current climate accurately and be peer reviewed before it's output will be accepted for climate predictions in the future.... So at last it seems that a little sense is prevailing rather than the hysteria of "We are all going to die, and all the puppies are going to drown because of rising sea levels"

I failed to get excited about AGW, no doubt man has had an impact on the climate but I think some of us think far too much of our importance when it comes to how the Earth naturally manages our climate and has done since the Earth has had a climate...

Meanwhile I'll continue chuckling at the zealots... some of them are hilarious ... meanwhile I have to pour boiling water over my 47Kg Calor Gas bottle so we can cook because it's so bloody cold this winter....

and finally ...... It used to be only the likes of Monty Python who could rip the urine out of political hot potatoes. but now it seems anybody can do it... and rather well ... :)

The cost of keeping warm

2010-12-06T14:02:00.002Z

We had our delivery of oil the other day, well I say the other day it was about 2 weeks ago now... and we've had a belter of a cold snap with temperatures hitting record lows around the country.... needless to say our boiler has been on quite a bit...and that has just about kept us from freezing.... I was more than a bit shocked when testing to see how much oil we had consumed when I pulled out the sight valve to see the oil level drop by half IN TWO WEEKS !!!

At this rate we will need a refill at the end of the month and oil prices have sky rocketed so that will be a welcome bill right about Christmas time...NOT !! All we can hope is that this nasty cold snap will pass and our boiler can ramp down from its current ravenous consumption of heating oil....

The only other notable event was my near death experience at 3am in the morning on the way back from dropping Andrea off at the station so she could attend a running event in Birmingham... So after waving her off at the station, I made my way back on the A40, I got about half way down the road when it just poured down with rain, at first I thought "brilliant!! it will melt all this ice and snow" but that thought soon melted away when I glanced down at the temperature readout on our car and it stated quite categorically that it was minus 6 degrees centigrade....

It was right about that moment that I noticed the back end of the car starting to drift gently, I quickly realised that I was driving at 55 - 60mph on black ice, and not just a "bit" of black ice either... the whole road was a sheet of black ice...I could see it freezing as I drove..... The temptation to slam on the brakes was so overpowering but I knew if I did then I would eventually come to an abrupt halt but probably against a tree or crash barrier and in a completely uncontrolled fashion....

So I gingerly danced with the car as it weaved from side to side making minute changes to my steering to correct the drift coaxing it in the general direction I wanted it to go....mainly I was trying to keep it in the middle and avoid the edges at all costs....... knowing full well if it went too far one way or the other it would be sayonara....and very probably painful....

If you could have traced my path down the dual carriageway it would have looked like a gentle diminishing sine wave....weaving from side to side .....unbelievably or maybe by pure chance I also managed to get it around a bend in the road before my speed reduced naturally to a more sedate speed, not helped by the low friction road surface ...

My only comfort was another car on the other carriageway suffering the same terror.... we were separated by the crash barrier so no chance of impact with each other and all I could see in the fleeting glimpse I had of the other driver was that he had an equally ashen white face and the very same look of abject terror written all over his face as he weaved past me jinking gently in the mist and rain with his hazard lights flashing...

I did think it's a bit late for that mate I've been skating for the past mile...I eventually got home driving at a sedate 20mph..... phew !!!

Free thinking and what it means

2010-12-04T12:29:00.001Z

Part One

Part Two

Welcome to gridlock Britain

2010-11-28T19:06:00.002Z

I was in Carmarthen when the snow struck, and within 20 minutes Carmarthen was gridlocked.... It looks like our efficient county council hadn't gritted the roads they seem to have been taken by surprise.... or could it be a subtle hang back on the gritting front because there is worse to come ? .....

There's no disputing its been cold Powys has recorded it's lowest ever temperature last night of -18C .... that is cold, and I can confirm that it's bloody cold here in Laugharne so much so our brand new 47Kg bottle of gas froze solid the only thing I could do was pour boiling water over the cylinder until the pressure cranked back up then I gave it a nice towel overcoat to try and keep it's contents above freezing we shall see in the morning if that did the trick.....

Anyway this is all down to the cock eyed jet stream which has missed us yet again this winter and plunged us into unseasonable artic conditions.... I'm still waiting for this global warming malarkey to kick in so I can crack out my flip flops and shorts in November... Alas I think it might be a long wait....

It never ceases to amaze me how the UK is brought to its knees by a few flakes of snow

Xbox boy done good

2010-11-24T12:09:00.000Z

He's done his BARB test and has scored 75% which is brilliant his three choices are :-

Ammunition Technician

Amourer

Dog Handler/Trainer

I am immensely proud of him, it seems his life is finally snapping into place since dumping the girlfriend who controlled his every move...I think we can safely say she's history and somebody elses problem now and good riddance and of course don't bang your head on the way out of the door :)

Ammunition technician is a pretty dangerous job in civvy speak it's mainly bomb/munition disposal, but it also encompasses supply and safe destruction of ammunition, and he's been told that he won't actually be doing any bomb disposal for at least 18 months after training.... The recruitment staff at Army Careers said that not many make the choice of Ammunition technician ..... because of it's an increased risk occupation... but hat off to Stewart he's determined and if that is what he wants to do then it's not up to us to try and dissuade him.... and at the end of the day somebody has to do it....

It's far from written in stone yet but that is what he is wanting to do and it's his first choice so who knows, he has to get through selection first and he has to build up a bit of upper body strength and endurance, because the Army are only taking the cream of the crop these days. So roll on April 2011.... he'll be in his element and absolutely love it !!! :)

Immensely proud of him :)

As for the other ankle biters .....FOMO boy is due for an attitude adjustment course, which will entail bed by 9:30pm and complete banning of Xbox activities as he is starting to think he is bigger than his boots....He's been having trouble getting out of bed in the mornings and basically dawdling when doing anything, not to mention "forgetting" homework and seemingly muttering under his breath.....

We think he's under the impression that both of us were born yesterday.... where he's got that from I don't know because we are at least four steps ahead of him before he even thinks about doing anything remotely rebellious .... which must be frustrating for him ;¬)

You'd think he would have had a lightbulb moment by now.... but alas no.... I think it's a combination of Xbox exclusion syndrome characterised by the blank stare and twitching thumbs common in so many today...and I'm in Secondary School syndrome characterised by the classic "I know everything there is to know.....therefore I'm not listening to you"

He's also lost his coat because it's "SO NOT COOL" to wear one to school...it must therefore be "UBER COOL" to be drenched to the skin whilst in and outside school....because as everybody knows that's "JUST WAY COOL"

We'll see how cool it is once SS-ObergruppenFuherer D Brabrook and his second in command Oberstleutnant A Brabrook get to grips with him.... abandon hope all wannabe teenagers ... resistance is futile to coin a Borg phrase....

