We went shopping up town in Hull today for the first time in a very long while. It was sad to see that some places haven’t made it through the pandemic, but it was great to see that McCoys is doing well. They are something of a Hull legend and benefit from a chunk of outdoor space on the side of Victoria Dock which is a great place to sit and watch the world go by as you chow down on their huge portions.
Great stuff.
I bought my Lumi keys from Anderton Music. The only device they had available was an “opened box” unit which was a bit cheaper. However, when the keyboard arrived it turned out that someone had done a bit more than just open the box and look at it. They’d also used all the download voucher codes that came with the device. It is at this point my heart began to sink a bit, what with having to go back to Andertons and ask them to sort it out. However, the good news is that they owned the problem and kept me informed as they fixed it. I think the true measure of a company is how well they work in “failure mode” when things go wrong. In this test Andertons passed with flying colours.
Here’s another Harlow Carr picture. Because I like you.
Today finds us at Harlow - Carr gardens in Harrogate. These are awesome. If you live near enough, get down there and have a walk around. If you don’t live near enough, make a special trip. They even have a “Betty’s” tea room on site. Wonderful.
It turns out that there is a gap between “making it go” and “making it useful”. Today I’ve been filling this gap for the ESP uploader software I got to work yesterday.
Today was supposed to be the day that I lured a bunch of hapless family members to the house with the promise of free food and then got them to move a piano into the garage. Thanks to a nasty little virus that’s not how it turned out. Fortunately nobody is actually ill, which is the only part of good news in the whole thing.
I didn’t even know that black tulips were a thing until number one wife planted some….
I think I might actually be a writer now. I’ve spent the day working on another Hackspace article, along with a bit of editing.
We’re getting some new furniture. To go with our new curtains. This means that we have to get rid of our old sofas. Today some lovely people from the British Heart Foundation came and took them away. Of course, it wasn’t without incident. When it was delivered they had to dismantle the big sofa to get through our “quirky” (read that as small) front door and into the house. When the collectors arrived I thought I’d taken everything into the right number of pieces but then we found that one chair would not pass through the opening without further surgery.
And one of the four bolts (have you noticed that it is always the last one) holding the base on just would not come out. It was quite fun, two folks holding the chair up in the doorway while I grappled with a mole wrench and a spanner, all the time trying to observe appropriate social distancing.
In the end I prevailed and hopefully someone else will be able to make use of what are really comfy chairs.
I had my first Covid vaccination a while back. And today I had my second. I see myself as a squeamish and self-centred person (I only faint at the sight of my own blood) but I got by just fine.
Some things are hard to do just because you don’t know how to do it. Today I wanted to move some music off my PC onto my iPhone. I’ve got Apple Music but some of the stuff I like doesn’t exist there. Or it exists for a while and then vanishes. Anyhoo, it turns out to be very easy, at least for me. I just had to open iTunes on my PC, import the folder containing the music files onto the PC and then wait a while. Eventually they appear on the phone. Now I can play the copy of my “OK Chicago” single. Or I could just watch the YouTube video:
We bought some curtains today. I’m quite happy to buy curtains as long as I only have to do it every ten years or so. And of course it lets me trot out one of my favourite jokes:
“Doctor, I keep thinking I’m a pair of curtains”
“Pull yourself together man…”
Thank you.
I’ve just ordered a new (to me) camera. Rather excited about this. It should arrive at the end of the week.
Burnby Hall is a great place to visit. Particularly if you have a boisterous four year old in tow who wants to feed the fishes…
“Last week there was a tap on the front door”
“Our plumber has a strange sense of humour”
Actually our plumber is me. And last week I got to show my lack of plumbing skills when the hot tap in the kitchen suddenly stopped delivering water.
After spending a night worrying about blockages in the pipework and failing hot water cylinders I decided to start by buying a new tap. If that didn’t solve the problem the next step would be to call in a proper plumber.
The tap arrived on Friday and I started fitting it that morning. I instantly rediscovered why I hate plumbing so much. When it leaks you never can tell quite where the water is coming from. You can only really tell that it is coming.
The most important thing I remembered though was that you only tighten things as much as you think you need to. Then you leave it for a while to see how much it leaks and tighten a bit more until it stops. By the end of yesterday I reckoned that things were staying dry and now it’s officially fitted. And we have hot water in the kitchen again.
I’ve had my mower a long time. It broke around 10 years ago when some little pins that linked the drive to the motor hub sheared off. My first repair, using the metal bits of treasury tags I had lying around was not successful, but my second attempt using steel nails worked a treat.
I got the lawn mower out last week, what with the grass starting to wave in the breeze. I had a look underneath to see how my repair was holding up. The repair was fine, but the bearing that holds the metal blades (lumps of sharpened steel that whizz around at amazing speed and cut the grass) seems to have collapsed. I can move the end of the blade up and down a worryingly long way. And since these parts are very close to my ankles when I’m mowing the lawn, I thought a new mower might be in order.
The mower has arrived. It turns out that mower technology has not moved on a great deal, but the new one does have a roller at the back. This means that I can get the same “striped” effect that you see on posh lawns and tennis courts. I hope it lasts as long as the old one did.
Well, that was fun. In celebration of a family birthday we had a barbeque this afternoon. I have a record with barbeques that can charitably described as “patchy”. Most of the time I can argue that this is down to the weather, which used to reserve special levels of downpour for our barbeque events. Although the attempt to start the fire using newspaper, which filled the neighbourhood with tiny scraps of burning paper, was entirely down to me. This time I settled for the special lighting fluid, and plenty of it. This went up a treat, and left a little pile of happily glowing coals on which we were able to prepare some sausages and burgers. Which were very nice.
I bought a CD last week. It’s one that I already “own” having bought it from the iTunes store a few years ago. Unfortunately, the 10 tracks that I thought I’d paid for turned into 2. This is probably due to licensing changes that should not in any way be my problem. I suppose there are some weaselly terms and conditions somewhere that make this quite OK.
Anyhoo, the CD arrived today. I had to find a CD-ROM drive and then use iTunes to rip the music onto my PC, and thence to Apple music share so that it reappeared on my phone. So, after spending only 9 pounds plus a bit of messing around I’m back where I should have been if Apple had kept the promise that buying something actually means buying something. Modern life eh?
Lockdown has turned me into the kind of person who wears christmas socks all year round.
I took this picture on a walk earlier in the week. Nice to see some colour coming back. I hope this is some kind of metaphor.
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
