Month: November 2008

Alone

Its very odd how you don’t realise just how much you miss someone until they are not there.

Kathy flew out to Maine on Saturday to spend Thanksgiving with her family. Its the first Thanksgiving since her dad died and she just had to be there for her mom. I usually go over but the cost of the tickets and things at work got in the way. As it turned out I had no job and some money so we could have tried to get a ticket at the last minute but we’d no-one to look after the cats and so I didn’t go.

Saturday wasn’t that bad because the morning was taken up with driving over to Heathrow and seeing her off and in the afternoon I helped my brother move a sofa bed – we were going to use his car and his roof bars but instead we slipped in into the back of the 95 Estate and delivered it to the Sea Scouts.

Then we went to The Greyhound and had a couple of pints which were both very good. You dont often see Dorothy Goodbody’s Wholesome Stout very often and so Nick just had to try it.

After that we stuck our head in at The Sudeley Arms which has been going through a rough patch recently, where we had a perfectly decent pint of Pride.

Then we made our way over to The Railway to meet up with the rest of Richard’s Stag Night party. We had a couple of beers there before heading to the Everest and then onto The Swan for a few final beers.

So Saturday sort of passed in a haze and Sunday I didn’t really do a lot because I was just tired. But last night it started to hit me and going to bed alone with just the cats keeping me company / waking me up, really got to me.

I had a lie in this morning and then spent some time tidying up the TV/HiFi cabinet in a vain attempt to rationalise the wiring in there. I repaired one of the doors which suffered from an unexplained breakage when mum and dad last stayed here. Not sure what happened but hopefully the glue will hold.

Kathy then phoned to chat and it really hit home then. It probably would be so bad if I was working but I’m not and I didn’t really have the motivation to do stuff today and it all piled up on top of me. Of course I know I can’t just sit round all week. I’ve got stuff to do round the house and if the weather holds up I might venture into the back “garden” and get rid of the leaves and some of the weeds.

This Hoover Sucks

Back in 2002 Kathy and I bought a Hoover AAA 140 washing machine.

Hoover, a good name, so its going to be a good washing machine. Might last as long as my parents Hoover washing machine (aeons) or their Zanussi (not quite as long but still pretty good).

How wrong we were. Within a couple of years it needed its drum casing replace because the idiot designer at Hoover (who probably didn’t even have a degree in anything but stupidity) decided that they would use plastic for the outer drum casing and then they would secure the concrete ballast weights to it using rather thin semi self-tapping screws/bolts with no locking plates.

So what happens over time is that the bolts start to vibrate loose and then the concrete starts bouncing and suddenly one day there is a big bang as one or more of the bolts shears and the concrete flaps around inside the washing machine.

So the engineer comes and fits a new drum which has bigger mounting bolts and bigger mounting lugs and metal lock plates to stop the bolts vibrating loose.  So I guess some engineer looked at the original design and having hit the first idiot round the head a bit came up with a new design.

So its been pretty OK since then, well apart from the the fabric conditioner tray syphon not really working and the tray fills up with gloop and you have to keep taking the soap tray out to clean it and then of course the spring loaded handle falls off because its made of plastic that is about as robust as a CD Jewel case hinge.

Then the other day it started spewing water all over the floor.

So I check the obvious things, I look for loose pipes, I look for loose seals on the outer drum, I check that the door seal is OK. Everything is fine.

This morning I get a big torch and I really have a good look because frankly at the moment I do not want to have to replace the machine.

I find the problem.

The pipe from the soap tray that feeds water into the washer has a hole in it. Why does it have a hole in it? Well its simple – it has a hole in it because the pipe sits about 2mm away from one of the drum mounting springs so when the drum moves on the springs during washing it rubs against the pipe. So over time it wears a hole right through the pipe wall. Hello?? HELLO? That is not bad luck: its a shaped pipe – its in the only place it can go. This is lousy design pure and simple. Vibrating springs and rubber pipes do not go together… even I know that, so it looks like the curse of the idiot Hoover designer strikes again.

So Its all wrapped up in tape for the moment and I might just buy a new pipe (apart from the fact that you probably can’t get them) and then of course its just about impossible to get the pipe on and off the soap tray because there is a large block of concrete in the way which stops you getting both hands to the pipe (one holding the pliers that hold the spring clip open, and the other to move the clip up the pipe).

So yes, this Hoover sucks.

Things to do when you are unemployed

Well I’m still sort of offically employed : my last pay cheque arrives this Friday but I’m laid off.

So I’ve been using an old Toshiba Satellite SA30 laptop running Ubuntu and its OK but its only a 640*480 display and it was getting a bit unreliable. You know when the disk drive starting making twanging noises that its not a good sign.

So I went and bought a new Toshiba Satellite : a L300D-13S. Very nice, 3GB RAM 150GB HD, widescreen, AMD Turion X2.

All well and good but it comes with Vista Home Premium. What a pile of crap.

How can something like that take so long to boot up for Gods Sake. It takes forever to get to the password screen. It drove me mad, and dont even try to work out why applying system patches is rather like watching paint dry underwater.

So I decided to dual boot it with Ubuntu which at least uses the 64bit extensions rather than the 32bit Vista.

So I got that working after fighting with the partitioner and everything was fine. Until I booted back into Vista when the Wireless card didn’t work. Couldn’t get it working so I guessed I’d somehow screwed things up. Rebuilt it using the recovery DVDs which I’d made. Wireless came back for a bit then stopped again.

So I go round and round in circles. Ubuntu works fine on the Wireless. Vista works once then craps out on me each time.

So I dig round and what do I find. Its nothing I’ve done wrong. Its Vista being a total pile of shite.

I used WEP encryption with a 128 bit key on the home wireless. OK I know its crap but its better than nothing and the old 11b PCMCIA card in the SA30 didn’t like WPA.

Of course some moron at Microsoft screwed the WEP encryption on Vista and it looks like it just doesn’t work with 128 bit keys and truncates them at 64 bits. I did seem some advice that says “Upgrade to a Vista compatible wireless router”. I’m sorry? I end up buying a machine with an O/S that I have no choice over and now I’m told to upgrade my router to something that works with Vista because someone somewhere didn’t code something properly.

So I switch everything over to WPA and accept that I’ll have to use a cable to connect the old SA30 to get stuff off it.

Everything is fine until I really push the new laptop which then gets DNS failures and the only fix seems to be to restart the Wireless Access Point. So I drop back to WEP and it seems to be OK but of course Vista wont play. Then I manage to get the same problems under WEP. So I do some digging round and find that my new laptop is running IPV6 which seems to cause problems with the router.

So I turn off IPV6 on Ubuntu and its OK now so tomorrow I’ll put everything back on WPA and see if it goes wrong again.

OK so the Ubuntu stuff is not good – quite why it comes with IPV6 turned on by default I do not know but I’m sure it will be fixed soon. The router is old and I guess it can be excused not working very well. What is totally wrong is the fact that Microsoft can’t cope with WEP using 128 bit keys on Vista. OK I know WEP is broken  but that is NOT the point. WEP is a standard and once again Microsoft have decided that that they know better.