And life goes on...and on...and on

2010-11-19T14:39:00.001Z

Xboxboy has decided to join the Army after dumping his ball and chain....sorry "girlfriend" ... I really hope he actually does it this time rather than think about it and fail to follow through..(that can be applied to both the Army and the Ex girlfriend)

The only advice I've given him is to go for a trade within the Army that can be used when he eventually joins civvy street rather than going in as a grunt... He seems keen this time, who knows..

He did say something rather funny in that he was commenting on how clean and tidy the barracks were on the DVD and were they all like that .... the penny dropped when I said "Yes they are, but who do you think cleans it ?"

Freya still has this amazing ability to melt both of our hearts sometimes, mainly with the crazy things her imagination comes out with and how she has moulded the English language to suit her.... such as the new english word "Willunt" which is her version of "Won't" She frequently has us in stitches, but that is probably down to living with three other siblings who are almost as barking mad as she is...

I've been married before, but I can honestly say I've never had this much fun or laughter in my entire life, having Freya and taking on three step children and a mad marathoning wife who "gets" me and who I can reduce to laughter in seconds and her me, has given me a new zest for life and I have to admit it is keeping me younger than my years.

like they say "life isn't a rehearsal.. enjoy it while you can"

Marmot

2010-11-12T15:40:00.002Z

No not the small furry animal pictured to your left but the manufacturer of outdoors gear... I bought a rather expensive (£300 ish) all weather jacket a few years ago and I have to say it's been rather brilliant and it hasn't let me down once...not the slightest hint of wetness getting through....

I've only recently re-proofed it after it succumbed to the appalling marble sized hailstones and reservoir like rain up in Llanberis (I say succumbed in reality the outer sleeves got wet but not on the inside) for the Snowdonia Marathon...... but when I took it out of the tumble dryer I noticed the rubber sleeve straps had perished... they are still functional but it's only a matter of time before they snap and my cuffs on the jacket will flap around my wrists and when you're on top of a mountain (or indeed battling your way down the highstreet) the last thing you need is a draught up your sleeves ....

Anyway I decided to contact Marmot and see if they could do anything for me... I wasn't holding my breath but much to my surprise after an exchange of emails with a lovely woman called Stephanie and a few photographs describing my problem (for the exact same straps)... a few days later two straps and associated Velcro pads arrived which had been hacked off what looked like a brand new jacket !! (I would have been quite happy for them to send the entire jacket ;¬) )... I was gobsmacked at such brilliant customer service, especially on a jacket that must be knocking 4 or 5 years old...

I will certainly be buying Marmot in future :)

I despair...I really do

2010-11-11T12:03:00.000Z

We asked the sullen one what she wanted for her christmas present on the way to work this morning....

She replied deadpan "A car.... a combined Christmas and Birthday present" she announced under her breath....

Andrea and I looked at each other briefly and both said in unison "A CAR??"

"Yes" replied the sullen one "it will motivate me to pass my driving test"

At this point Andrea said "You're being serious aren't you?"

"Yes" replied the sullen one "Why are you laughing at me"

I have to admit it was VERY hard not to laugh considering the cheapest decent car is about £500ish then on top of that insurance at well over £2000 possibly more considering she doesn't even have a provisional licence yet and can't until she's 17... then road tax of course.... Then of course you have driving lessons at £18 - £20 a pop...thereabouts....

Even if we were daft enough to get her a car for Christmas so that it could rust outside on the curb while she motivates herself until she passes her driving test.... she'd never be able to afford to run it, and we certainly wouldn't be putting petrol/diesel in it, or taxing it and definitely not insuring it....

We learnt our lesson with Xboxboy when we donated "Duran Duran" to him "whilst he learned to drive" it sat there for months the doors unopened, untouched by xboxboy... the only time it had human contact is when I went out to turn the engine over to keep the battery topped up... we sold it when we moved...and no, Xboxboy didn't get the money from it... if he had no interest in it previously then he had no interest in the cash it generated when sold.

It does make me wonder what school actually teaches them during school hours.... mind you apparently you can get a course in University about Lady Gaga.... So I have every reason to feel despair about this latest generation

Thar she blows....

2010-11-08T14:39:00.001Z

The wind picked up a bit last night... well I say picked up it blew a gale more like so much so that our enclosed garden took a battering pushed a few chairs over and lifted our closed umbrella clean out of its holder and threw it down the alleyway and it's probably beyond economical repair now... ahhh well forces of nature etc...

Andrea has entered another race, I'm not sure which one they all seem to melt into each other these days, and I'm recovering from a short lived illness... although I think the medicine caused me more upset than the illness.... kill or cure probably !!!

We are starting to get the ridiculous Christmas present requests already ...mainly from FOMOboy who seems to have no idea of the value of money....and yes you've guessed it it's "another" games console he wants to add to his stockpile starting with his Xbox360(no longer working) his Nintendo Dsi (No longer working)...

In fact I think the only console he has that works is his old PS2... so he is jumping into Stewarts room at every opportunity to game on with his brothers Xbox360.... We've told him he isn't having an Xbox live subscription, we aren't letting him go down the same road Stewart did where his life revolves around it...we are determined to get some vitamin D into his sallow skin and break the habit before it starts....

If I had my way I'd chuck every games console we have in our house out into the bin and quite merrily watch them get crushed in the bin lorry... but then again I've never really seen the attraction of wasting hour upon hour of your life staring at pointless shoot-em-up games or any games come to think of it...whilst twitching my thumbs.... each to their own I guess....

The only other news is we ventured out to Manor Wildlife Park near Tenby and Freya encountered her first Wallaby (kangaroo to her) and various other exotics... overall there weren't that many animals in the place and the food in the cafe was extortionately priced ... but we would go back again..... I met Anna Ryder Richardson (the owner...ex changing rooms personality) ... she's much shorter than you'd imagine, but seems nice enough.... We'd go again but avoid the cafe.

Snowdonia Marathon 2010

2010-11-01T15:53:00.002Z

Well Andrea completed the marathon in a very respectable 4 hours 28 minutes and I am immensely proud of her achievement and the dedication required to get a time like that on what has been called the toughest marathon in Europe !!

She is of course walking like somebody has taken a baseball bat to her legs.... but that will pass... she'll be out pounding the pavements and jumping into the bushes to avoid speeding cars in no time flat...

