Bought a piano

I’d taken all the sensible precautions. I had number one wife and number one son present in the shop to stop me from doing anything silly. And I was only going to take a look at the thing. And then, of course, I bought it. I was expecting my family safety net to kick in and tell me not to be so silly. But instead they told me to just go for it.

There are two possible reasons for this. Either it is a really good deal and will do just what we want. Or they knew that saying no would just lead to further visits to keyboard shops, searching on eBay and earnest discussions of the best thing to get. Anyhoo, it arrives once we have carpet in the room to stand it on. Rather excited.

Back home to my biggest fans

We drove home today from the lakes and spent the afternoon fitting ceiling fans. As you do. I’d rather like the fan makers to know that this step is actually a lot more tricky than it looks. You are supposed to be able to just slide the infra-red receiver into the gap in the bracket. But the diagram doesn’t show the thick bunches of cables in the bracket and coming up from the fan. And when you’re reading the instructions you forget that the whole thing is attached to the ceiling at this point. It turns out that it is possible, but requires the use of a lot of language I’m not particularly proud of.

Walk number 6

Last day today. Wah. We drove up to Wray Castle and then took a walk around the side of the lake.

Walk number 5

Todays’ walk was in Grizedale, which is a wonderful place. Like all the places around here.

Walk number 4

OK, so technically today is not all walking. After three days of climbing up and down hills, today we thought we’d let the boat take the strain. So it was onto the ferry on a trip to Bowness. The weather is improving, which made the trip on the water all the better. And we did walk around a bit when we arrived.

Quite a nice sunset too.

Walk number 3

Walk number three finds us in the woods just outside Ambleside. Apparently one of the trees here is the largest in England. They all look pretty big to me.

There were also some amazing views of the lake.

Walk number 2

Today’s walk took us to a “tarn” on the top of a hill. Tarn is a local word for “pond”. Apparently these are always placed on the hills in pairs or, as the locals say “One good tarn deserves another”.

Walk number 1

The weather forecast said “good chance of rain”. But we went out anyway. And it didn’t rain, at least until we got back inside. A lot of our route coincided with a local marathon so we had a bit of company on the way round, which was nice.

Hello Ambleside

We’re doing lots of things we’ve not done for a while. We’re going somewhere else. We’re having a holiday. We’re eating food off different plates. Today we headed out to the Lake District for a little while. We made a policy decision not to look forward to the trip on the basis that lots of things we’ve looked forward to in the last year or so have vanished at the last (or first) moment. But now we are here, perusing weather forecasts and walks. Great stuff.

Intelligent glue

I spent a big chunk of today ripping cable trunking off the walls and trying to minimise the amount of wall which came came off with it. The trunking sections had been fitted with a special kind of glue which doesn’t grip when you want it to (the trunking kept falling down) but will hang on like grim death if you need to remove it. I wonder how they make it do that.

Go England...

Nothing like a bit of success to turn you into a football fan….

Biscuits from around the world

Another lovely father’s day gift I got on Father’s Day (what a coincidence) was a box of biscuits from around the world from the Biscuit Baron. They came in a box with a book about each biscuit and even a scoring form that you can fill in. The ones above were wonderful.

Bought 100 Dice

A while ago I bought 100 coloured dice. I’ve no idea why (although I do want to teach number one granddaughter about probability at an early age). However, they are nice to take pictures of.

Carpet fun

We’re getting new carpet. Well, after over 20 years it is probably time. Anyhoo, we wanted to get something very similar to what we already had, only with more of the carpet stuff. We solved the problem by taking a corner of old carpet to the shop. I think we got quite a good match….

Bye bye to the piano

I said goodbye to over 50 years of my past today. Two men came and took away the piano. Our family got it in the 1960s and I, and my sister did our piano practice on it. Then it found its way into our house and we inflicted piano lessons on our kids too. It has been a fixture in our house every since.

It’s been rather neglected for the past few years though. It was heralded as an interesting instrument when it was launched because it used a novel, weight-saving design to mount the keys. Unfortunately this design also meant that after a while all the plastic key mountings fell to pieces giving the instrument a rather snaggle toothed appearance and making the keys not work properly. Then the felts all got sticky so that notes would play forever so for the last while it has been a nice ornament but not really useful. So we decided to get rid of it and get something more up to date that we might actually play. This was done with a heavy heart, but you have to keep moving forwards in this life.

I asked the man who took it away if it would go to a good home. I had a vision of some kind of retirement home for pianos where they could see out their days with plenty of tunes and whatnot. “Well”, he said “we’ll melt down the frame and turn the case into firelighters”. Oh well…

Long blogs

Blimey. Long blog posts are fun to write if you have nothing else to do. I may need to rethink this….

Project Blogging for Fun

It’s been a bit quiet on the blog for the last few weeks. I always said that I blog because I want to force myself to do interesting things so I can write about them. Recently there have been so many interesting things going on that I’ve not had time to write the blog, which is an interesting problem. Or perhaps I’ve persuaded myself that I’m too busy to blog…

That is going to change a bit now though. I’ve decided to experiment with “project blogging”. I’m going to take the thing I’ve just done, which is create some JavaScript code that runs in a web page and can load code into ESP devices, and write it up. I’m doing this retrospectively from diaries that I kept during the development process. If you’re a programmer it might be an interesting read. The posts will appear around the time I did each task. I’ve tidied things up a bit to reduce the number of dead ends and whatnot.

They start around here. If you then click the left hand link at the bottom of the text on each post you can move through them in order. There will be other topics here and there too, and some pictures. You can just see the project posts by using this link.

I’d love to know what you think of it and how I can improve the presentation content. Feel free to comment (he said dangerously).

Travelling shirt

One of my shifts has managed to make its own way to Leeds all by itself by stowing away in a bag. I hope I get it back. It has sentimental value, if no style at all.

Burnby Hall

A casual reader of this blog might form the conclusion that all I do is buy Lego and go to Burnby Hall. Having said that, for the last couple of days they would be completely correct.

The Price of Greed

This post doesn’t reflect well on me. I present it as a salutary tale about greed.

When I started working on the “Connected Little Boxes” I invested in the domain name “cleverlittleboxes.com” as I thought that might work for the name of the product. Then I found out that there actually is a company called Clever Little Boxes which rather scuppered my plans. So I switched to the name “Connected Little Boxes” which is just as meaningful and ties in rather well with our “Connected Humber” project. I spent another six pounds or so on “connectedlittleboxes.com” and went on my merry way.

Last week, via a domain sharing thingy, I got word of an offer for the “cleverlittleboxes.com” domain. The mysterious purchaser was offering 199 dollars for the domain name. Visions of riches swam in front of my eyes. Or at least, enough riches to get a new iPad. So, having done some research on the domain selling site I sent back a counter proposal of around half the price of what I saw as comparable names. This is a long-winded way of saying that I got greedy.

Anyhoo, today I got a rather sniffy response from my mysterious buyer, complaining about my profiteering actions and dropping the offer to a very iPad unfriendly 50 dollars or so. Oh well. I’m going to hang on for the domain for now and see what happens.