Week of 28th May, 2007

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Monday, 28th May

It's a Bank Holiday today, a secular not religious holiday, so everyone should have a day off by Government fiat. But commercial pressures mean that a lot of shops will be open. I will be taking advantage of this - I need to find a shoulder bag that will allow me to carry my electronic gadgets, rather than hanging them from my belt. The list of geek toys is quite long - I'll post a photo of the pile when I've shot it. I also need shoulder straps for the May Day radios, so that the users don't have a hand full of radio. The HT600E is about the size of my hand, and weighs 1½ pounds without the speaker-mike.

Later: Camera shops locally are no use for the shoulder strap - I want a simple ½ inch wide webbing strap with carabiner-style hooks on each end, about 5 feet long, with no name branding. But it seems that the only way you can get such a strap is with certain makes of pouch case - the sort of thing one might keep a digital camera in. And it seems like overkill to buy the case just to get the strap. So camera shops are a bust. Maybe outdoor activities shops will have such a thing. But more likely their web straps will have plastic slide-snap buckles.

Jane and Sarah returned from Aberystwyth, with a considerable part of Katy's University life packed into the back of Hopalong. Katy will follow at the weekend, and will take up 2 weeks of work experence at a local school, before returning to Aber. for her year of teacher training. She would like to teach in Wales, but it is required that all teachers there speak reasonably fluent Welsh, and I don't know whether Katy can cope with that. But she could still teach on the English side of the border, where Welsh is not required. We shall see what we shall see.

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Tuesday, 29th May

To Uxbridge today, to visit the local branch of Maplin, in search of compact fluorescent spotlight bulbs in GU10 fitting. And they had them, but stock level was a mere 2 - I wanted 4, to replace the halogen version in Jane's Mum's new kitchen spotlight rail. She's already blown 6 or more bulbs, in a couple of weeks - which is ridiculous.

The Uxbridge branch of Jessops had a single strap of the kind I wanted - not a stock item, some customer had left it behind when he bought a pouch case. The manager gave it to me for free, which I thought was very kind of him.

Then to Jane's Mum, to try the newly-purchased low-energy bulbs. And they blew out very quickly, which suggests problems with the spotlight rail. Must try to find the shop receipt, so that we can exchange it. If the receipt doesn't come to hand, I'll just bin the present rail, and buy a different style - blowing 4 bulbs a week at UKP5.99 a pair is not on.

The strap works nicely, which is a result. Now all I need is another 3 similar to it.

But before all that, the piano tuner made his six-monthly visit to tune the piano. Which is rather old, and not up to being tuned to concert pitch - a lot of the strings are a bit rusty, and might not stand the extra tension required to raise the pitch 1 semitone. So a semitone flat it stays, which doesn't detract from the pleasant sound it makes. I just wish the rest of the family would play it more often - count me out of this, I never learnt to play any instrument. Now, of course, I wish that the ability was with me.

In the evening, I investigated why my comic downloads were failing - or, at least, running very slowly. The cause turned out to be at Day by Day, where Chris Muir has added a list of links to various RSS aggregators. And each of those links was failing to respond within a (very generous) timeout. The links are all external to the domain, and wget is invoked by script with the -E flag, which allows cross-site spidering, which I need for a couple of sites.. So I moved Day by Day from the general list to a separate invocation of  wget, without the -E flag, and everything happened in double-quick time. So that's sorted.

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Wednesday, 30th May

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Thursday, 31st May

Two relatively quiet days, marred only by the habit of one of the commercial traffic staff of making large, infrequent deliveries of material, as compared with the other traffic co-ordinator, who makes frequent, small deliveries. Snacking is good, bingeing is bad. And these two days we had bingeing - if you will allow me that simile.

Dolby Digital continues to cause problems. It now seems that one of our suppliers has been doing something (and it's not clear to me what that thing is) that breaks our systems. The problem was exacerbated by our slowness in getting the material checked and processed for air. But, allegedly, these problems have been addressed, and future deliveries should be better. I'll believe it when I see (or in this case hear) it. Checking material should be quicker now - we've got approval to buy another Dolby LM100, which among many other things will decode Dolby Digital, and log any errors it sees. At the moment, we have to 100% monitor every Dolby Digital movie - thank $DEITY it's only movies.

And they want to do 3 channels of HD as well. Please - we're in one hole already (called Dolby Digital) - don't dig another quite yet.

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Friday, 1st June

Today, I contnued the search for appropriate webbing straps, by visiting a local outdoor activities shop - and they have never stocked what I want. But there are more such shops elsewhere, and easily accessible. I'm not stumped yet.

Of course, this also ties in to the gear bag search. If I relax my desire to have a built-in pouch for each item, I can obtain the webbing straps by choosing the correct brand of pouch case for each piece of kit that will live in the bag.

Finally, I installed and tested the wiring for the HT600E vehicle adaptor, now that I've found a source of mini-UHF plug to SO239 adaptors that is cheap and doesn't charge ruinous rates for postage. And after that test, I stored it - I won't need it often.

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Saturday, 2nd June

Today is the day that Jane's Aunt Dora's flat gets a new carpet throughout, and some new furniture. And it is certain that there will be fireworks after all is complete.

So, first thing, get Dora to the Day Centre. This is a regular Saturday thing, but she is tempted not to go (why?) for the slightest reason - today, she scraped three fingers in a minor fall, and they are sore. But I got her there.

Meanwhile Jane and her cousin Liz were madly moving furniture around to make room for the carpet fitter. And everything has to go back exactly as before, or there will be fireworks - over and above the fireworks associated with the new carpet. Basically, Dora doesn't want anything changed - even though the flat is, not to put too fine a point on it, a pigsty - she even tried to stop redecoration after a water leak upstairs, which left her walls runnng with water.

Meanwhile, I took Jane's Mum to lunch, and ran errands. Come pick-up time, I took Mum and Dora back to Mum's house for tea, and did a runner, cowardly me passed the 'take Dora home' task to Jane.

And so far, all has passed fairly quietly - the only objection I've heard of was that "the new chair is too low". It's seat is higher than the old, dangerous one I dumped as one of my errands. We seem to have got away with the carpet.

Katy is home for two weeks - with another car-full of stuff, including a fish tank, which she proposes to leave here, since the Hall of Residence at Aber. doesn't allow pets. Remember, Jane and Sarah brought twice as much back last weekend (bigger car!!). At least, Katy has palmed the old widescreen CRT TV off on one of her housemates - and his household now has 3 widescreen TVs, Katy tells me.

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Sunday, 3rd June

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