Week of 9th July, 2007

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Monday, 9th July

Hopalong has been delivered to Katy's tame garage, to have things looked at. That'll be the A/C drive belt, at least. Meanwhile, we've gone into Aber. - Mum and I courtesy of Katy, Jane and Jenny on foot, over the cliff. You may recollect that I have decided to pass on such exertions in future.

Later: Considerable work is needed on Hopalong, mostly to the brakes. Of course, the garage is not a Peugeot specialist, so he will have to order parts in. Whether all can be done before Thursday, when we will have to have him back, is moot, given Peugeot's slowness at delivery of parts.

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Tuesday, 10th July

To Aber. again, in the same way as yesterday. I took the Acer in with me, because there are several pubs that offer free Wi-Fi, and Jenny wanted to look up something. The SwissGear backpack works quite well for carrying the Acer, albeit it's slightly too small - you have to persuade the zips to close around the corners of the machine.

And Wi-Fi worked fine, although I couldn't get a connection from the AP in the pub we were in. The pub across the street worked fine, though. There are 3 such pubs in Aber., plus one that has an AP linked to The Cloud, and hence is for-pay. Unfortunately, that's the cheapest for drinks.

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Wednesday, 11th July

A do-nothing day, spent reading - or, in my case archiving data to the big USB hard drive.

Not only do we have Katy's graduation this week, but Jenny has her Duke of Edinburgh Award ceremony tomorrow, so she has just left for London, by train. She will return tomorrow evening, with Sarah. It's a pity that we can't attend the DoE ceremony, but Jenny would only have one guest ticket anyway, whereas we've got a full set for the graduation ceremony, of which there are 8 this week.

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Thursday, 12th July

I had to get my mop chopped this morning - wild man of Borneo wasn't in it! After that, everyone went clothes shopping, which left me bored numb, so I betook myself to a Wi-Fi pub for a drink and some Web-surfing. Jane's Mum joined me a little later, so we had lunch and more drinkies while everyone else (including Sarah, by this time) shopped some more.

I've managed to collect all the Userfriendly strips to date, even though my home IP address seems to be blacklisted (and if it is, the only reason would be persistent attempts at scripted downloads - which I no longer do. Are you reading this, Illiad?)

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Friday, 13th July

Katy's Graduation

Which all went well, barring torrential rain, and a taxi driver who overslept... Katy is now officially a B.Sc. Geog (Aber) - good for her. And since this is the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, the ceremonies were bilingual. I pity the University Vice-Chancellor, who had to pronounce one of two formulae (depending on Faculty) in Welsh, a total of about 40 times. And he's English - but he must also be bilingual. I wish I was.

In the evening we had a celebration dinner, and since Katy's tame garage hadn't finished wotking on Hopalong, we had to taxi in and out. Taxis get expensive. Never mind, Hoppy will be ready tomorrow.

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Saturday, 14th July

And so he was, albeit a little later than I'd hoped. New front brake calipers, new rear brake slave cylinders, a new brake pipe and a new steering rack. Plus the A/C drive belt - and the one I bought in the car parts shop wasn't right. Never mind, it was less than UKP5, so small loss.

And then home, following the same route as we did on the outward trip - with me driving, so I got choice of music. Thanks be to $DEITY. I think I'll have to replace the radio/CD player in Hopalong - the display is unreadable. It'll have to be an RDS radio (with the autotuning and other functions that that brings) and probably a CD player with MP3/WMA capability - and ideally an Aux input for your music player of choice.

Amateur radio in Mid-Wales (not just Aber.) is confirmed as dead. I couldn't hear a thing. Next time I go, I may well not bother to take a rig - unless I'm in Ally, where rigs come as standard.

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Sunday, 15th July

Today is the McMichael rally, near Slough, west of London. But I decided to pass. So now it's a dump run - once I post the backlog.

There's a currently running stink about provision of external connectivity in UK, particularly the trend among local loop unbundlers to migrate their punters from BT ADSL to their LLU ADSL. This is like the Hotel California - it's impossible to get out again, without a total loss of connectivity for 3 weeks or more.

Add to this the stink about charges and download caps - not a problem for me, I'm paying the same now for "Up to 8MBit" as I was for 512kBit, both with no download cap, so as long a my sync rate stays up at 7616kBit down, 448kBit up, and I can get datarates of 1MBit or more, I'm ahead.

But don't get me started on mobile data - UKP6 per hour in a for-pay WiFi hotspot, purchased by voucher and available for 24 hours? I should co-co. And mobile 'phone data is worse - Vodafone (my mobile provider) charges UKP5 per Mbyte of traffic, unless you take a data contract (at UKP45 per month for "unlimited" (sic) traffic, with an AUP of about 3GB per month) OK, the 3G licence auctions led to 'phone companies paying silly money to be allowed to fleece their customers (or should that be sheep - baaaa) but one of the higher ups in network provider 3's management stated in public that well in excess of half of their charges goes on marketing. A suggestion - market it a bit less hard, and don't be so rapacious in your tariff structure, and punters will beat a path to your door. The better mousetrap here is a combination of fast and cheap. No-one does both of those - yet - and all 5 providers are being dragged, kicking and screaming, towards that goal by goverment regulatory fiat, not their own gumption, if any.

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