We stayed in a lovely cottage in Llanberis which had all mod cons and was considerably cheaper than the hotel we had booked... I'd tell you where it is but then I'd have to kill you..... so pointless ;¬)

I was supposed to be meeting up with my best mate Chris in Llanberis but he made a no show, with no reason... just didn't turn up... I supposed something more exciting turned up who knows... it did put a huge damper on the nights proceedings but things turned out ok in the end and a good time was had by all once enough wine and beer flowed in the right direction...

Highlights of the Marathon....

A) Being in awe of the fastest man at 2 hours 36 minutes

B) The cottage

C) The fabulous countryside

D) Pete's Eats

Lowlights of the Marathon....

A) The beer

B) The hailstones the size of marbles

C) The torrential rain (short lived)

D) Chris not bothering to turn up

Musca Domestica (bloody flies)

2010-10-25T20:14:00.007+01:00

Yes I made the mistake of using Raid fly killer (tm) on a few flies which where re-enacting the battle of Britain in our bedroom... they were merrily battering themselves against our sky lights and each other so after being hit on the side of the head by a rather large bluebottle I thought the time had come to remove their genes from the fly genome using a good old fashioned aerosol poison....

Little did I know that the entire Luftwaffe and several squadrons of the RAF World War II re-enactment group were hiding in every crevice our bedroom affords, probably because our bedroom is at the very top of the house and any flying insect eventually ends up in our bedroom pointlessly battering itself against the glass of one of our skylights.....

Needless to say once the RAID got to them they came out coughing and buzzing in their hundreds..... it was carnage I was literally sweeping them up off the floor..... how we didn't notice them before is beyond me... maybe the cold in our rafters had immobilized them....

(I still rate DDT for it's knock down power after using some circa MOD 1969 issue in 1982 in our guardroom once and I've never seen flies drop like that in my entire life before .... or since.... no wonder they banned it if it killed flies that quickly .....)

Anyway getting back to the story .... "Ha Hahhhh" I thought "that got you ... all of you ....buzz no more you hideous little creatures...."

But no..... they had one last act of defiance before becoming a lifeless ex buzzy thing.... several squadrons managed to ditch their twitching bodies into our hot water header tank ... which when it was installed by the plumber did not have the tank cover put on the top.... in fact it was devoid of any kind of cover near it or placed remotely near it....

It gets worse.... much worse .......So several days later when I was running a nice relaxing bath for myself when I noticed black things wildly swirling about in my bath water..... on closer inspection I realised that those black things were in fact fly body parts...... legs, heads, wings, thorax's.....

I didn't have a bath that night.....unsurprisingly ..... I opted for a shower instead which isn't attached to the header tank (thankfully)

So today I've just spent the last 30 minutes draining the header tank out ,fishing out the remaining dead flies scrubbing the inside of the tank out and pouring enough bleach in it to turn the black hole at the centre of our galaxy white......

The tank now has a cover on it so any further mass genocides will remain outside of my bath water......

Shudder....

Bloody cowboy builders...... sheesh

The girl hits the big THREE !!

2010-10-24T16:41:00.000+01:00

Well it seems like only five minutes ago she was learning to walk and talk and now we seem to have a girl who is all grown up.... Time marches on as they say ....

She had an absolute blast at her birthday party, my parents attended along with Niki and Justin with their kids .... Andrea slaved over the food for hours and overall it was a very enjoyable day... We bought her an enormous dolls house complete with wooden furniture which she has been playing with quite a bit since yesterday... she has such an imagination.. and has us falling about laughing most of the time and she knows we're laughing at what she says not her... she's a bright spark Freya....

Andrea is getting a bit jittery about the Snowdonia Marathon....

As for me I'm getting a bit jittery about leaving two teenagers alone in the house for three days..... God knows what we will come back to but I will actually go off my nut if anything is broken/damaged/trashed.....I will of course be equally displeased if the house is a mess.....

I don't know about you..... but

2010-10-19T20:10:00.008+01:00

It's a tad worrying this latest cost cutting scythe that has sliced through the MOD here in the UK.... I'm fully aware that savings have to be made but to decommission the Ark Royal after only 25 years of service ????

Which means it leaves only HMS Illustrious and HMS Invincible as aircraft carriers... but there isn't much point in having Aircraft carriers when the Government are also ditching the Harriers we have as well ....

Of course it didn't start with the new government it started way back when Labour got in power, as you can see above (click the table above to enlarge) it's been quietly selling off war ships to other nations and pocketing the cash... I doubt Ark Royal will be sent to a breakers yard...

More like it will be re-badged and be sailing under another countries flag.... Britain seems to be turning into the Car booters of Europe when it comes to military hardware.... likewise 100 ex British Army battle tanks and several hundred (possibly thousand) artillery pieces will probably be sunning themselves in Saudi Arabia before the end of next year....with a nice KERCHING from the Government.....

it makes you think when HMS Victory ( a Royal Navy wooden war ship launched in 1765) saw service..... she lasted for 40 years before she was decommissioned.... a wooden ship outlasting a modern aircraft carrier ???? surely not ......

Anybody want to invade us ? we've left the latch off the back door.... come on in......

Teenage Angst & Whatever

2010-10-16T11:43:00.001+01:00

We've had some ructions in this house of late that have wobbled the time & space continuum and quite possibly cracked the timeline of existence .....

Or to put it another way both Xbox boy and his sister have broken up with their respective boyfriend/girlfriend...I suspected it might have been something to do with increased solar activity or possibly a change of water or some lunar influence that triggered the double whammy on the same day... but nothing really fits ........

I suppose when you're 16 - 18 it can feel like the world has come crashing around your ears and they lack the clarity of experience not to mention the realisation that it's not really the end of the world... I won't go into specifics because that's not really fair on them and neither would I want to go into any detail here on my blog.... it's their life and sometimes taking a few hard knocks is good for you ......That said all we can hope for is that lessons have been learnt and that they won't go down that road again.... Alas I fear that won't be the case.... most teenagers seem to like the feeling of banging their head off the wall.... personally if something hurts .... stop doing it.....

Time will tell...... providing it hasn't been cracked by teenage angst

Destiny is a funny thing, when you get there...... you can't really blame somebody else, if you've let them drive......

The wonders of ebay

2010-10-12T17:53:00.001+01:00

I noticed our bonnet badge had taken a few high speed impacts with either stone chips or some very hard headed insects, needless to say the veneer over the top of the badge had cracked, then let in water and then had obviously frozen the water and cracked open even more and has basically split off large chunks of the badge... so much so it's almost a white circle on the bonnet...

So no problem I thought I'll find out how much a BMW badge is at the local BMW emporium...."NO that can't be right !!! £25 !!! after nearly spitting my coffee over the screen and keyboard I fell back to the old faithful ebay...

I found a much more wallet friendly one at £2.50 !!

Spot the difference ?

