So one is ready for clearing

Can’t remember what I did at work, oh actually it was rather dull. Something to do with environment maps. It’s been very windy. Went out for a run at about five thirty, managed about eight miles. Had a shower. Did a but more work. Then took some wine gravity readings. One was ready, so added the stabiliser and gave it a stirring with the drill. Then added the finings and another stir. The other one is about 996, so I’m going to leave it a couple more days to see if it drops some more, it won’t harm. The other one takes around fourteen days to clear, so hopefully this one I can do the finings on Thursday and Friday, that one only takes about a week to clear, so probably ready for bottling next Thursday. The other one will be a week after. Then it’s on to the red and the other white, which I can’t even remember what it is now.

Haven’t heard back from plumber. I think I’ll cling-strip the rest of the paint, I can’t be assed to steam it.

So bathrooms are bloody expensive

So started off by finishing off what I was doing last week, that basically took all day. Walked Sasha. Got most bits finished then went to the gym and did Combat. Came back a did a few more bits. Looking at some parallel reduction stuff, which sounds more impressive than it actually is. Got the quote through from the plumber. It was a bit higher than I’d like, but it looks like he wants to remove all the walls and replace then, which is a hell of a job. I was contemplating removing all the tiles myself and making good the walls. But to be honest, I can’t really be assed. So I think I’ll just strip the rest of the paint off and fill in all the crap plaster, then it’s all his problem. Still have the ceiling to repaint, but if I get a good run on it on Sunday I should get the lot done. I can then move on to the lounge, although the entire decorating budget has now been used up. Still contemplating putting a TV in as well though….

Oh, I think the wine fermentation is complete. I’ll take a gravity reading tomorrow and then degas it all if its ready.

Welcome back DIY Sundays

So woke up at 9AM, couldn’t really get back to sleep. So printed out all my ‘evidence’ for ‘Bathstore’. Headed over there at 11AM. Started cruising at towel rails. Eventually got to the guy I saw yesterday. Said I was after a towel rail after taking his advice and that he’d got his figures wrong. He went through them and saw it was actually the web site that was wrong, but had no problem at all in honouring the figures. So basically for an extra sixty odd quid I got four hundred quids worth of towel rail. They made 0.3% mark up. Came home, put some paint stripper on the glass above the bathroom door then started working on digging in the alarm cable. I then noticed a major problem, none of the paint was really keyed into the plaster properly and it was coming off in handfuls. If you put a weighty tile on that it would just rip off and fall on the floor. So I decided just to steam the lot off and be done with. Eight hours later and three quarters of it is done. I’ve let the plumber know that I’m quite happy to take all the tiles off and make vaguely good the backing if it reduces time and cost. At least then I’ve kinda had some hand in it. Finished just before eight, then with an hour cleanup, in bath by nine. Now time to make a curry. I even went for a run, for a break! I worked hard today, but it’s very satisfying. Jamie wonders why we don’t have sex anymore, it’s because I’m knackered as I do everything, while he does nothing.

I bought a bathroom

Not sure what happened yesterday, it was probably very dull. Oh that was it, Jamie was home all day with Ebola, so annoyed the shit out of me. Did work. Went to the gym and did Pump with Trudie. No extra tonight as no Laverne. Watched the first one of the new series of ‘The Apprentice’. I do enjoy that. Went to bed in the spare room as the noise coming from ours was horrendous. Didn’t sleep well.

Woke up. Jamie was now on the couch, thankfully he’d now shut up and was asleep. Made breakfast for three and took the paper back to bed. Jamie joined me and managed to keep his respiratory system under control. I got up and measured all the bathroom walls. Shopping arrived. We then ventured out. First to Tesco to get a passport photo and a flu jab. Photo machine broke down and the pharmacy had just closed. Managed to get photo at Tesco photo lab. Booked in for flu jab. Went to pet shop and Argos, came back. Had flu jab. Then went to B&Q. Bought paint. Saw some floor tiles we liked. Went to bathstore. To cut a long story short, we bought a bath, sink and loo, together with all the other shit and wall tiles. I came to two grand, I could have saved ninety quid online, but the bloke was nice and I have the feeling that if anything was wrong I could just go back there and punch him. Time was getting on and the jewellers closed at 5PM. I was in Cabot Circus car park at four fifty. I ran right across town and made it to Parsons. There shutter door was already partway down. I dived under it, much to the surprise of the four women behind the till standing there with there handbags. They said they were closed, I looked at my watch. I still had fifty seconds. I was dripping in sweat, just said I’d come to pick up a repair. They somewhat relented now figuring out that I wasn’t about to rob them and managed to pick up my necklace. Drove up to Cribbs. Went in Topps Tiles. Bought four real stone marble tiles for the sink to go on. Need to pick up next week. Then went across to B&Q and bought the floor tiles.

Came back home. Walked the dogs. Then worked out bathstore would have been ninety quid cheaper online, but considering they have an ever changing sale on every three minutes anyway, it’s all a bit impossible to work out. Went through doors for the cupboard with Jamie. Did the accounts, sent off for a quote for the doors. Bought taps from Amazon. So the only things outstanding now are a towel rail, the shower and some blinds. And yes we did spent over four hundred quid on a bathroom cabinet (before all the various discounts), but it’s a really cool cabinet. You won’t get that off fucking QVC.

If your email breaks down for an hour, don’t email me, Facebook message me, then leave two different messages on two phones

I spent the whole day basically tracing one bug. It was to do with shadow flicking and it was getting on my tits. Walked the dog. Still bug hunting. Went for a run. Came back to a FaceBook message, a message on my mobile and a message on the home phone, all from my mother. All asking for the password to log into her email. It’s all setup and doesn’t actually require one. So I tried to log into my own email and got an authorisation error. So a bit of digging. I finally managed to log into my Ubuntu box and reboot it. It took bloody ages to start up and then was slow as hell, still no email. Rebooted it. Web server came back up but that was about all. Managed to copy the syslog across to my PC. It did a kernel panic at about 6PM, ran out of memory. After the reboot I did a process list and there were an absolute shit load of apache services firing up. This looked highly suspect. I killed apache, then started digging more. I thought I was getting a denial of service attack, so added a log to the firewall and sure enough there was an access a second from some external site which was trying to randomly access my site. Every access would spawn a new apache server service and eventually it would go pop. So blocked the IP on the firewall. Restarted apache but it still needed another reboot to get it all back together. I think I need to limit the amount of services it can fire up. But that’s a job for another day. Or may be I should stick some more memory in it.

Then the plumber man turned up. He was fine, young chap, made vague notes, I’m sure he will give me an even vaguer quote. Finally traced and fixed the bug. I do need to twiddle it a bit more though, at least I know where it came from now.

Wine o’clock.

I think I’ll go for a double ender

Took Sasha to daycare at 6:30. Went back to bed. I couldn’t persuade Jamie to do anything exciting with my penis, although I gave certain hints. Got up and had coffee. I then spent probably the best part of three hours trying to get something to work, which basically was just badly implemented and almost non-existent in places. Ranted a lot. Then spent the rest of the day fixing odd bugs, wasn’t really in the mood for anything else. Yet another set of small hand tools arrived, I was determined to find the correct one for that bloody HK250. And finally cracked it, it was a Torx T5. So I can now strip it done. I think I will strip it down completely, make a list of all the parts and then attempt to rebuild it from scratch. That’ll be a fun job for my retirement as I haven’t got clue when I’m going to do it otherwise.

Went to gym and did Pump. I do like Trudie who plays the CD about 25% faster than it should be, it gets it all out the way.

Heard again from Plumber man. He recommends stuff from bath store, so we should be fine there. I don’t think the p-shape bath is going to fit, so instead I think I’ll try and go for a double ended slightly wider one. It’ll still be a whirlpool. It’s all a bit stressful. I need to do some sealing of the ceiling, then a bit of painting. Plumber man is coming tomorrow, we will chat, he will quote, I will have a coronary then spent seven hundred quid on helicopter lessons instead.

Second fermentation started

Started late as I was waiting for something to be fixed. It wasn’t fixed even then. Still, by the end of the day I had everything checked in and working. It was yet another miserable and rainy day. I spent a long time looking at bathroom suites and tiles. The p-shaped bath I wanted was too big. It came to about two and a half grand. Tonight I found another one, bath, screen, panel, sink, loo, cistern and taps, about eleven hundred quid. Just need to look at tiles. Went out for a run in the rain. Came back, fed the dogs. Then went for another run. Had a shower. Measured the gravity of the wine, both were bang on at 1010. So sterilised two more buckets and transferred them across. Now set for the secondary fermentation, which should take about two weeks. Sat down and looked at more bathrooms.

How hard can it be to route 15M of cable?

Started reasonably early I guess. Well on time anyway. I had a nasty bug left over from last Friday. It probably took me the best part of five hours to trace it. One line slightly wrong. Always the bloody way. Then I had hud rendering flickering all over the place, that needed a bit more tracing. The weather has been shit, constant rain. Walked Sasha in the drizzle. Went to the gym and did Combat. Was okay. Came back and did another hour or so, have to resolve a lot of code and data now before I can check it all in. Hopefully will be quite quick tomorrow as I want to get on to something a bit more interesting.

Keep trying to work out how I can get this hdmi cable from the bay window up to the ceiling. I reckon I can get part of it under the floor, then up the stud wall. I may have to do some exploratory drilling and sawing of flooring. It will be an interesting project anyway.

Changing seasons

So once again I was up like a shot. Okay, may be not then. As the weather has now certainly changed it’s time to knock Geocaching on the head and crack on with the DIY. So I was lying in bed researching DIY projects. I’m going to get someone in to do the bathroom, so as long as I get that sorted that’ll be fine. It’s just not worth me attempting it. I’m sure I could do it eventually, it would just take about five years. So I’m going to crack on with the living room. First things first is preparation, and that means running cables. Lots of cables. I need to get an HDMI cable up from behind where the TV is to a mid point across the ceiling. This is for the projector. I think the best way to do this is cut a hole through the floor behind the TV, then another over by the door, pull the cable across here and then another hole over by the archway. Then pull up here and drill through the bottom of the studding, then up the wall (I’ll put a speaker cable up this way as well), through the ceiling, then through the floor of the landing and across the floor of the wardrobe, then across the ceiling. I also need to run power and probably a network cable as well. I’ll probably run two HDMI cables for redundancy. I reckon theres a good couple of Sunday’s work there to start with. Also I’m thinking of some wifi controllable down lights.

Got up, boiled eggs, picked up dog poo. Drove to Tytherington. Did the puzzle cache which was the last remaining one there. That brings me up to 315 now, happy with that. Message from captain James that the fog was lifting. Drove to Staverton. We had the air field pretty much to ourselves due to the weather. We did lots and lots of autos. Pretty much got the hang of them now. Took the ‘Operational Procedures’ exam again. Got eleven out of sixteen. Had another pop at it and got fifteen out of sixteen. We had a look at a couple of questions, there was one there that neither of us thought was correct. Some of the semantics of the answers is just bizarre. Anyway, passed. So now on to radio telephony.

Came back. Went for a quick run. Imported helicopter footage of today. Have a bath. Drink wine.

So where will the dog sleep?

Okay, so I had a bit of a lazy morning, which kind of drifted into the afternoon. Read the paper, studied ