For a while now we’ve been hearing odd thumping noises at night from outside and one morning they either woke Kathy up or stopped her going back to sleep.
At first we thought it was our neighbours daughter ( who lives in their shed ) doing teenage girl things.
But the other day I was talking to my next door neighbour and she said she’d heard it too and I’ve heard much louder noises during the day.
Yesterday I was out in the garden and I heard the noises coming from the garden of one of the new houses behind us. Not only did I hear thumping noises like the ones we’d heard at night but I also hear much louder ones and what sounded like an animal moving round in hay or wood shavings. The loud thumps sounded like the noise a hoofed animal would make if it struck out with a leg and hit a wooden wall.
So the person behind us has some sort of “animal” living in their shed. But its an odd animal in that it never makes any other noise. If it was a pony or a goat or a donkey or a miniature cow then you’d hear other animal noises. If it was something like a giant vorpal bunny (i.e. The Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog) which doesn’t usually make many noises then it wouldn’t sound like it was hoofed.
So maybe its a mute goat or something like that?
The more perverted and odd amongst you can probably come up with a lot more causes of odd noises coming from a shed at the bottom of someone’s garden, please do not share them here!
I think we’re all used to Jehovah’s Witnesses turning up on our doorsteps in their sinister black suits looking like something from a Sci-Fi movie. I’ve often wondered if its worth asking if they have one of those nifty devices for wiping your memories like they do in MIB
But today the JW’s plumbed new depths for me. They were doorstepping the street and I was walking down the road with my Sainsbury’s bag grasped in my hand. I was walking with a purpose and one of them called out to me and asked me that question, then he asked it again and I found he’d actually come back down the path and was chasing me down the road.
Now I know we’re in a global recession but is it hitting the JWs?
“Brother, we have been looking at your performance figures and they are most disappointing. You need to up your catch rate by 25% or we will have to let you go”.
I ignored him and headed off and did my shopping. I dawdled in the fruit and veg section, working out that by the time I headed back they would be past my house.
But alas and alack, no they were not.
So I sneaked past them and got into my house and put the shopping into the fridge and then headed up stairs for a shower which I took my time over
Surely that would be long enough?
It would seem not, it looks like they managed to button hole a couple of the neighbours.
I’d been back downstairs about 10 minutes when the doorbell rang, so I ignored it.
Rude and impolite I know but hassling me on the street frankly is not on.
I’ve been working on code for Pubnight and really just adding a few features to make things easier for people editing and adding information, basically Richard who has been hard at work on updating the site.
Part of the enhancement was easy, actually two bits were. I added two new custom tags to the Pubnight code which allow quick linking to beers and breweries. The other easy bit was adding a Rich Text Editor using the FCKEditor extension.
The hard part was adding extra functionality to the FCKEditor. I added a form which allows the easy selection and insertion of PNC Pub Digraphs and beer and brewery links. So now rather than having to remember that The Red Lion Inn, Market Drayton has a Digraph of RM you simply start typing the name of the pub and then pick it from a list. It uses the same code base as the canalplan codes function on here which is based on the same code Nick uses on CanalPlan. So that’s a good re-use of code!.
Well, it was really putting the brakes back on, once we’d got them off in the first place.
It all sounded so simple really: Change the front brake pads and disks on the Saab 9-5 Estate. The car has done over 165,000 miles and the brakes were “grooved” according to its last MOT and had started making odd scraping noises.
I’d worked out what the scraping noise was – it was down to the thickness of the pad material reaching the same as the depth of the wear on the disks so that the back plate of the pad caught on the original edge of the disk and scraped the rust off.
New pads and disks were ordered from Elkparts along with some new vacuum hose to fix another problem that I had. Then once that had arrived all I needed was the time and the place to do the work. My brothers driveway seemed a logical place as its flat, off the road and close to a handy source of coffee (and plasters and drills and hammers and other diverse tools). So last Saturday I headed over and we got to work.
