Week of 26th March, 2001

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Monday, 26th March

We decided that Dad's hearing problems are causing enough hassle within the family that further assistance was needed - so I went out to buy a telephone with an amplified handset for him.

Luckily the amplifier can be switched off, otherwise anyone else using the 'phone would be deafened. With it on, Dad can hear incoming voices, not perfectly, but well enough. The ringer still isn't loud enough, though, and that is now the main problem - he no hear the 'phone ring, and gets panicky because he goes from "Where are they?" to "They're all dead, what will I do?" in nothing flat.

I'm sure a large part of this deafness is due to lots of hardened wax in his ears, blocking sound from reaching his eardrums. The local hospital have prescribed drops to soften the wax, preparatory to using suction to extract it, but the removal operation looks like being weeks (up to 13?) away - I tell you, the NHS is getting abysmal. When I was young, this sort of thing wouldn't have taken anything like as long - but that was when the administration of a hospital consisted of Matron (a very senior nurse) and a few office staff. Now there are more bureaucrats than clinical workers, and the NHS budget gets eaten by paper-pushers.

I just hope the delay-induced problems don't drive us all mad.


I haven't had a chance to get Hopalong checked - that will have to wait until I've got Peanut to the garage to have his check-up for nasty noises. I'll have to walk back (plus a couple of stops on the Tube), because the garage is some miles away. You think, "Oh, London is one city", and forget that "one city" is actually in excess of 50 miles across, and it can take two hours or more to get from one side to the other.

I used to drive from here, in the West, to Docklands in East London, about 25 miles each way, and I reckoned to be able to do the trip in about an hour, perhaps a little more. Public transport (the Tube) took longer, on the few occasions I used it - Central Line to Bank, change to the Docklands Light Railway, and get off at Crossharbour.

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Tuesday, 27th March

I got Peanut and Hopalong checked - no fault found in both cases. The nasty noise from Peanut must have been a trapped stone in a brake drum, which has since fallen out, and Hopalong's wheel nuts were all tight, as checked with a 3 foot bar wrench rather than the normal air wrench. This is good, but still doesn't account why the nuts were loose in the first place.

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Wednesday, 28th March

Last two early shifts of this fortnight, and the workload is getting no smaller. The guy on ingest (me, next week) has been faced with upwards of 50 commercials a day, plus promos, and is at it all day. This is good for our client, since more commercials equal more income, but unless we can maintain service level, we don't see it. I also see some trends - I swear that at least one channel is auctioning advertising spots, the number of amendments replacing one product with another is becoming ridiculous.

There is also a tendency to move sponsorship material ("This programme is brought to to you in association with...") from commercial minutage to promo minutage - which I'm sure is a ploy to get round the limits on commercials. I've suggested that all sponsorship material be ingested as both commercial and promo, so that we don't have to rush around getting the master tape and reingesting it under another number when the client deigns to tell us he's changed things. Of course, they're not admitting to the above, if true.

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Thursday, 29th March

I did some more of the re-edit job I mentioned some time ago - removing extraneous material that the Americans put in to try to keep viewers through their long and frequent commercial breaks. This includes highlights of footage shown in full immediately after an American break (and probably immediately in our transmission format), and other presentation effects (presenter says "We'll be back after this", which is a no-no under our licence, especially if there's no break in the way) There are 65 episodes to do - thus far I've done (or  at least checked) 42.


The Corporation Tax people have started threatening me with enforcement action if I don't pay over. I still believe that I don't owe them anything, but they don't accept this. Now I know why. The Tax Inspector (not Hector, he deals with personal Income Tax) wanted a copy of the company tax return, not copies of the accounts, which he has coming out of his ears. Trouble is, he didn't say so - at least not in so many words. I've informed my accountant, who is dealing with the matter. Hopefully, this will be the last gasp for this saga.


Action have got the D-Link box in stock, according to their sales line today. That's good, now I can collect it. I ordered the Netgear hub as well, also for collection tomorrow.

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Friday, 30th March

Collected the bits from Action this morning, and found I'd made a mistake. I'd ordered the Netgear EN104 hub - I should have ordered the EN104TP. This leaves me with a BNC 10Base2 connection I don't need, and a couple of pounds out of pocket. No big thing.

The hub fitted straight in, instead of the SohoBasic, and works fine. The SohoBasic hub is now fixed to the underside of a stair riser waiting for me to run Cat5 cables to the patch panel beside it.

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Saturday, 31st March

Today I installed the D-Link DP-802. It works fine as a DHCP server, but attempting to do dial-up to Demon fails - just like using Tux.

I spent some time on the 'phone to Demon Tech Support, but the guy, while helpful, couldn't assist much because the Web-based configurator for the D-Link doesn't expose any of the functionality he knows about ( mainly Windows, including the same sort of fault I was seeing, with a known fix - for Win NT) I'll try Action's Tech support on Monday - they should be able to point me at D-Link.

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Sunday, 1st April

I went to a computer fair this morning, a few miles up the road in Harrow, and managed to pick up an infra-red keyboard for reasonable money - the only one I've seen elsewhere was UKP35 plus VAT - this was UKP18 inclusive. It works nicely too. The feel is better than the grotty, cheap Alps I've been using so far, and it has the major virtue that I don't have curly cables hanging about - Tux is mounted on a shelf at head-height, and the keyboard normally lives beside him, except when I'm using it.

I also bought 10GB of Seagate hard disk - Tux needs more storage. This was a mistake - Tux's BIOS only recognises 8440MB of disk. I tried installing E-Smith, but although the install completed all right, an attempted reboot froze at the "LI' prompt - this is characteristic of the boot partition extending beyond cylinder 1024, if I remember correctly. This only applies to older versions of Linux, and E-Smith 4.0 is based on Red Hat 6.1. Whatever the cause, a non-booting machine is as much use as a chocolate teapot, so I put the 2.1GB drive back in, and all was well. Pity - the extra storage would have been useful, and the drive is much quieter. Never mind, I'll use the drive somewhere else - maybe Celery.

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