OK it's made in Taiwan but it looks the part and apparently you'd be hard pressed even with close examination to tell the difference between a genuine one and a copy.... and lets face it, it's not performing a vital function to do with car safety or driving experience it's purely there for a finishing touch...What I do care about is not filling up BMW's coffers with our cash for a tiny "genuine" approved badge which "might" last as long as the copy....

All I need to do now is get it booked in for an oil service and have the intermittent ABS sorted out and it's good to go. I have to admit I've never really been a fan of BMW's they tend to be driven by idiots...but I guess I'm a BMW idiot now because I love it... it sticks to the road like no other car I've had, the only complaint I do have is that it's a bit heavy on fuel if you drive it a bit urgently or go over 65mph but then I've been used to driving "Duran Duran" around which barely had an engine to speak of and only needed the barest of petrol fumes to run

Beauty and the Beast

2010-10-01T19:02:00.007+01:00

I'll probably get sued for this but I'd like to introduce my estranged daughter Emma....(The Beauty) Hey who knows we might even get to see each other in court..... well worth it !!! (The Beast)

She's studying for her BA in Photography and I have to say judging by the pictures I've seen thus far, she is a very talented young lady. I've been following her for some time on the internet and was delighted when she started a blog to showcase her idea's and photography talents. I wish her all the very best in her chosen career.

I know what she thinks of me, and I can't change that .... neither would I want to... it's something that she herself will have to get her head around when the time is right for her.... I'll still be here (hopefully) who knows I might even get to introduce her to her half sister Freya at some point... what will be will be.....

ps/ all photographs in this blog post are copyright Emma Brabrook (that might fend off being sued) and if you like them you can see more >here<

Snowdonia Hellathon is looming

2010-09-28T20:39:00.000+01:00

Well for my wife at least..... some of us have more sense than to run marathons, let alone run marathons in probably the hilliest place in the UK.... but each to their own I guess.

We are staying in a nice cottage in Llanberis for a couple of days....myself and Justin (the husband of the other deranged runner) are going to provide vital support along the marathon route namely making sure water is available for our respective partners which of course will require stopping at every pub to fill up water bottles and it would be rude not to have a pint while we wait patiently for our respective running partners to zoom by...

Then we have the strenuous task of breaking camp (after a bag of pork scratchings and a packet of crisps) and moving onto the next pub and doing it all again... it's a good job there are only three pubs on the route otherwise we probably wouldn't make it to the fourth pub.... These runners just don't know how much hard work it is supporting them whilst they go for a jog around the countryside.....

Then we have all that awful drinking and socialising after the race to endure and of course "The Curry" ..... it will be hell.

The things you do for love eh ?

;¬)

Wifi and Physics

2010-09-22T23:51:00.000+01:00

Xbox boy after being banned from using the broadband connection for going behind my back and re-enabling it when I had disabled it has had a reprieve.... I've allowed him back on the internet with his precious Xbox 360... so he went out and bought a new usb wifi dongle from Microshaft... (well the ban had gone on for longer than a year... despite him asking at least four times to be forgiven ......let it not be said that I'm draconian unnecessarily)

I wasn't hopeful that he would get a decent connection because Lauren's computer has difficulty connecting through the 3ft thick stone wall and Xbox boy's room is directly above hers which means that to the wifi signal it's exponentially thicker because it travels up through the wall at an angle increasing the width of the wall by a factor of at least 4 maybe more...

Needless to say it didn't work (very well....told you so !!!) so I told him to put the dongle in a plastic bag and hang it out of the window with a USB extender cable I had knocking around.... bingo full connection !!! although I can't see that lasting because Andrea is not happy about a plastic bag hanging out of his bedroom ..... I can see her point..

As for his full connection, yes he does have all the bars lit up but it's not really though because our router really doesn't like what the Xbox is throwing through it data wise so he's getting drop outs ..... There have been complaints about the Zyxel router we use with fellow Xboxer's ..... Which means I'll have to get a new wifi router that supports Xbox properly ..... NOT !!!

ahhhh well his in-house support for his Xbox network connectivity ended years ago... He's on his own now.... it works for Linux and Vista and XP and that's all that matters to me (and everybody else for that matter).....

Freya has managed to trash FOMO boys nintendo Dsi obviously by hammering it on something and breaking the screen, apparently it's only £32 to fix it so not as bad as we thought... but to be honest I think kids have far too many "gadgets" these days and one less is no loss to me..... (FOMO boy may disagree on that one)

If all the consoles and gaming machines suddenly disappeared in a puff of smoke I wouldn't lose any sleep over it.... I can't see the draw with them to be honest, I also can't see how an adult can become so wrapped up in a "game" that it rules over all else.... a sign of the times I guess... maybe it's an escape from reality ?? who knows (or cares even)

Like music ?

2010-09-20T19:13:00.002+01:00

And more importantly brilliant music .....

Then click on the link below

Dom Kane "Silence" Bootleg

The man is a genius !!!

Just click the link above turn your speakers up

and get blown away !!! :P

I'm a Nazi

2010-09-17T08:52:00.002+01:00

Well according to Pope Benedict I am at least..... he made the astounding comparison when he addressed the nation in Edinburgh the other day.... He said that Atheism is comparable to the Nazi's ... Now I don't remember putting to death millions of Jewish people or putting them into forced labour..... I'm sure I would have remembered doing that and I certainly don't remember giving my allegiance to some despotic nut case hell bent on world domination at any point in my life.... Neither do I walk around in shiny jack boots or have I ever possessed insignia or a membership card of the Waffen SS or the BNP....

So I fail to see how the quite plainly mad pontiff can draw the conclusion that I being an Atheist equals being a Nazi.... but each to their own I guess.... live and let live.... I certainly won't lose any sleep over it or rush to get converted to the Catholic faith or any faith (ever).....Mind you I was never a member of the Hitler youth..... unlike Mr Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger

You don't need a bible to show what love is all about, the bible however is the most efficient instrument of hate ever created..... and lets face it a God who made imperfect human beings when he was perfectly capable of making perfect ones (allegedly) Then spends eternity blaming us for his mistakes !!! that's not intelligent design .... it's just bad design....

Anyway enough of the fanciful my PC is still limping along at half speed, I can't seem to find a supplier for Arctic Silver 5 heatsink compound and until I do I'm running at half mast on the Ghz which is a bit frustrating... That said I'm sure I will get hold of some at some point.....

Our heating/boiler/Rayburn has been fixed and we now have heat in the house... couldn't have happened sooner really because the days definitely have taken a turn for the colder....

