And nothing of interest has happened. This is here because I am doing the Blog365 challenge.

I have a vague recollection of eating a stew one dinner time before the holidays. As is the way of things I forgot about the empty dish and hid it somewhere amongst the mess on my desk. Before going home tonight I found it again…

I like the folds in the colonies of bacteria and mould. No idea what type of simple lifeform this is,  but it’ll give the cleaners something to talk about when they find it in a bin tomorrow. I decided it probably wasn’t worth trying to save the spoon.

Spent most of today helping Amy tidy her new bedroom that her old housemate used to inhabit. Since her previous housemate was a dirty person with no concept of hygiene we decided to remove the carpet and put a new piece down. We also started stripping wall paper and disposing of quite a large stash of naked-lady magazines that he had been hoarding.

We have no idea what he used to do on his carpet, and really don’t want to think too hard either, but there were quite a lot of stains that had gone through to the underlay.

Once the carpet was down I set up a small fish tank that I’d bought. It’s now whirring away and has to be left alone for a week to make the water fit for fish.

To finish off we had a barbequeue in the dark and cold. It being so cold things were beginning to freeze by the time it’d got to the marshmallow course. Barbequeues always have several courses - the raw sausage starters, cremated burger appetiser, char…everthinged chicken main with extra soot and ash, followed by volcanic marshmallows.

Amy has a slightly naff keyboard, it’s a small laptop-style one with the only redeeming feature being it’s bright pink (not that I like pink you understand, but on Planet Amy, anything pink is good… no matter how bad it is ) And you know, the keys stick and she gets frustrated with it so I thought I could lend a hand.

Read on to see some photos of the progress…

(more…)

Ever wondered what a hard disk head crash sounds like? Well wonder no more… this Hitachi website has some WAVs of various ways an HDD can die. Do you go for “Head damage” or “Head stuck to platter”?

Now go and back up your data like you know you should do

From Random

Because she’s a nice person, Amy bought me a new graphics card for my PC. It’s an Inno3D NVIDIA 7600 PCI-Express card with half a gig of ram. Then, because she’s an awesome person she gave me one of her old TFT displays. We didn’t quite know if the display worked since she’d been given it by a person who works in a recycling centre (visit your local tip, see the container full of old PCs and tellies? One of those places). It needed 12V at 4A to work, a fairly standard voltage, and after some rooting around a suitable PSU was found to test the monitor.

It worked! This monitor was totally fine with nothing seemingly wrong with it, and it came out of a skip. Had it not been rescued it’d now be in some WEEE recycling place being made safe enough to bury in some landfill. A totally fine working monitor being stripped down so it could be buried in a landfill… think about that for a moment.

I’ve just come back from Maplin where I had to buy my own PSU for it as we were borrowing one of Amy’s existing monitor PSUs to test this one. It needs a bit of a clean, but otherwise is fine.

So before you junk your old PC because it’s “too old” or is “broken”… actually think whether it really is broken, and then offer it on somewhere like Freecycle or eBay. There will be someone who’ll take it, even if it’s knackered. Amy has several half working Playstation 2s from which she has been able to make three working ones. All of these were also rescued from the same skip this monitor came from.

From Random

Today I spent a fair amount of time driving around in a hired van. Yes, finally after about six months I’ve managed to hire a van and retrieve a sofa from Amy’s. I also called upon the assistance of a fellow YakYakker to help move it. Thanks Andy.

On the way home we detoured past Ikea where I bought some Ivar shelf pieces for in my kitchen, and a Detlof display cabinet which, as you can see above, has been put to good use. It sits neatly in an unused corner upstairs showing off my random collection of retro computing stuff.

My washing machine has just finished washing the covers for the settee cushions. They were rather dirty, turning the water a manky brown colour. Now they’re all clean and probably safe to touch again. I’ve cleaned the settee itself best I can and it’s now drying out. I think I’ll need to hire a carpet cleaner at some point and give all my upholstery a good clean.

It’s great, I have a settee and a chair so visitors don’t have to sit on the floor any more

From Random

Pink fairy cakes I bought in Sainsbury’s. I’ve eaten four, but two are going to be given to a certain Pink Fearie when I see her tomorrow.

Took Todd out for a long walk today. We went to Steve’s to collect an audio cable. I’ve acquired a new car stereo off my sister - she bought a new car so kept her old car’s stereo - and spent some of last night fitting it in the dark. It was fairly straight forward and I learned that you can remove car stereos using just a knife, it being quite easy to pry the cage open.

The new stereo has a line input socket, so all I needed was a 3.5mm jack to 3.5mm jack wire and I was all set. Steve had a spare one so I took the dog for a much longer walk and let it run in the fields for a while.

Here is Todd. Todd is a dog. See Todd run, run Todd, run!

From Random

Except earlier on today Todd couldn’t run in the sun, he had to wait, which was no fun. No fun at all. He was stuck in the kitchen with nothing to do.

OK, enough of that before it turns into a warped version of The Cat in the Hat

I’d been asked by my parents, who are off in Spain at the moment being rained on (the rain in Spain falls mainly on the tourists), to look after the dog for two days while my sister was at work doing long shifts. They’d agreed to leave me a key so I could get in. This suited me, I needed to visit Steve, who I used to work with and he lives down the road from my parents. So off I set.

I arrived at my parents and obtained the key. Then things went a bit pear-shaped as I discovered the back door was bolted from the inside, and I only had a back door key. Oh dear. The irony of this situation was not lost on me - here I was on the wrong side of a locked back door contemplating whether I could break in - not to steal laptops and Xbox 360s but to let out a by now rather wound up dog.

I texted my parents to let them know I was at home, but locked out. I also texted my sister asking where she worked so I could call her a moron in person, and maybe get the front door key. Making it fully clear that any dog mess found in the house was her problem to deal with.

She rang me back and gave me directions. We’ll skip the driving to her work and collecting the key, it was as boring as it sounds and contained no interesting drama. I came home and let myself in.

Wanting to get off to Steve’s to do some important stuff I let the dog out so it could have a crap. Only it wasn’t interested, and after five minutes of being prompted to go and pee, I put it back in the kitchen and said I’d be back later.

Off I went to Steve’s, I showed off my Macbook and we did some work. It got dark and I came home about six pm. It’s quite fun walking a black dog in the dark, it wanders off and waits for you to catch up. If you’re not paying attention it’ll remind you by nipping at your kneecaps.

I will take it out for a proper walk tomorrow to make up for being stuffed in the kitchen all day.