A full weekend

We stayed up late on Friday to welcome Sarah and Paul for a weekend with us, tiring but worth it.

Saturday was pretty good too with everyone but me doing their own thing away from the house. I sat and vegetated until I had to fetch Sal and her surplus furniture. Then we both sat and vegetated. I took Sal to work and chatted to Russ and went to bed early.

On Sunday, we all visited Ian and Lulu for a while and then Paul and Sarah drove home whilst the rest of us took Samuel home. Then Hazel and I took Ian and Lulu out to Southway to spend the afternoon with Wendy. Then we went shopping! After the shopping, we went home and had a meal before Ian arrived all ready to help me unload the spare furniture from Sal at their place. In all, a busy weekend.

I was a bit concerned about Titch on Saturday as she was very quiet and drooling a bit for most of the morning. However, she perked up a bit after tea and by Sunday seemed to be back to her usual self. I will keep an eye on her though.

Early to bed..........

I actually got to bed by 22.15 yesterday. Some sort of record in the immediate past. I did very little apart from moving bags of Christmas pressies around and a tiny bit of tidying in the back room. I feel so much better for that.
Unfortunately, Hazel is still not well. She is suffering from what appears to be a cold but may be caused by her new medication. Either way, she is not a happy bunny. Ian is still enjoying working hard at T. K. Max, he has also had a brilliant letter from Warrens to say how sorry they are to see him go and any time he wants to return etc.

Oh well.

Early Fleetwood Mac song.

I did my last overtime, I hope, yesterday and I am shattered. I don't seem to be able to concentrate on very much and I just go home and sleep after work. Yesterday, I had my fifth Expert Patient session and, during a relaxation session, I fell asleep! This was either very good or very bad.
Plenty of rain yesterday but no apparent sign of the leak so it would seem to be wind direction that causes it. The strength of the wind currently is so high that I am not too worried about the leak at present. I am more concerned about the directional sat dish as it is constantly being blown awry.

Todd has now joined us on Google Wave so I look forward to more chats with him in the future,

And then again.............

Sally's laptop is here and working well, she will probably collect it today. Sadly, it looks as though Lulu will be redundant again by the weekend. She will stand a better chance than most of getting another job but that won't heal the hurt. Ian is loving his new job and that will help with the finances but Lou is a worker and wont be happy until she has another job.

Such a night.

Oh what it is to have an insomniac wife!

I spent most of Saturday with Samuel and we had a pretty good time until bedtime. Then, all hell let loose for an hour of tears and whining. It transpired that what he really wanted was his teddy that we bought for his birthday and which he had accidentally left at home.
We managed quite a lot of our Christmas shopping over the weekend as well so all in all, we had a pretty good time..
Some serious rain over the weekend resulted in a few tiny trickles of water. Better but still not perfect, I shall have to investigate further.

This morning, the new HUD speedo arrived and, wow, it's better than the original model was. More about it on the janis blog.

Fiddlesticks!

(Ancient Plymothian bowdlerism)

It's been a busy week and it's getting busier. I worked two and a half hours overtime yesterday and got home totally shattered. I will be doing overtime again today.................

I found a hole in the terrace yesterday after several days of dry weather and was able to block and seal it. We had some rain overnight but no leaks, fingers crossed.

Wish me luck as you WAVE me bye bye................

I'm not actually going anywhere, it's just that I got my WAVE account yesterday and at least one of my nominees got his this morning. This is good news as we can now test the system properly.

Speed flitting?

I managed two loads from Southway to the new house and another of immense dimensions from Laira Street on Saturday. The two sofas were finally moved complete with door removal at both ends and a lot of sweating. I did about five hours on Saturday and we still went visiting in the evening to help out with a few small things. Molly is not very sweet at present, she is peeing anywhere she fancies in order to get her message across too. Saturday evening, I looked like death warmed up but still managed over 90 minutes talking to Russ.

On Sunday we did a major shop and topped up the fuel tank on the Merc again, 22 litres of chip oil and about the same of diesel.

This morning, Hazel had to be at Derriford Hospital for her check up results and I had a bloods. So I took her to work and drove straight to the surgery thinking I would have a pee and sit and read for twenty minutes. Whilst I was in the toilet, my name was called. The first appointment had cancelled and I was there so I went in first.

There are good days. And then there are bad days.

Yesterday was a happy day. I'll get that out of the way first, just in case you think I am depressed. I am still not depressed in spite of the things that happened. The Galaxy didn't just need a new belt, it appears that either the air conditioning pump seized and took out the belt or vice versa. The result is a bill for £400.00 so the service is out of the question this month. The gas man didn't come and when Hazel rang them to find out why, it seems that whoever took her call didn't finish the booking so we just disappeared into limbo. Whilst eating a meal with my wife and daughter, the chair I was sitting on collapsed and broke up around me. My back went out and I have a few bruises. The bruises don't bother me too much but the back problem had only just gone away and now it's back. Hey ho.

The gas man should come this morning and the Galaxy is being done next week and I am feeling a little better this morning so, all in all, things are on the up again.

Whatever is happening at Redmond?

