A Week of High Jinx (by sarah)

This is getting ridiculous it really is!

Last Thursday we had to leave earlyish in the morning for our hectic long weekend in London/Guilford, I went to finish cycling the machines so everything was clean before we left - ie washing machine, tumble dryer etc.... and lo! no electricity. Arrrggggg!!!!!Quick check showed that the RCD had tripped. A quick check settled my dread of fridge and freezers - things still frozen! Relief!

But not for long as we reset the RCD and it goes again!

We are by this time running out of time, a third and forth time show us through elimination that it is the dishwwasher thats doing it. Worrying about that I go to fill our bottles with water for the journey. Not wearing any shoes I noticed to my horror the now familular feeling of wet squelchy carpet under my feet - a little checking shows that the bloody thing has leaked again dispite the cowboy repair guys assaurances - this time straight onto the extension lead its plugged in on - at this point we thank the heavens for nice residual current detectors, we unplugged it - warn our house guest and rush out, knowing it will be just one more thing to deal with when we come back 🙁

The blower in the car deemed that week to stop working and as the front windows do not wind down it was hell - I had packed little plastic ice cube things that I regularly gave to Jean to suck to help keep her cool - though she was a lot cooler than me and Al. Once Ealing was found I was disembarked to sit with baby in an air conditioned Pizza Hut whilst Al went in by him self on the train.

That night saw Jean mega waily - she hadnt wanted to eat becuase of the heat so at 2 in the morning I found myself feeding her whilst Al slept (he was to drive us to Guilford the next day so it was important he got sleep).

On the way to Guilford we sat in some traffic and appeared to have people throwing stuff at the car? Thank goodness the windows dont open or it would have hit Al!

Then things were pretty much fine until Sunday morning when as Als said the brakes went iffy - if its brake fluid thats the cylinders gone if its oil then bearings? But both wheels at once!?

We were going to take the van back but my uncle said it wasnt motoway ready as the bearing still needed fixing, this ment we had to borrow mums car which though fine on the way home as mentioned in Als post even though it too has only just past its MOT 🙁 I got ill on Monday, along with my already infected insect bites!

We also opened our back log of post to find that banks were moaning we hadnt payed bills we'd never recieved and that we had been charged!

Tuesday Al was ill and I fell down a rabbit hole - oh and it turned out the small fridge hadnt been shutting properly so we lost a load of food 🙁 but pretty uneventfull really. Yesterday, Wednesday we were back on the roll of bad luck. First of all I put the kettle on and it seemed to be boiling but not switching itself off! I was peed off as it was obviously broken, then I went to do the washing and lo! It was grinding round and didnt appear to be drawing any water in - it broken too?! Then to the mystory of some lights working some not - was one of the curcuits out? But surely lighting's on a lighting curcuit? The freezers continual hum told we still had power - what I didnt reallise was that it was about half power. This was bad as I found the grill full of meat fat (from house guests who probaly didnt realise it would be such an issue - ie forgetting Al veggi!) so I had to cook the potato bread over the toaster - it took an age!

We also had to sort out the fact that Al's paycheck was wrong and we hadnt been paid everything:( Today - well where to start!

We got a letter from the a debt collector becuase the stupid phone company (mobile wont mention in fear of being sued or something) have for a third or is it a forth time? mucked up the direct debit! Several phone calls later and the rude person at the phone company told us thats not what their screen says etc... when they bank said it was their mistake!

Then to the cleaning out of the pool - it had been accidently left with just a bit of water in by house guests who didnt know the dire consequences of this action - mind you we werent expecting it to be that bad! Green and brown slime - ah nature a miraculous thing! So we set about cleaning it which has led to yet another 'incident'. The hose pipe attachment in the sink appeared to be fine but then when we came back in it had been spraying water everywhere! So once again the kitchen was soaked 🙁 - this is now the fith!!!! bloody effing flood/leakness to happen 🙁 🙁 🙁

This time the windowsill flooded and the kettle, microwave and sterilizer where soaked and are now drying, oh and the toaster!

Still it meant I got to clean the windowsill properly though I did manage to put my foot onto a cracked tile in the process (me not being able to reach unless I climb onto the window sill) which broke showing that half the window sill is over abyss! Al has now banned me from cleaning windows!