It's just under six weeks before Andrea does the Snowdonia Marathon we were all prepared with the hotel booked and everything but we had the chance of booking a cottage for two days in Llanberis much cheaper so with Andrea's friend Niki and her husband we are sharing this lovely cottage for the duration which will give us a bit more freedom than the hotel.... plus it's right next door to Pete's Eats in Llanberis the home of the hearty climbers breakfast !!!

So all systems go although Andrea has been suffering from some kind of cold/chest infection so her running/training has been put on hold for now but she's champing at the bit to get back out there....

That's about all the news there is at the moment I'll report back when I've something less interesting to speak about

Gravity.... it's ups and downs

2010-09-04T09:52:00.002+01:00

I have enough computing power to concurrently run a moon mission, control Heathrow airport, calculate the end of the universe and play several games of chess concurrently..... Alas this needs a CPU cooler of monstrous proportions made of pure copper... which is HEAVY ....

it's mounted sideways on the motherboard and strains on it's retaining clips like a breeze block suspended by spiders thread....

So let me set the scene... I needed to pull out the "beast" to plug a usb connector in for our ink hungry Epson printer.... simple job you would think.... but like most men I over estimate the length of things.... (slight pause for comic effect) .....and pulled the computer too far causing it to bump heavily down when the back end of the computer ran out of computer desk and settled on the wooden floor.....rather loudly....

there was an almighty "CRACK!" as the CPU cooler separated from it's fastenings and my 4 drives all decided that I had exceeded their operating shock (non sinusoidal) limits.... and all recalibrated in unison having completely lost the position they had last left the read/write heads (careless to say the least) .....closely followed by my Quad Core CPU immediately going into thermal meltdown a la three mile island style....ok it didn't melt it's way through the three stories of our house and continue on it's way to the centre of the earth.... but it had a good bash at it... thankfully AMD have engineered their CPU's to become a little bit suspicious about temperatures above 86c and they immediately disconnect power to prevent thermal runaway.....

However I was left with a broken CPU cooler bracket and a motherboard manufacturer which had closed it's doors in 2009 (Abit) so after a few phone calls to a local PC supplier of whom I've been friends with for years......I had secured another clip off a dead motherboard !!! yay!!

or so I thought.... it seems now that the CPU is a "bit" brain damaged in that no matter how fast the CPU fan runs (currently nearly 4000rpm and sucking the air out of the room as I speak) the CPU will, if stressed above 90% peak at over 90c which is pretty bad for this particular CPU because it's rated at 86c max temperature..... :(

So as a stop gap until I can get hold of replacements I have cut off the thermistor which controls the fan speed and it's running like a Spitfire engine at full tilt in a dive towards a group of Heinkel bombers over London .....which makes playing music different as the wind whistling past your ears and almost ripping your socks off as a veritable mini tornado under my desk pulls anything within 4 metres towards the computer air intake.... does detract somewhat ...... just a tad .....from the quieter moments of Pink Floyd's "The Wall"

I will have to cancel the next moon mission and cut down my parallel chess games to just one....Heathrow will have to wait on a holding pattern until I can fix the problem......

Gravity sucks ......

SN9C202 web camera's (Microdia type)

2010-09-03T10:16:00.003+01:00

These little beasties are pretty hard to get working in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS but here is a step by step walk through to get it working within minutes :) just type the highlighted commands in a terminal session....

firstly identify you have an SN9C202 or similar camera by using

lsusb

which should return something like this

Bus 002 Device 002: ID 045e:0040 Microsoft Corp. Wheel Mouse Optical
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0c45:628f Microdia PC Camera with Microphone (SN9C202 + OV9650)
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

Once you have indeed confirmed you have the offending camera follow the steps below.....

firstly install Git with the following command line

sudo apt-get install git-core

1. Download the source code

From a command-line prompt, cd to a directory where you want to download it, default "home" will do then run the command:

git clone http://repo.or.cz/r/microdia.git

This will create a folder named "microdia" which contains all the source code.

Sometimes the above command doesn't work. In such cases please try this one:

git clone http://repo.or.cz/microdia.git

2. Install bare minimum packages

To be able to compile the driver, you must have kernel sources and the necessary tools to compile it. For most applications you will also need libv4l.

Debian/Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install kernel-package linux-headers build-essential ctags libv4l

(this might take a while depending on how fast your connection is)

Note: linux-source is not necessary, rather linux-headers with the same version of your kernel will install /lib/modules//build.

Attention: Do _NOT_ under any circumstances use "sudo make" or "make". There are no root privileges necessary at this point and using them causes a never ending chain of different problems later on.

3. Setting up the compilation environment

The linux kernel needs to be locally compiled in order to compile the microdia driver.

If the kernel is not compiled, "make" will complain of "modpost" missing.

The Makefile expects the source of linux to be located in /lib/modules/$(KVER)/build, if this is not the case edit the Makefile to set KSRC to point to the linux source location.

4. Building Microdia driver from source

After installing Git (command line to get git shown above), you need to download microdia kernel driver source. After installing Kernel packages and necessary tools to compile it, you will be able to compile it by typing:

cd microdia
make

Attention: Do _NOT_ under any circumstances use "sudo make" or "make". There are no root privileges necessary at this point and using them causes a never ending chain of different problems later on.

Troubleshooting MAKE errors

If you get the following error:
make: *** [driver] Error 127
Error 127 simply means that the module is not in the proper location. This is not a major error.

5. Loading the driver

sudo insmod ./sn9c20x.ko

If everything works fine you won't see any message on stdout, but your dmesg will have lines like the following:

sn9c20x: SN9C20X USB 2.0 webcam driver loaded
sn9c20x: SN9C20X USB 2.0 Webcam - XXXX:XXXX plugged-in.
sn9c20x: Detected XXX Sensor
sn9c20x: SN9C20X USB 2.0 Webcam is now controlling video device /dev/video0
usbcore: registered new interface driver usb_sn9c20x_driver
sn9c20x: v2008.10 : SN9C20X USB 2.0 Webcam Driver

Troubleshooting insmod errors

insmod sn9c20x.ko
insmod: error inserting 'sn9c20x.ko': -1 File exists (which is what I experienced)

means a similar module is was already loaded into the kernel and needs to be removed first. To find out which model that is, do:

lsmod | grep sn9c20x

you should see something like this

gspca_sn9c20x 31616 0
gspca_main 26816 1 gspca_sn9c20x

From which you can then figure out the module name (gspca_sn9c20x in my case) and replace it with the new module as shown below

sudo rmmod gspca_sn9c20x
sudo insmod snc9c20x.ko

Make sure you type all of this from within the git cloned microdia directory or else it will simply bomb on you. You can now check to see if the module is loaded:

lsmod | grep sn9c20x

and you should see the driver installed.....

Update the dependencies for every module.

sudo depmod -a
sudo m-a update,prepare

if the sudo m-a update,prepare fails you'll need to run the following and repeat the command line above

sudo apt-get install module-assistant

then

sudo m-a update,prepare

FIXME: more possibilities
6. Test it using Skype or the command line shown below
Please note that the test requires libv4l for video decoding. mplayer does not support JPEG compression on its own.

LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l2convert.so mplayer tv:// \
-tv driver=v4l2:width=640:height=480:fps=25:device=/dev/video0 -vo x11

7. Installing the Microdia Driver

Once you're happy that it's working as expected ....

open a terminal session and put the following commands in to weld it into the operating system :)

sudo strip -g sn9c20x.ko
sudo mkdir -p /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/media/video/usbvideo/
sudo cp sn9c20x.ko /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/media/video/usbvideo/
sudo depmod -a

Just cut and paste the above ... you might need to press the enter key for the last command to execute

voila .... working webcam :)

School Time is upon us

2010-09-01T19:09:00.001+01:00

The long lazy days of the school holidays are behind us (nearly) .... Andrea went back to work today and the other kids go back on Thursday (Phew!!) it's been a busy 6 weeks what with moving house and settling in.... I won't want to be doing that in a hurry again that's for sure... predictably the weather has improved remarkably in the last three or so days.....

We are still without heating, we are just using the immersion heater for hot water which is probably going to bankrupt us once the bill arrives.... but can you get a boiler engineer when you want one ??? ... you'd think in the "height" of summer they would be thick on the ground begging for work .... but alas no.... I'm under the impression they all hibernate in the summer and only come out of their work vans when the weather turns a bit colder and boilers fail like leaves off the trees....

I will have to lay a trap and see if I can catch one staggering back from the pub....

Andrea is in Carmarthen this evening "running one off" doing endless laps of a 800m circuit, it's something to do with building endurance or something like that... she did manage to beat her personal best at the St Clears 10k race, she beat her previous record by a few minutes.... which is a massive improvement :)

Snowdonia marathon is looming large now ... the heat is on ....

She is off doing the Merthyr to Brecon race along the Roman road this weekend I think...... it's 16 miles up hill and down dale.... she'll be cream crackered after that one....

Did I mention the kids are back in school on Thursday ??? (YAYYYYYY!!!)

and relax.....

Settling in nicely :)

2010-08-29T11:52:00.001+01:00

I've been fishing three times now since we've moved, nothing spectacular just a couple of sea bass and some small flatfish.... in fact the sea bass were caught just on the spot of beach you can see in front of Dylans boathouse... well a little further back than there but literally just out of picture.... as you can see it's a bloody awful place to live..... a complete eyesore ... (yeah right...) ;¬)

We still haven't managed to get the heating sorted out yet, we've been promised and promised but alas nobody has turned up.... the famous Pembrokeshire promise it seems..... thankfully it hasn't been cold of late, wet of course but not cold.... well it's August after all, torrential downpours are the in thing.... I guess that's why Wales is so green....

I'm off out fishing again this afternoon (shock...horror) after Andrea gets back from running the St Clears 10k .... She's incredibly fit now and doesn't think twice about knocking out an 8 mile run... but she needs to keep doing it if she is going to do well in the Snowdonia Marathon in October I've walked that course it takes you right around Snowdon and it's bad enough walking it let alone running it.....but she seems to be looking forward to it... I honestly didn't think she'd stick to this running lark, but I've got to take my hat off to her (if I had one) with the London marathon under her belt and numerous half marathons and 10k's....not to mention the seventy odd miles she's doing a week.... she's doing very well indeed and I'm very proud of her :) not to mention the fact that she's become very toned all over...she's a lean mean racing machine.....

I just broke off from updating my blog to get a coffee only to find that the kettle had died, it's been a bit iffy for a few weeks... you'd turn it on and it would go off with a crackle then back on again... then off then finally it would boil.... well it's finally blown when I tried to get a much needed cup of ambition.... so out came the screwdrivers and I disassembled it.... I found out what was causing it to stop working and have jammed a piece of cork into one of the leaf contacts to keep it down and a further piece of cork to keep the on/off latch switch down so it can boil.... it has to be watched now because it would boil dry.... but at least I've got my coffee :) it will last until we get another one.... another Bodge-it & Scarper job with a good result :) (I doubt it would pass an electrical safety test) but my coffee is hot and I care not .....

Well I'm going to have to break off yet again because my little daughter Freya has just come up and said "Daddy .... you're my best friend"

So until next time :)

We've moved

2010-08-23T17:13:00.002+01:00

I have to say it was one of the most knackering experiences I've ever had... we only had a small van to do the move because we simply refused to pay the £150 to hire one (plus fuel).... so it took 252 miles or 7 trips there and back....

The teenagers were suspiciously absent except for the odd occasion, so basically Andrea and I did it all, FOMO boy was more help than both the teenagers put together... We did have some sterling help from Lauren's boyfriend Tom who's muscles and spatial ability came up trumps at a point where my brain had been frazzled by lack of sleep, tiredness and aching muscles. But eventually it was all done and all that remained was to put everything in its place and unpack everything.... (which is actually the hardest part!!!)

I have to admit I lost my rag on a few occasions, mainly through tiredness and muscles screaming out to be rested and although I didn't fly into full blown massacre mode it was close..... however I did manage to keep a lid on it (mostly) but my patience was thinner than the skin on a rice pudding... I was bubbling away for quiet some time .....

It wasn't helped by the endless heap of teenage bodies which seemed to be appearing from every crack in the front door (Lauren's friends) ..... last thing you need after a house move are teenagers... in fact I think they should be banned from being seen or heard by adults until they are at least 21.....

Broadband and the phone appeared on the 20th as promised by the Post Office and at a blistering full rate of 8Mbits but I'd be silly to think it would be anything else considering how close we are to the exchange.....

I had to "undo" some "Larney" wheezes, such as the pub powering it's beer garden lights off our ring main.... that was disconnected immediately I found out.... we did have the landlord poke his head over our fence and ask us to switch a light on and off on our wall which they had "tapped" into... which was completely pointless as it had been removed at the fuse box ;¬)

We still have a few things to sort out such as the Rayburn only fires on the oven side not the heating, but we'll get that sorted out fairly soon before the cold weather hits.... (oh sorry it already has it's August already!!!)

other than that we are moved in and all systems go......

We are moving !!!