I have been having problems with the MSDNAA licences for Windows 7 that I issue to students for a while now. Some of them aren't "Taking" as they should. The software seems to accept the code but after a couple of weeks, it starts throwing wobblys about the Specific product key could not be used and error code 0xC004C008. As this error code seems to be usually associated with volume keys and we are using retail keys, I was at a loss for a while. So far, I have only managed a sort of work around answer to the problem. Don't put the code in when you install, wait for the OS to nag you a few days later. Then, making sure you are on line, input the product code and it should go through the full checking routine and accept the code. In addition to our problems, I met a student today who had almost exactly the same problem installing on an Apple with a purchased code. He will be phoning MS and creating merry hell.
Yesterday, our combi boiler went awol on the radiators so we have had to call in British Gas and the Galaxy has finally gone to Vospers for it's service and new belt. Another month without money.....................

And there's more...........

As a final test, I tried using AVS converter to convert from drv-ms to mpg2. It works but it trashes the audio sync. I went back and ran the same file in the command line program and I lost minimal sync on over three hours. That program runs on a gui  front end and is ffmpeg running under Winff.
I also checked out the hole in the ceiling to terrace while it was fairly dry yesterday. It is a bit squishy and quite deep so it will be fairly hard to plug unless we have very dry weather for several days at least.

Slow and steady.......again!

I checked out the direct method of using re-maker to open the dvr-ms file and it didn't work for me, I ended up with an un-openable file. So back to the tried and tested formula of converting with a command line program and then editing in re-maker. The quality of all these recordings is, however, marvellous and bodes well for the future.

The leak is beginning to shrink at last, it dripped all night but has only dripped into the bucket and everything else is slowly drying out at long last. I may be able to do a bit more proofing on top this evening again.

We drove down to Coads Green after work yesterday and picked up 100 litres of wvo from Tony. Nice man and nice price, I suspect we will do more business there.

A blog of bits or a bit of a blog?

I spent a lot of Saturday working. We began quite early by going down to 238 with Lulu and letting her see the house for the first time. Fortunately, she likes it a lot. Then Lu and I went to collect Nicky, Robbie and Keane and we all went out to Southway to load up. This took a while (in the pouring rain) so we stopped for a breather and then three vehicles drove down to 238 and we began to unload. Once I was empty, I left the rest to it and went home to start work on the terrace into bedroom leak. There was good news and bad, the good is that my hoped for result is that the only place that water is entering is through the nasty hole drilled through the pantiles. The bad news is that there is no obvious way of blocking this up other than removing the tiles laid on the floor of the terrace. However, I have laid a goodly amount of PVA glue down which has soaked into the floor and permeated all the way through the hole so I am hoping that when this sets it will stop up at least some of the minor channels there.

On Sunday, we began in a lazy fashion and then went shopping at about midday. A fairly simple food shop and some work slacks for Hazel and we were home by about four.

I also played with the "Super PVR" this weekend. I have installed two sat tuners in the test PC and have done some serious recording using the facilities of Media Centre. The whole thing is working very well indeed but needs a little more work in order to edit and store the results easily. I have found a very good quality freeware converter that will take the dvr-ms files and output mpg2 files for editing and storage. Windows 7 is already able to convert wtv files into dvr-ms so that works quite well now. I am also experimenting with AVS remaker importing the dvr-ms file directly in order to edit that but I have some reservations about speed of loading.

Too wet to dry up

Sadly, the rain continued to fall yesterday after work so I didn't do any PVA-ing. I did, however, manage to change the outside lamp that needed replacing so that will help no end when I finally get stuck in.

I also had a play with the satellite card in the dual core desktop test PC. I couldn't get it to work at all for a while and decided to see if there were newer drivers that might help. Yes there were, and in spades! The new drivers are optimised for Windows 7 and they have even re-written the applications in order to take advantage of the new OS. It's all most impressive. Best of all, however, is the integration with Media Centre that it allows. I am so impressed, I am considering using this PC as a super PVR.


The above was written yesterday, Thursday, but only published today, Friday. Now for today's words.

I spent a while yesterday recording and converting a movie in order to check the Media Centre. All went well, but it is a bit long winded and I lost audio synch towards the end of the recording.

There's a hole in my ceiling, dear Liza, dear Liza

On Tuesday, I finally removed all the books and paperwork from my bedside unit. Oh dear, very damp and beginning to be quite wet in places. I removed the internal panels and the ceiling was a bit black! poked it gently to see how spongy and whoosh, a pint of dirty water straight down my sleeve. So, I have removed the ceiling in the unit and can now see the extent of the damage. At some time in the distant past, some idiot had wanted to run, probably, a water pipe down through the ceiling to the, long removed, boiler. I now have to pick up the pieces. We dropped in to Wickes yesterday after work and bought a giant sized tub of PVA glue and I hope to begin using it after work today.

And a good time was had by all.........

Not!

Well, that was my lost week for this year. I went home that very morning and did practically nothing until today.

It was just a cold but even the lovely Hazel admitted I was pretty poorly and not just suffering with a "man cold".

I'm still not feeling much better, but have reached the stage where if I don't clear my lungs soon they will get worse again. As I am forbidden to have any truck with decongestants  or anything of that ilk, I will just have to exercise myself well. It felt strange driving in this morning and parking was weird, it took me several goes just to line up in the bay.The Merc smells of chip shop most of the time now, and constantly reminds me of how much money I am saving.