I decided that with or without kettle I was having a cup of tea - so on with the saucepan. Finally it boiled - I made the tea and took it into the lounge area were the mug fell off of the handle! 🙁 I'm afraid that at this point I swore - jumping clear of the boiling splash. At this point Al rushes into the room to say that I had left the window in the bedroom open, this was bad as it was where I had imprisoned the kittens whilst we sorted out the chaos. He could now only find one of them 🙁 However, kittens were later both discovered in my wardrobe sitting on the jumpers! It has a hole in the back of it I had completely forgetten about!

Technology jinx (by alaric)

On Sunday, we were due to drive back from Essex (stopping off to pick up Minnie)... but while driving back to Sarah's parent's place that morning, I noticed that the brakes were really really feeble. As in, the pedal would go all the way to the floor without much resistance until the last part, and the car would come to a gentle stop rather than screeching to a halt.

When we got out, we saw that the rear wheels were all covered in an oily liquid that had emerged from the axle. Bah.

So we borrowed Sarah's mother's car for the journey home. It's a bit smaller than ours, and we had a lot of stuff, so it was a bit of a squeeze!

Then on Tuesday, we went out to pick up more cat litter from Stayte Services in Stroud, and as I was parking in their car park, the car stalled.

Which is an odd thing for an automatic transmission to do.

It wouldn't start again.

After a bit of sitting there groaning with our heads in our hands, it did start again, but quickly stalled once more. I began to surmise that letting the engine cool down had helped, so we left it a while, started it up, and this time I kept the revs high so it wouldn't stall again, and reversed it into a parking space. In case the problem was due to something in the fuel line, I left the engine running (with Sarah watching over it) while I went in and purchased, but it had stalled again by the time I returned. It started again after a cooling period, then I had a nervous and fraught drive home, trying to keep the revs up in slow traffic and so on. It's been fine since, though - I suspect it was just overheating in some way.

But then Wednesday morning, I got up to find the ADSL was down. So I used dialup to check for emails, and to complain to the ISP. The fridges and freezers were all running their compressors at once, and Sarah complained that some of the (flourescent) lights weren't working; and the UPS kept switching to battery mode. Checking the logs revealed that the mains voltage was around 170v instead of the usual 240v; and before long it cut out entirely, so I dragged the generator out and started it up to run the computers and the fridges and freezers - which, given enough voltage to run their compressors properly, were soon at a decent temperature, and the compressors shut off again.

The power came back, but I stayed on the generator for a while, until I was sure it was OK.

Interestingly, when the power came back and the ADSL router powered back up (it wasn't on the generator), it managed to obtain a link immediately; perhaps it was only failing because it was running on a reduced voltage, and its power supply was thus failing to provide proper power to the thing in such a way that made it unable to get a proper link. I'd expect a switched-mode power supply to still provide clean power in such situations (the computers were all quite happy on 170v), but you never know what corners might be cut in cheap equipment!

Either way, right now, I'm feeling a bit cursed...

Interesting sites (by alaric)

I came across:

Guide to Zone 6 by Quin Parker on Haddock.

This guy's decided to go to every station in Zone 6 and write a little review on each. They're quite funny.

Then following random links from there, I wandered to:

Cinnamon Thoughts - Colorful Optical Illusion which is a nice visual trick.

Motorway Cow Bridge (by alaric)

Well, I've just ported my nice image upload to blog script to run from a Web form (rather than a script on my machine that uploads via SCP), so that Sarah can use it too (and I can use it from random locations).

As a test of it, here's some pictures of a strange phenomenon we often see when going to pick Jean up from nursery - at about 5:30pm each day, Junction 11 of the M5 is visited by a parade of cows (you have to look closely to see them - I didn't want to crop the images, so you get the full context):

Fusion power! (by alaric)

Cheap affordable fusion may be on the horizon...

I've spoken in the past of the wonders of the Fusor, but recent developments in the field have occurred; Robert W. Bussard, of Bussard ramjet fame, has recently claimed that he has a design for a fusor that overcomes the obstacles to power generation, with the output power rising with the fifth power of the radius of the device.

He's just looking for a few hundred million dollars to build a prototype.

Here's hoping somebody pays up, and that it works!