2010-08-11T23:37:00.003+01:00

For those of you familiar with the picture on the left will realise that we are moving to Laugharne the town where Dylan Thomas lived for the latter part of his life... I actually grew up in Laugharne and my parents still live there... so it's a kind of homecoming for me... it's a sleepy little town right next to the sea or should I say Estuary.... it's going to be nice to wake up to the "ding" "ding" of the town clock again (its a very distinctive "ding" trust me) :) We have been buzzing about like blue bottomed flies in this house packing boxes, throwing stuff away, burning stuff we don't want to turn up on a dump.... we've been pretty ruthless, but it does feel good to get rid of stuff that's been hanging around for ages, old paper work, old insurance documents, seven year old bank statements, computers bits and pieces and old computers I lugged around with me, all gone...

The only problem is I think I've thrown out my mobile phone.... I hope I haven't, I'm hoping it turns up in some box we unpack when we get to the new house.... which is enormous, we fell in love with the place as soon as we walked in .... it has a huge kitchen, with a big rayburn in it, gas oven, gas hob, granite work tops, very nicely done out...

All the enormous bedrooms have en suite shower/bath/toilet... Freya already loves the place because it's close to the park with the whirly slide as she calls it.... so no doubt I'll be getting dragged down there at all hours...

As much as I love this place where we are now for it's isolation and lack of neighbours ... it's not doing the kids much good.... arranging sleep overs and visits is becoming a major logistical nightmare... then you have to drive miles to pick them up.... I think I will have to wait for desolation and idyllic peace and no neighbours for a few more years yet..... besides once Freya is a bit older and less of a handful we have handy baby sitters on the doorstep ;¬)

Anyway I will be offline for a while whilst our ISP sort themselves out... we are due to resurface online on or around the 20th August apparently .... (yeah of course) one thing for certain we are a mere stones throw from the BT exchange (literally) and I will cut off both of my arms if we don't achieve over 7Mbit (there may be some blood spilt as I might regret that statement) ....

We are all looking forward to the move.... well except Xbox boy ... he isn't chuffed that he now has to travel even further to visit his girlfriend.... ahhh well I'm sure the extra 15 minutes on the bus won't kill him......but at least with the regular bus service the taxi of mum and stepdad will cease... no excuse now...

"Oh dear you missed the last bus..... unlucky!!!" I've walked to Laugharne many a time after missing the last bus in my youth.... let's not break the tradition :)

No more Mr Nice guy

2010-08-07T09:38:00.001+01:00

I've had it up to the back teeth with re-installing the kids computer because of viruses and I've told them if it gets taken down by another virus I'm killing Windows XP on it and installing Linux ... like it or lump it end of viruses it just works and keeps working...

My 18 year old step son is the prime culprit (no he actually is the culprit) he like all 18 year old lads has a fascination for porn, most if not all porn sites are designed to deliver a virus or some kind of payload to your computer and it doesn't seem to matter how many times I've told him not to visit those sites he persists, I've blocked network access with OpenDNS and Netelligence which filters out I'd say about 98% of them but it's not 100% ...

I've not actually got an issue with him looking at porn... the only issue I do have is that the computer he views it on is a shared computer and his younger sister does all her banking on it... which is like playing russian roulette with a semi automatic pistol, it's not if you'll get shot it's more when.....plus every time it gets infected with a nasty virus all the kids lose everything in their profiles....which simply isn't fair

Anyway I've warned him and he's ignored me, so he's had his internet/computer access revoked indefinitely, He's lucky I was going to send his girlfriend a list of websites he visits on a regular basis.... but that's too cruel....

So his ass is banned .... it's the only way it seems

Derek vs Epson

2010-08-03T14:57:00.005+01:00

We purchased some more incredibly expensive ink for our Epson DX4450 all-in-one printer yesterday to print something out.... it's rather annoying that if ANY colour runs out the printer simply won't print... so I opened the beast up and put in the cartridge and it went through it's ink priming cycle only to be confronted with a paper jam.... so I cleared it .... or thought I had and tried again .... same thing happened.... RIGHT !!! I reloaded the paper, fanned it, checked the paper path all seemed fine... would it print ? would it buggery....

It was at about the 10th attempt to print something, that it made the most expensively loud and grinding sound after which it simply stopped trying to feed paper and just sat there endlessly winding itself on with no paper movement... so I went onto the Epson web site which proved about as much use as a chocolate fire guard in front of a steel blast furnace... there was only one thing for it.... I needed a Philips screwdriver and I wasn't afraid to use it !!! So I set to work dismantling the beast....

Now I'm a trained Epson Engineer on their laser and dot matrix printers of yestermillenia but that was many years ago and I may as well have been an untrained baboon taking it apart, I have to say these new Epson printers aren't built to be taken apart at all, they have fire once plastic clips on them once fired they stay fired....they are basically throw away printers and once you get inside them, which is no mean feat you realise why.... there is very little in it to throw away.... gone are the days of massive circuit boards with endless heatsunk transistors to take the wattage....and an enormous switch mode PSU.... you could run these things on a single AAA battery....

So once inside I could actually see what was causing the problem.... I had a chunk of paper which had torn off under the back paper feed wheel ... all crunched up.... but being old and wise to these kinds of faults it meant that wasn't the cause of it.... paper doesn't simply rip off there is a reason for it... and a little further digging and peering about I discovered this little beauty :-

Freya !!! come here a minute please....

Can you see the frayed edges ? that's where the paper drive mechanism had tried to feed it through the paper path... needless to say it failed hence the expensive grinding sound it made.... So after removing the offending item above, I set about putting the printer back together, which with no disassembly /assembly manual requires a brain capable of navigating the Dan-y-Ogof cave system blindfolded using nothing more than echo location to find your way back.... I had hundreds of screws on the desk and a very taken apart printer....

the worst part was assembling the scanner module which although clip together technology with just two screws required to secure it, it required the balance of a trapeze artist and the dexterity of a juggler to put back together... that done the rest clipped back together without much of a problem.....

Bits and bobs

The picture above is about half way through the assembly process....

Now the universal sign of a good engineer is always to have at least two or three screws left over because you have improved the design of the device by removing excess weight and still it works...

Well I must be losing my touch because I had no screws left and no I hadn't lost any on the floor.... The moment of truth was upon me... I powered it up.... it went through it's initialisation procedure of priming the ink cartridges pumping half the ink out as usual and sat there waiting for some data.... s

So I sent it a test print with my fingers and other body parts crossed.... I have to admit I was half expecting that horribly expensive grinding sound.... but no I still had the printer magic and it performed beautifully even the scanner scanned.... all was well in my world.....

now what was it I wanted to print out again ????

