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...

And Then There Were Three (by sarah)

Hydrogen and Helium have been joined by a third cat! This ones called Mini and is all black with large pale green/yellow eyes. We picked her up on Sunday evening after a hectic weekend. She was very good on the journey home, only mewing when I made the squeaky noise I make. She even let me stroke her, purring when we stopped at the services so the we could give her some water.

She has so far spent most of her time behind the fridge and freezer, grrrring at kittens who tend to ignore her, after some initial hissing.

Shes seven years old and has been a bit lonely and stuck inside recently but hopefully she will soon settle down.

She had been out rather a lot today and let me comb her with the cat comb that came free of charge with her! 🙂

Hmmm might have to add even more subcategpries!

p.s. she mults lots 🙁 hoovering here we come!

Comedy Moment (by sarah)

Well the kittens have been getting into everything and we have been trying to 'train' them out of sitting on beds and tables to little success. Today I saw Hydrogen climb into my wooden potpori bowl (dads cousin John made the bowl in Wales!). I jumped up saying, 'No bad kitten'. Al simpered over how cute it looked - I moved around the furniture to remove it firmly but gently from the bowl. Kitten mewed I said, 'OH no' as the realisation dawned on me that I had found the elusive cat turd that had been smelling - with my bear feet and lo! It was flipping moldy!

Al rushed to get a bowl for me to wash my feet in with out smearing it everywhere - unfortunatly it happed to be the bowl which leaks!

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.

NetBSD/cute: kitten(4) (by alaric)

Well, the latest snapshot of NetBSD/cute now supports the kitten(4) driver.

I tried to get a screenshot of kitten running with my two black and white devices, but while I was preparing it, I ran into a resource conflict with the existing baby(4) driver:

I managed to jury-rig a bus isolation mechanism, however: