Well Well Well

I've just been contacted by somebody on facebook who pretty ruined my life back in 1982 along with my then wife Deborah Brabrook.....I'd just been posted to West Germany to a place called Celle, well to be more precise Sheuen near Celle.

My new wife at the time Deborah and I couldn't get married accommodation or married quarters in Celle, so a Soldier I'd befriended whilst at Celle offered to share his flat for us to stay at so we could be together as a married couple.

Great I thought we can be together at last.......

How wrong I was, my "Christian" wife at the time (spawn of satan damaged goods more like)  Deborah who was over the moon at being reunited with her loved one ....."me" allegedly...  .....decided within a few weeks...........to sleep with the very same friend who I had arranged to stay at his flat.... his wife "Sarah" knew nothing about it......neither did I until she (Deborah) weirdly confessed.....

Needless to say she didn't stop there she went through quite a few "soldiers" whilst I was posted there, I think the term is a dose of salts.....lets put it this way far too many to count on two hands...and quite a few after I left the army .....why I didn't dump her then I have no idea, I suppose I had this hard wired brain at the time that marriage was forever.... 

But had I dumped her then....I wouldn't have had two beautiful daughters much later in life...and yes they are mine, despite her many indiscretions....  so everything has a silver lining I guess if only to produce two wonderful daughters which I will never regret.....

Anyway.....

So fast forward 30 odd years and up pops the bloke I had thought as my friend all those years ago .....his first words were ..........."I apologise.....it's Paddy" that's all I needed ............ Sorry.....he was sorry ......it had obviously burned into his conscious all these years later..........

that meant WAY  more to me than 22 years of marriage to my first wife.......he was sorry he'd screwed over a friendship over a mere wife............


after all these years later.........amazing ..........


Paddy I salute you !!!!

ps/ I never once got an apology off my ex wife for anything.....she was after all perfect (in her eyes)

Samsung Galaxy S II (thinking its charging all the time)

I'd thought I'd share some information about this phone to stop people spending money on getting it fixed unnecessarily.

I was bought this phone by my wife on my 50th birthday in March of this year, and to be frank it's a brilliant phone, it has performed faultlessly since it was switched on for the first time.

However like most electrical things they do suffer from wear and tear, and although the phone has been looked after and has barely a blemish on it, it did fail on me.

Namely the usb charging port, initially I didn't think there was anything wrong with my phone other than the battery not lasting very long, so I downloaded battery saving apps etc thinking my battery was on it's way out, but they didn't show anything untoward.

So being an utter unashamed geek I decided to get to the bottom of it and rooted my phone to get into the internals and see what was going on.

I found out that a wakelock was keeping my phone from deep sleeping, a wakelock is basically a kernel mechanism for Android power management. When a thread holds a wakelock, the kernel will refrain from entering a low-power state.

Now the wakelock in question was "vbus_present" which basically means it thinks it's plugged into the charger/usb port.

So I cleaned out the usb port on the phone with a soft toothbrush, then proceeded to blow it out with compressed air, neither of these things worked.....

Eventually I decided to look at the port with a high magnification camera from where I work, it was pretty obvious the central spade connector was pushed down away from the position it should have been in.

So after removing the battery and power source and with the help of a small flat bladed screwdriver I gently lifted the central spade (it's VERY small) upwards towards the screen side, until it was central, not thinking for a minute that it would do anything because I thought the usb charger side would straighten the spade out when inserted, and at this stage I had already called Orange (EE) and Phones4U to find out how to return my beloved phone for repair. 

To my surprise the wakelock disappeared. A fluke I thought....no it wasn't it's been consistently fixed since this rather bizarre fix I stumbled across.

Just for information the USB charging unit in these phones is easily replaced by yourself for around £10 and you can get the part from here.

etradesupply

So don't be fooled into paying large amounts of money to get your phone fixed

it's 8 screws and the job is done... there are even video's online to show you how.

Well I've hit the half century

It was ominously looming on me my 50th year on this planet..... I have to say I wasn't looking forward to my birthday.... 

My ever thoughtful and darling wife had been deceiving me for weeks, I knew something was happening but I've got to be honest I had no idea what she had planned.... she finished work early and then when I finished work,  she turned up in the car without the kids, which immediately got me on edge.... we drove, and drove... it started to get dark, we still drove out into the wilds of Wales....  

then the water pump blew on the car..... we sat there looking at each other, Andrea had a bit of a melt down because the surprise had been scuppered by the BMW's water pump going and dumping our entire coolant over the road, and we were out in the middle of nowhere... and by nowhere I mean absolutely nowhere even the local sheep were miles away.....

So we had a discussion after the minor hysterics and I explained that logically to decide what to do that she had to tell me where we were going .... So I asked would we lose any money if we cancelled, apparently yes..... all of it.... Soooooooo I spoke to our friendly garage owner on the phone and he gave me a number of somebody local in St Clears who did recovery..... and then I phoned my parents and my father eventually picked us up from our wilderness break down, and carried us to our final destination...... The £95 sting of the vehicle recovery marred things somewhat, and we knew we'd have a massive repair bill for the water pump (well I did)

My father bless him turned up about an hour and a half after we broke down and drove us to our final destination.......I have to say I was blown away with this 5 star hotel, they upgraded us because of our unlucky car troubles and probably because they felt sorry for us, but I wasn't complaining ... it was stunning, the whole place was pure sumptuous luxury.... They had a treatment room/spa.... hell there isn't any point in me describing it on here..... 

just go here and take a look at the place 

http://www.peterstone-court.com/

Amazing place.....

We were booked in for two nights weekend break and it was worth every penny......

Having to go down to the bottom of the enormous drive and wait for the local bus to take us into Crickhowell did raise a few eyebrows with the locals on the bus.... We were the only guests who didn't have our own car... but I've got to say it didn't dampen the weekend very much at all....

My wife also sprang a surprise visit by our friends on the Saturday night which was a lovely surprise.....

I've also been rocketed into the 20th century with an Android smart phone, which I'm still getting to grips with......(which by the way I'd managed to lose on a walk within hours of getting it... but it was recovered.....eventually)

Overall I've had the most fantastic 50th birthday a person could wish for.....and I'm married to the most thoughtful, loving and beautiful  uber fit wife a man could wish for :)