Month: February 2009

Technology

Last night was Pub Night at the Bath Tavern where a good time was had by all. There was a world first event last night, in that the page for the pub was edited to update the beers on sale and who attended, and it was done from the pub which meant that no-one had to wake up this morning and remember what beers were on tap.

As the pub night page for the pub tells you the Bath Tavern is very much changed from how it used to be. Gone are the days of small, cold, rooms and a tiny bar and Uley bitter being the only beer on tap. Gone is the “Open all hours” manual till which seemed to be possessed. Gone are the outside toilets, well only because they roofed over the back yard, and also gone is the “£20 notes are NOT accepted” sign. Can you imagine a pub not accepting £20 notes nowadays? Of course back then beer was only about £1.35 a pint and so £20 would have bought a round of beer for more people than you could probably fit in any of the rooms, and to be fair even cash machines didn’t give out £20 notes, only £5 and £10, so the only place you got £20 notes from was directly from the bank. and there had been a rash of fake notes going round which was probably the real reason for the notice.

Androids

Well I’m now the owner of an Android G1 phone so I’ve been making some mods to the site. The first one is that you can now mobile enable your blog so it is easier to read on a mobile device. I’m also going to look into ways of using the other features of the phone which could prove interesting!

This post was written on the G1 and although I wouldn’t want to do a major code on it I can always ssh into the server to fix problems.

Edited to add : I found that it really is worth turning Gears on on the G1, it speeds up the whole back end so much. But I also found that the quickest way to do that was to pair the G1 to my home network which is where the server sits.

A pleasant weekend

Well that was a quite enjoyable and pleasant weekend. I picked Nick up just before 7pm on Friday and we loaded the new fridge into the back of the car and headed off to the boat. The roads were strangely quiet and we got to the boat at about 8:20. We plugged in the power line and I battled with the central heating but eventually got it lit and we headed off to the pub for a couple of beers and to discuss the plan of action for Saturday morning.

Saturday we got up, got the engine started and went up to the winding hole by Betton Mill and turned and pulled onto the water point. Whilst Nick got the water hose out I wandered over to the boat yard and arranged a pump out and a new gas cylinder. Then I wandered back to the car and drove it to the bridge and we unloaded the fridge. I then took the car back to the marina and walked back and we got the fridge into the boat, and yes we did measure it first to make sure it would not only fit through the front door but that it would also fit in the kitchen

We turned the boat again and got it pumped out, and being the first pump-out of the season it was a bit rank. Then we turned the boat again and headed back to the moorings where Neil turned up just as we manoeuvred the boat back into the mooring. We had a coffee and we powered the fridge up and then Jon turned up and we headed out to the pub. We had a very relaxing time and we did quite a few pubs, including two we had never done before before heading for a curry at The Jaipur. Then a few couple more beers and a couple of games of pool and back to the boat. When we got back to the boat the inverter was beeping at us and the lights were a bit dim but the fridge was still cold. We powered up the battery charger and put the fridge onto the land line. The whole idea of doing what we did was to see how long the batteries could support the fridge but we need to do some more tests to see how long it lasts when the fridge is already cold. I do have to say however that the chiller blocks from the cool box were still frozen solid on Sunday morning so it had obviously worked quite well. Nick and I now have some ideas on what we need to do for the fridge to make running it easy and we are also going to pick up an external fridge thermometer so we can see just how cold it is getting/staying when its running on batteries.

The next job is to get on the boat and remove the gas fridge and its piping and ft the new fridge into the old place. The new fridge is quite a lot bigger than the old one which is not a bad thing because we did sometimes find that things got a little tight in there at times.