Week of 14th June, 2004

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Monday, 14th June

Jane has been complaining of a noisy exhaust on Hopalong for the last few days, so today I got a round tuit and went to get him fixed. Three-quarters of the exhaust system, two new tyres, and 4 hours later, he's fixed, at a total cost of just under UKP440.

While I was waiting, I visited a local electrical goods store, and in the computer section I saw a Fujitsu laptop - well it's really more of a desktop replacement - the Amilo D7830, with 3GHz P4, 512 MB memory, ATi Mobility Radeon 9600 graphics with 64MB dedicated memory, 40GB hard disk, a 2.4x DVD-R/W, and a 15 inch XGA TFT screen, all for UKP899, which subsequent research suggests is not unreasonable. But not until the will is proved, I have too many other things to spend money on before then.

Katy has got into the habit of inflicting her preference in music (sic) on the entire house, by leaving her bedroom door open. Tonight, I got my own back - Sibelius' Karelia Suite, in the recording by the Gothenburg Symphony under Neeme Järvi, nice and loud - which made her close her door, and turn the volume down. Result.

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Tuesday, 15th June

Ally gets his service and MOT test today, and hopefully the banging noises will be fixed as well. The garage will also fit the new rear screen wiper motor he needs. Then the glass replacement people will attend, again, to fix BLC's smashed quarter-light, and I'll have to take Jane's Mum in to Guy's Hospital again for her first post-op. visit. Quite a day. 

On the day: Ally failed his test - not severely. Two items were considered untestable, bcause broken, and he failed. So the garage will fit a new light switch, and a new backend to the exhaust, plus change the rubber gaiters on the steering rack, which had split. He will then pass, and I can re-tax him.

The next question, of course, is whether the insurance people will try to write him off as uneconomic to repair. One of the companies (I know not which) has put in a firm of assessors., who wish to look at him. I've given them my timetable for the next couple of days, and they will attend when they can.

And then a trip in to Guy's hospital to get Mum's shoulder checked. All seems to be well, so next checkup may well be weeks away - the hospital will get progress reports from mum's physio in the interim.

Later: Ally's not finished - so I get to keep the courtesy car until tomorrow.

And idiot me forgot to pay the congestion charge until about 11 p.m. The charge doubles, to UKP10, if paid after 10 p.m., and you are liable for a UKP80 fine if you don't pay before midnight.

I'm still not convinced that the congestion charge, as implemented, is a Good Thing. Of course, any reduction in Central London traffic densities is good, since it will reduce pollution and improve journey times, but does the implementation have to be so draconian, and downright awkward?

For instance, you can buy daily "entry licences", payable in advance, in full, for a period of consecutive chargeable days. You cannot buy (say) 10 licences to be used as and when required - the licences must be for consecutive days. And I've already mentioned the fines for late payment.

But then the Mayor, Ken Livingstone (who has just been re-elected for another 4 year term, $DEITY help us) is old-style Left Wing Labour, and left-wingers are anti-car to a man, regardless of the fact that public transport is inconvenient and/or impossible for some people, of whom I am one. Are there buses or trains at 6 a.m.? I should be so lucky. Can I get to work by train in 30 minutes? Nope, it's more like an hour. Each way.

Forget it - I'll drive. Luckily, I don't go near the charging zone normally. And it is mooted that the zone will be extended westwards towards Kensington and Chelsea - where most of the residents are anti.

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Wednesday, 16th June

Ally wasn't finished yesterday, so I drove to work in the courtesy car - an 'R' registered Skoda Felicia. Nice car, and the marque is probably a candidate for Ally's replacement, when I have to do it.

A modicum of tape copying, plus lots of long-form ingest work today.

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Thursday, 17th June

I've got Ally back, with MOT certificate complete. Now to tax him, unless the insurers write him off. Talking of which, the inspector is due this afternoon.

Work today was the music festival, plus lots of ingesting - long-form material for the server-based channels.

And the music festival was the usual shambles - plus the fact that quite  lot of the coverage wasn't about music. They were showing water-skiing, stunt-motorcycling, skateboarding, plus a little music, for a total of a 5 hour offer - last year it was 10 hours of music. And it's repeated twice.

I recorded the offer on two tapes doing staggered tape changes every hour. So I started with 2 2-hour tapes (the longest you can get) and changed one in a commercial break after an hour. Then change the other one an hour later (in a break) Lather, rinse, repeat to end of offer.