Normandy (last day)

2010-08-03T12:44:00.014+01:00

half way across the new bridge

We had to be out of our hotel by 10am on the last day, so we had a long (homeless) day ahead of us... We had taken in Pegasus Bridge on the previous day which I found rather amusing because there were a lot of American tourists there marvelling at Pegasus Bridge and snapping away reams of digital storage at the thing when in reality the "real" bridge which had been removed some time ago and moved onto the other side of the river/canal was practically unvisited......

The real Pegasus Bridge

Anyway we tucked into our breakfast at the hotel and set off for Bayeux, I had already warned my father that we WERE visiting the Bayeux tapestry and probably the Cathedral.....he rather grumpily accepted he was outvoted... so off we drove to Bayeux which is remarkably close to Caen only a few miles really .... we got there and I have to say it is a beautiful town, very clean very bright stonework and we parked up and headed straight for the Bayeux Tapestry

I was particularly amused by the medieval flasher

I managed to shoot this photograph from the hip because photography was strictly forbidden in several languages !!! my camera was supposed to be on "Museum mode" but no it FLASHED in a VERY dark room and I quickly pocketed my camera and whistled unconvincingly....

Those nuns had vivid imaginations

Obviously he was doing "I'm a little teapot... short and stout" and they did it naked in Norman times.....

We then went onto the the Cathedral and I have to say it's a must visit ....well despite the homeless man (I question that statement) begging at the huge front door... although I had to laugh at somebody thanking him for letting him visit his Cathedral ...(some people....rolls eyes) He was being very sly... when somebody put some money into his tin he'd wait for a few seconds then remove some cash to make it look like he hadn't collected much, I estimated 20 euro's in the tin and judging by the steady flow of tourists and contributions he must have been making a fortune.... call me cynical .....he wasn't that hard up....

The Cathedral is just monstrous... you walk in and your jaw just drops.... it's beyond massive, quite awe inspiring and a huge achievement of medieval builders and stonemasons... my father made me laugh by saying "what a waste of money" .... but then with my dad if it hasn't got a sharp point at one end and an engine at the blunt one and travels in water.... it would be a waste of money

Bayeux Cathedral... HOOOGE

As you can see by the photo above I couldn't even get the spire in... a very impressive building....

We then went on to the tank museum in Bayeux... again worth a visit and very eye opening as to what went on starting on the 6th June 1944... I found it particularly ironic that one of the gun barrels of the tanks parked outside had a birds nest in it complete with chicks... so where once only death and destruction came.... sprung forth life !!!

We then ambled back via Omaha beach which was pretty awe inspiring and you could understand the great loss of life on that beach by looking at the beach defences still there....very sad ..... then back to Ouistreham where my mother finally got her lamb chops which she had been coveting at a very nice restaurant, right on the front of Ouistreham beach (Sword beach) ... we then simply waited around until our ferry left at 11pm and had a very nice trip back again it was like a billiard table much to my mothers relief !!!

My parents however have the spatial ability of a hamster between them, I think they did more mileage walking the wrong way up and down the ferry than the whole time in France they very nearly wore out the lift.... very funny though....

all in all a very worthwhile and enlightening trip.... and I didn't crash their car once !!! :)

ps/ if you click on any of the pictures you'll see it in higher resolution :)

Normandy (continued)

2010-08-01T19:10:00.002+01:00

The end of the second day ended rather stressfully in that I thought I had had my digital camera stolen, we had ended the day in Ouistreham at a brasserie to have a meal and a drink and watch the sun go down.... on returning to the car and driving for about 7 miles back towards the hotel I had that "where is my camera...moment" I then remembered I had put it down on the floor next to my chair...

So we turned around and headed back to Ouistreham.. we finally got there and I shot out of the car back towards the brasserie at warp factor 9 and interrogated the waitresses with my best camera impression I could muster.... they all said "non" and lifted their hands skyward in the typical French fashion shaking their heads at the mad Welshman standing in front of them gesturing wildly like a demented fool .....

Ahhhh well it was gone.... I wasn't upset about the camera I was more upset about all the lovely once in a lifetime photographs I had taken.... I think I was visibly upset when I got back to the car... so much so that my parents plotted behind my back to get me a new camera and stating that we had one more day and we could re-take the photographs... which was a poor substitute but our only viable option really .....

So we got back to the hotel and I ripped into the French on Facebook calling them nothing short of a set of froggy camera stealing people with no fathers who smelt of elderberries.....

then my parents sprang the "Right we are getting you a new camera.... and no arguments" I've learned not to argue with my mother once she sets her mind to something... there is no turning her to your point of view....

so off we went to Cah fur and on parking up in the blue disabled car parking bay I automatically reached into the glove compartment to pull out my parents disabled badge to put it on the dashboard and there looking up at me was my "stolen" camera.... it was a mixture of relief and utter stupidity that washed over me.... ahhh well alls well that ends well....

I deleted my derogatory French bashing post on Facebook.... hoping nobody had noticed and slunk away to my room .....

Normandy ......

2010-07-31T09:03:00.001+01:00

It was a lovely trip, sometimes sad, sometimes hysterical funny.... well it would be with my father there, he does come out with some pearlers at times....

The ferry across was like riding on a billiard table you wouldn't have even known you were on a ferry except for the "Brittany Ferry" signs all over the place... oh and the sea of course... 5 hour crossing and we emerged to blazing sun and a hot day.... I switched my Tom Tom on and within 10 minutes we were at the hotel.... We didn't do very much the first day, we just went down to Ouistreham beach front and wandered about having a look at this and that, eventually we decided to try out my mothers french speaking skills and got a remarkably strong french coffee ... then we drove back to the hotel and settled in for the night.....

Rabbits !!!

They are everywhere in Normandy, we had them outside the hotel, on roundabouts, roadside verges.... I have never seen so many BIG rabbits in my life, quite unafraid some of them....

The second day started relatively early, I was refusing to alter my watch to French time otherwise it wouldn't have been so early... We drove out to the local Carrefour and my mother bought a lovely floral display to put on Georges grave and after we had had a look around Carrefour for all of 20 minutes we set off to find Brettville-sur-laize Canadian war cemetery.... I have to say the cemetery is in the most peaceful and beautiful setting, it's very rural, no towns that you can see for miles and the cemetery itself is immaculate, it has lawns that are like billiard tables and there is nothing unkempt about the place. I was really pleased it looked so lovely.

I've uploaded the full resolution photographs so if you click them you'll see how well looked after the grounds are.... The one thing that really saddened me about the cemetery is how young practically all of the men here were. I only saw one headstone that had an age of 35, the vast majority were men in their late teens early twenties.... it really brings home how many died who were involved in the liberation of Europe... it's a really sobering place to visit..

We then went back to Hermansville sur mer and then onto Ouistreham again until the sun went down and then back to our hotel...

**\\--Digamy--//**