Week of  3rd July, 2000

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Monday, 3rd July

Got the 'phone call from my tame garage this morning. Jane's Mum's car (I still haven't thought of a name for it) still hasn't got it's MOT certificate - it has been passed as safe (verbally) but the MOT station cannot issue a certificate because the "Men From The Ministry" are inspecting them. Typical.

Later: Still no certificate. The Ministry are still there. They've been there all day.


There's very little to report on the computing front - I can't get into the shack, because it's being used as an auxiliary bedroom, and the flop-out bed on the floor is blocking access to almost everything.

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Tuesday, 4th July

I finally got the MOT certificate for Mum's car today, so the first thing to do was get the new tax disc. UKP155 for permission to keep and use a motor vehicle on the public highway for a period of one year.

Now I've got to tax Peanut.

There's a furore at the moment about levels of tax on petrol. Currently we pay about UKP0.85 per litre (that's about UKP3.82 per Imperial gallon. Americans please remember that our gallon is about 20% bigger than yours - and you complain about $1.60 per US gallon? You don't know how lucky you are)

UK petrol is allegedly the most expensive in the world. Of that 85 pence per litre about 70 is tax, the rest is the actual cost of the petrol. The trigger for the current complaints is the recent rapid rise in crude oil prices, from about $10 to $30 per barrel (anyone know how big a barrel is?). There is talk of organising a national boycott on petrol purchase on August 1st, and every Monday thereafter - this, to me, is like shooting the messenger because you don't like the letter he's carrying. It's not the petrol stations' fault. We should be giving HMG the kicking (doesn't matter which colour - they're all as bad)

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Wednesday, 5th July

Earlier this week I finally posted the $ky Digital contract, duly signed. Having checked first, I left the "maintain my analogue subscription" box unchecked, since the customer service 'phone slave said "That will be two subscriptions, please" when I asked.

Of course, I didn't specifically tell the girls that I'd done this, so when they got home from school today, I got the irate 'phone call "Why can't we watch $ky via the analogue box?" I'm sure that Katy, at least, thinks that money is effectively free, all she has to do is wheedle. She certainly didn't listen when I told them all that analogue will go away if it costs money.

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Thursday, 6th July

I tried copying an audio CD yesterday - pop music, complete with enhanced content, probably song lyrics and pictures. I didn't let it do it's thing, becuse I'm paranoid about queer apps being installed - even though this is on Celery, where I've already done two reinstalls. The copy is for a friend of Katy's, as a birthday present for the friend's sister (I think. As usual, when I first said 'no', all sense went out of the window)

Of course, since this is copyright violation at least, I should have expected something to go wrong - and it did. The first attempt, a direct copy, stalled at track 12 of 13, resulting in a coaster. Why it stalled I don't know, but the second attempt, copying via the hard disk took approximately forever to copy the last 6MB of that track. A simulated burn from the image ran ok.

On retrying this morning, before work, again the test ran OK, but the burn dumped 180MB into track 13 (the computer-readable track?). The result wasn't readable in my audio CD player, so that's a second coaster. Serves me right for trying it. The fault symptom was the hard disk thrashing madly, followed by CD Copier jumping straight to writing the disc TOC, and an error message on completion. Perhaps MS Office Fast Find kicked in, I don't know, I didn't have time to investigate.


I had an interesting discussion with my boss today. Apparently, our verbal comments about missing functionality, non-compliance with Windows standards (indeed the Windows NT client doesn't respond to mouse clicks in the main window - you can only use the mouse on the menus) and assorted other user interface funnies have been heard and will be acted on, although I'm not holding my breath.

We also discovered that the software is listed as an ALPHA version - WTF? This is a production environment, why the h... are we running alpha software?

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Friday, 7th July

A busy day today, even more so than usual. A training stint at a new site, in Central London as usual, and then on to the overnight operational engineer job.

The training stint refreshed my memories of the old analogue kit, and added some extra procedures. I watched two transmissions - very fast turnaround, late arriving material, the lot. The booking for this job will be several hours nonstop, continuous - promises to be a case where one really earns one's corn.

In contrast, the night shift was very quiet.

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Saturday, 8th July

After freelance last night, I hit another reason why I don't like public transport. I waited on the Tube platform for about 20 minutes while a stream of trains went through, all not going far enough. Eventually, I gave up and jumped on one. When the train got out into the open air the electronic destination boards started showing the reason for the absence of the train I wanted - there were no trains west of this point. A replacement 'bus service was running, but I didn't need that hassle after a night's work.

On the 'bus I got the 'phone call from Jane - "The car is finished. Where are you? Can you collect it?" We arranged that she would pick me up at the station, and we would go to collect the car together.

There was a degree of rush about this, since Jane had just heard that her parents had bought one of these super-duper, electrically driven, adjustable beds, and the shop were going to deliver it and take away their old bed. If we were quick enough, we could have the mattress off the old bed (what old? It was only bought last year, and our own mattress is about 11 years old, and lumpy).

This was fun, since even Jane's car isn't big enough to take a 5 foot mattress with any degree of ease. Still, I succeeded in doing the mattress swap, and then finally went to sleep on the newly-installed mattress. And very comfortable it is, too.

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Sunday, 9th July

More freelance last night - another (relatively) quiet shift. Trouble is, I forgot to leave my bill. Must remember to post the paperwork.


Late in the day, I had to help Jenny with her latest school project - "The Year I Was Born" That's 1988, the year of the Seoul Olympics and Lockerbie.

Much scanning and printing of images of the time, plus some research on the 'Net. Scanning at 600 dpi is definitely not a good idea with Fujisan - the file sizes are far too big for comfort, but when you're doing originals that are an inch square (postage stamps!) you need all the resolution you can get. Quite good results, when printed on the pukka glossy paper.

I was also bludgeoned into attempting to book tickets online for a pop concert in December at Wembley. The web site seemed to let me into the secure area, but then didn't respond further. Eventually, I gave up - the World Wide Wait was definitely on form.

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