For a couple of months, I’d been getting the “engine problem” light and each time it went to the garage, the onboard computer reckoned there was a different fault. The vacuum pump, glow plugs, mass air-flow sensor and oil level all caused it at one point or another.
Not content with this, my car has now got a slow puncture on the back tyre and the locking wheel nut key snapped when the garage was getting it off! Gonna cost me yet more money to get it sorted tomorrow 🙁
Category: Personal
Spammers should die!
*RANT MODE ON*
I just opened up my mail program and found 81 new messages (since last night!) Of those 81 messages, 4 were personal and the rest were blog notifications about new comments.. some nasty little blog-spammer has gone and added spam about casinos and various drugs to all my blog entries! It’s just taken me 15 minutes to clean up a few of the entries and change the comments to closed again.
I hate spammers!
*RANT MODE OFF*
The Pool (part 3)
Well, after 3 weeks the pool had turned a nasty green colour, had emptied of water a fair bit compared to when it was full, and the water on the rain cover (plastic dust sheet) was occupying more of the space in the pool than the water inside was!
Had to drain the pool and tomorrow will have to find something to clean the plastic with before it gets put away. I guess no-one’s going to be using it this year given that school starts again at the end of this week.
The Pool (part 2)
Went out to check how the pool was doing yesterday. It’s been there a week and no-one has yet ventured into it because of the awful weather we’ve been having. After all the rain last week, there was quite a large puddle collected in the top of the makeshift cover (an old polythene dust sheet weighted at each corner and held around the pool by the garden hose).
Having emptied the contents of the cover out onto the lawn, I figured that maybe wasn’t such a good idea after all because the lawn was as wet as the inside of the pool!
Maybe the weather will pick up somewhat this week and the kids will actually get some use out of it.
A hatred of floppy disks
I never realised how much I hated floppy disks until today. They’re slow, clunky and unreliable. It should be a simple matter to transfer a 1.1Mb RAID card firmware update to a machine with no O/S but no.. first the floppy drive in my PC doesn’t have the power connected, then it fails to recognise any disk I put in there.
After a reboot, it finds the drive, finds the disk, formats the disk (one of a box of 10). Copy the files onto it and insert into drive on other machine.
Data error reading drive A.
Tried the same thing on 3 different disks and two different PCs but still no luck.
I ended up writing 1MB to a 700MB CDR – what a waste!
A poolside seat
Bought a small paddling pool for the kids today – 6ft diameter, 25 inches high. Got it home from B&Q and found that it was more the kind of thing you fill up and leave out for the summer than a 10 minute fill and empty when you’re done sort of pool.
Weekend break
We popped over to North Wales (Llandudno) last weekend with barely 18 hours warning. Note to new visitors – we’ve been there before.. see 26 July 2003 for more.
It was Friday evening and we just figured we’d get away from the mess of a gutted bathroom in the early stages of being replaced. Decided roughly where to go, phoned a load of large hotels, no spaces anywhere, change plans, phone a load more hotels and finally find somewhere that has a room/suite for 2 adults and 2 children. Packed a few things and head off around lunchtime Saturday.
Offensive fonts! What next?
Windows Update says there’s a critical update for Windows. Critical to me implies that it’s absolutely vital to the smooth running of your PC. The description of the update left me wondering so I took a couple of screenshots of character map before and after the update.
The update description says “This item updates the Bookshelf Symbol 7 font included in some Microsoft products. The font has been found to contain unacceptable symbols.”
One of those moments
When attempting to make a slave disk into a master disk (and remove the previous master), it always helps to look at the documentation for the correct manufacturer and model of disk.
Invasion of the ant people
Ok, so they’re not ant people as such.. just your average run-of-the-mill black ants. Unfortunately they were all over the dining room and downstairs toilet – not just normal ants but winged ones as well. After trying Nippon bait, B&Q ant spray (on the ones outside) and still no luck, we had to call in the professionals. The last thing anyone wants is flying ants in the downstairs toilet after all!