Personal

Car troubles again

For a couple of months, I’d been getting the “engine problem” light and each time it went to the garage, the onboard computer reckoned there was a different fault. The vacuum pump, glow plugs, mass air-flow sensor and oil level all caused it at one point or …

Spammers should die!

RANT MODE ON I just opened up my mail program and found 81 new messages (since last night!) Of those 81 messages, 4 were personal and the rest were blog notifications about new comments.. some nasty little blog-spammer has gone and added spam about casinos and various drugs to …

The Pool (part 3)

Well, after 3 weeks the pool had turned a nasty green colour, had emptied of water a fair bit compared to when it was full, and the water on the rain cover (plastic dust sheet) was occupying more of the space in the pool than the water inside was! Had to drain the pool and …

The Pool (part 2)

Went out to check how the pool was doing yesterday. It’s been there a week and no-one has yet ventured into it because of the awful weather we’ve been having. After all the rain last week, there was quite a large puddle collected in the top of the makeshift cover (an …

A hatred of floppy disks

I never realised how much I hated floppy disks until today. They’re slow, clunky and unreliable. It should be a simple matter to transfer a 1.1Mb RAID card firmware update to a machine with no O/S but no.. first the floppy drive in my PC doesn’t have the power …

A poolside seat

Bought a small paddling pool for the kids today - 6ft diameter, 25 inches high. Got it home from B&Q and found that it was more the kind of thing you fill up and leave out for the summer than a 10 minute fill and empty when you’re done sort of pool. It takes a long time …

Weekend break

We popped over to North Wales (Llandudno) last weekend with barely 18 hours warning. Note to new visitors - we’ve been there before.. see 26 July 2003 for more. It was Friday evening and we just figured we’d get away from the mess of a gutted bathroom in the early …

Offensive fonts! What next?

Windows Update says there’s a critical update for Windows. Critical to me implies that it’s absolutely vital to the smooth running of your PC. The description of the update left me wondering so I took a couple of screenshots of character map before and after the …

One of those moments

When attempting to make a slave disk into a master disk (and remove the previous master), it always helps to look at the documentation for the correct manufacturer and model of disk.

Invasion of the ant people

Ok, so they’re not ant people as such.. just your average run-of-the-mill black ants. Unfortunately they were all over the dining room and downstairs toilet - not just normal ants but winged ones as well. After trying Nippon bait, B&Q ant spray (on the ones outside) and …