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.
Month: August 2004
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.”