If only! We hit our first problem within 2 minutes in that we could not get the wheels off. We had the “official” Saab wheel bolt remover but it just twisted and bent out of shape when we tried to use it.
So we hopped in the car and drove over to KarParts who are a great little indy car parts dealer, just like there used to be in the days before Halfords swamped the market. We picked up a rather nice extensible wheel wrench which came with a set of socket to fit the common wheel bolt and nut sizes.
So back to the drive and with some rather drastic cracking noises and puffs of dust we got the bolts free and once we’d jacked the car up and got the wheel off we could get to work.
Now the procedure for replacing the disks is quite simple:
Remove the Wheel
Remove the Brake Calliper
Remove the Calliper mounting bracket
Remove the disk retaining/positioning blot
Remove the disk
Replacement is, as Haynes puts it, simply the reverse of removal.
Ha, ha ha!
So we have the wheel off, so its time to remove the Brake Calliper. This is quite easy with a 7mm allen key or driver for your socket set. But of course once you’ve taken out the two bolts the whole thing will not come off because the pads are holding the calliper in place on the disk. So you need a pair of “Pinch” pliers, or a very large pipe spanner will work quite nicely.
Using the pliers you slowly press the piston back into the cyclinder which means you then have enough room to move the calliper off the disk.
So the calliper is now off and its time to move onto the mounting bracket. This is held on by two large bolts, two large 18mm bolts. 18mm… hmm, when did you last see an 18mm socket in your socket set? 17? Certainly. 19? Certainly, 18? Well that would probably be a no I suspect. None of the socket sets my brother and I had contained an 18mm socket. So it was back in the car, my brothers this time, and another trip across town. Now do doubt you’ll be thinking “Why didn’ they just get a 18mm socket last time they were there” Well Saab changed from using 18mm bolts to using a very larg Torx headed bolt and although theoretically my MY98 car should be on 18mm some people have found torx there instead.
So we return, with an 18mm socket and a nice little wrench bar as all our socket sets use a smaller size driver, and within a couple of mintues the mounting bracket is lying on the floor.
Now all we have to do is remove the little bolt which hold the disk onto the hub. The bolt has a 5mm allen socket fitting. This should be easy but its not and the bolt is seized solid.
In a fit of madness we put everything back on and turn the car round and start on the other side. We get the wheel off and everything loose and we give up for the day and go out to the pub.
Sunday we get back to it and we get the drivers side finished off and put back together within about 90 minutes. We turn the car round again and tackle that seized bolt. We try hammering drivers into it and they bind and lock in place but strip out when you try to undo it. So we have a bolt that is “made of cheese”, well its head seems to be because drilling it out become a major pain and we drill the head off and the disk wont budge at all. We drill some more and we hit things with hammers and eventually the disk comes off. We use a cold chisel to clean up the stub of the mounting bolt and fit the new disk and put everything back in place.
By very early Sunday afternoon its all done and the car has two new front disks and pads and I take it out for a little run and everything seems to be fine. All I have to do now is brake carefully for the next couple of hundred miles to let it all bed in.
And if you want see just how bad the disks were:
Picture of disk showing scoringAnother view of the disks showing scoring and the wear on both disksWorn brake pad
As Nick said afterwards, it was actually quite enjoyable in many ways. Its a long time since either of us has done anything really major on a car, I think that was probably changing the cylinder head gasket on the parents Hillman Hunter many many moons ago, and considering how much stuff on modern cars needs very specialist tools or computers it was nice to be able to do something so “major”.
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.
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.
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.
A few years ago now four of us decided that we’d get to together for a weekend of chatting and drinking. Now as all of us are married its awkward but Nick and I had an idea. We have a boat so why not go to the boat and do it there.
For a couple of years we did it at Upton upon Severn when the boat was moored at the marina there. However we got a bit bored with the River Severn, the scenery is not particularily exciting and really apart from Worcester or Gloucester or Tewkesbury there isn’t really anywhere to go for a weekend. Add to that the lack of moorings on the river and its habit of flooding and you can understand why we moved it. We headed north a couple of years ago, and boy are we glad we did because we got out of Upton before it flooded. Although I think we will all miss the really good pubs and Pundit’s Indian Restaurant.
So the boat is now moored at Market Drayton and this coming weekend we’re going there for our second Market Drayton Pub Crawl. Nick and I are heading up on Friday night and on Saturday morning we’re taking the boat out for a quick run and a pumpout and a new gas bottle and refilling its water tank. We’ve also got a new fridge which we want to check will work with the Batteries and inverter set up we currently have. Then round about opening time Neil and Jon will be joining us and we’ll probably head off to The Talbot for a couple of beers and lunch (they did very good pies last year) and then’ll we’ll wander off into town, probably spending some time at the Red Lion which does a very good pint of Salopian Shropshire Gold.
We’ll fit a curry into the evening somewhere and wander back to the boat for coffee and more chat before collapsing into bed.
Sunday morning will be lazy before a breakfasty brunchy thing and then we’ll all head off home.
Pub Night is a website that I set up for a group of friends who go out drinking once a week in Cheltenham. We’ve been doing it for years and a few years ago now Nick and I came up with the idea of building a website for it. I went for a Wiki based site but because we wanted “standard” information for each pub I built a rather large extension for it which basically allows us to use Data pages to hold the information on the pub and then for each pub we have a simple page which contains some tags which allow us to display the information in a controlled format.
There is also a sub group of Pub Night called Out Of Town Pub Night Group (or OOTPNG for short) which once a month goes to a good pub within a reasonable driving distance of town. The venues and drivers and approximate dates had been decided and I went to load them into the system so I could put up a page with the 2009 locations. That is where the problems began. The code that drives pub night talks directly to the database behind the wiki which means that information on pubs normally comes out in the order the pubs were added into the database. To support the new page I added two new fields to the data set – nextvisit and driver. But I wanted to sort the information on the nextdate. So I’ve had to go in a recode how the “where” part of the extension works so that rather than just trawling through the pubs in turn and if they match the criteria displaying the information I now go through the pubs once and grab a “sort” field from the data (if specified) and then I sort the list of pubs on that and then process each one in turn to get the information. Sounds easy doesn’t it?
Well it is when you are dealing with text fields because you can simply build the array with the Digraph and the “sort” field and then use the php functions asort and arsort. Date fields are another matter entirely. Pub Night stores its dates in dd/mm/yyyy format which do not sort. PHP has a strtotime function which converts “human” date formats into unix timestamps. Those we can sort easily so problem solved. Afraid not because strtotime doesn’t like dd/mm/yyyy. So I had to us the php mktime function to parse the PN date format into something I could then pass into strtotime to get the timestamp and now its all working.
Now all I have to do is fix the problem with null dates which upset it (silently, they just spew errors into the error log!)
When Eli Stone first aired on Sci-Fi neither Kathy or I really showed any interest in it for some reason or another, maybe we weren’t in the mood or something else was on TV at the same time.
But this past week Sci-Fi has been re-running Series One as a precursor to airing Series Two which starts next week and we’ve been watching it and I have to say that its actually quite good and I think that the person who decided to commission the series went out on a bit of a limb. Its whole premise is different and the show is quite light hearted in places with some wonderful lines and nice little set pieces but at the same time it actually can be quite serious.
I have been doing other things too, no honestly I have
I’ve finally properly released my Last.FM Widgets Plugin for WordPress which is something I’ve been meaning to do for some time and I’m going to try to actively develop it because there are a few things that I had to fudge to get it working properly which could do with tidying up.
I’ve also been coding more bits of the Canalplan integration project and I’m hoping to get some of that released into the wild soon but some of that depends on Nick and his changes to his Database structures.
I’ve upgraded the Pub Night Council Web Site to the latest version of the Wikimedia software. This meant revisiting the code that drives all the added functionality because of the way Wikimedia changed how the parser has to be called which really wasn’t helpful but hopefully they wont change it again.
