So, I went away over the New Year. Since I was leaving my house alone I followed the curious ritual of turning off all the electrical stuff in my house. No idea why we bother to do this since the chances of things catching fire are totally unrelated to whether there’s people in the house or not, plus I’m not quite sure what I’d do if my telly burst into flames and I was sat in front of it.

Anyway… This meant that when I came back I had to power everything up. All seemed to go well until I tried to watch telly. I had a picture, but no sound. Bugger…

All my set top boxes and things are routed through a Kenwood hifi amp. This was the source of my problems. For some reason it won’t enable the speakers or headphones. Everything else works, it just doesn’t produce sound which, for an amplifier, is a kind of important task.

Being the technically minded person I am, I undertook basic fault finding techniques to see what was wrong. Turning it on and off didn’t help. Neither did checking the wiring and checking that my DVD player was actually working. So then I went onto more advanced techniques - I hit it… this didn’t do anything, neither did swearing at it. Not having a degree in micro electronics, and my degree in software engineering not really applicable I ran out of sane options.

It was about then that I decided it was broken and there was only one thing left to do, so I went to get a screwdriver. Yeah, when things die it’s time to take them apart and see what’s in there. Nothing spectacular; nothing burnt, melted or bubbling and nothing that looked obviously broken.

I have now asked on Freecycle for a less broken one, if they don’t bite I’ll have to save up for a new one. Oh well, I have had it ten years so I can’t really complain; especially when for three of those ten years it was my alarm clock and spent its time turned on 24h a day.

School has just broken up for Christmas. There’s just five minutes before we can go and have some food in the staff room and then also go home.

OK, I went away over Christmas to the US with Emily (who now has to stay there because our government fears foreign people and makes it impossible to get a work visa).

America was fun. I did have a diary to paste in here, but after a small accident with my Palm, I don’t. TIP: Back up everything before deleting.

We went to the Grand Canyon for New Year. It was quite nice. Some pictures will appear soon… I can’t decide whether to scan them all in, or get the negatives turned into a PhotoCD (or whatever Kodak calls it now).

I also bought a GoType keyboard, and a battery pack for my Palm. If you’re American, go to Staples, the battery pack is called the ‘E-Go’ and is made by Belkin. UK Stapes probably doesn’t sell it. And $20 for 50 Maxell CD-Rs? I thought that was good. If you’re from UK Customs, I am making all this up.

Back to University tomorrow. Whopee.

A small request

I am looking for work in the US. If you know anyone who’s managed to do similar, how did they do it? I’m writing a CV on Monster.com (when the site actually loads that is), and will email some of the jobs on geekfinder.com as well.