Then it was log the timings accurately, having got rough ins and outs on-the-fly, label the tapes and hand to transmission for repeat.

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Friday, 18th June

Day 2 of the music festival, and the mixture as before. Plus a variation - a power failure oversea. Big black hole in the offer, filled with locally provided music videos until the power came back. This meant we lost one part of the show, complete. But the other parts will expand to fit, and the displaced commercials will slide down to the end of the show. This all worked nicely.

But one band set ran longer than I expected, and ended up split across two tapes. This is not good for the transmission side. They can butt-join two segments together, off different tapes, with no problem (the gear will do frame-accurate joins) but possible repeats would be very confusing for the poor schedulers, who would have to remember to run two specified segments back-to-back. Far easier to compile the split part onto another tape, and schedule it that way. So I did, and despite that, the repeat offer was ready to go, complete, within an hour of the end of the live show. Result, albeit on 4 tapes, rather than 3.

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Saturday, 19th June

I got ranted at by Katy this morning - a letter from the insurers arrived, addressed to her. And, sure enough, they want to write Ally off as uneconomic to repair. Well,of course, he's 9 years old, and the repair bill is bigger than his market value, if you do it the insurance way, with new parts - basically, two new doors. But he's mechanically sound, so why not fill the dents and repaint? I'd be happy with that, so if I can buy him back for the salvage value after the write-off, I'll do it. This will involve reinsuring him, because a write-off causes the insurance to lapse. No biggie.

What I don't want is the hassle and expense of finding a new car. After all, this accident wasn't my fault - nor yet Katy's (she was actually driving) - so why do I have the problem of finding a replacement car?

Katy and Jenny are at a Duke of Edinburgh expedition meeting this morning, and they've taken Ally with them. They'd better be back before I need to go to work.

Workmate's problems with his new ADSL connection were down to a combination of factors, it seems. Apparently, his machines were littered with spyware and other malware, and his virus definitions weren't up-to-date. This caused the instabilities he was seeing, and he'd bollixed the broadband setup trying to get round it. Full virus and spyware scans (he's now using AdAware 6.181, like me, and it found over 50 nasties) and first birthday resets of the firewall and router later, plus a (very) few adjustments, all is stable, speeds are blisteringly fast, and he's got a NAT router in front of a paranoid hardware firewall. And then he leaves his 802.11 wireless network unencrypted. But that will change - he ran out of time to get WEP turned on. So I'll get my networking kit back tonight - he no need it any more.

I may need to go the same route, mainly for access control by user and time-of-day - think Jenny, reading fan-fiction instead of studying.

Tonight's live offer was another shambles - so what else is new, I hear you ask. Earlier in the day they said they wanted to run the show one part short (11 instead of 12, or as I think of it, "K" instead of "L", since we differentiate between parts of a programme by alphabetic suffix) So we amended the schedule appropriately, and went to air. And half-way through part K, they decide they want part L back, because they still have a lot of material to talk about. Which actually helped me no end, because I was getting seriously near the end of a tape, so I suggested that they be told, "All right, but take the break before 00:40 clock time." They did, I swapped tapes in the break, and it all came out well, albeit the last tape only had about 15 minutes on it.

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Sunday, 20th June                         Father's Day

I've managed to schedule me a free day, and I'm off to the Newbury and District Amateur Radio Society boot sale, to see what's there, and possibly for a social meeting.

What's there turned out to be mostly ancient tat, but there was one new radio equipment dealer, not that I'm in the market for a rig at the moment. I did see some obsolete broadcast Tv gear going for pennies "for spares", notably a Marconi MR2B 1" C format VTR, without TBC (timebase corrector) for UKP5. I used to operate one of them about 16 years ago.

As far as the non-tat material was concerned, I picked up a Psion 5MX, second-hand. There are some things that you can't do with a stylus, and the 5MX will allow me to do such things as configuring headless computers via a serial port. I could use the Psion 3A, but that might die - it's good to have a spare.

The social meeting didn't work out - friend wasn't there, although we'd made a tentative arrangement to meet.

In the evening we (Jane, Jenny, Jenny's friend Gemma and I) made the trip into London (by Tube) to visit the Royal Albert Hall for a Russian Gala Night, climaxing with Tchaikovsky's 1812 overture, with explosions and indoor fireworks complete. An excellent performance by the Royal Philarmonic Chamber Orchestra. And the explosions were shatteringly loud.
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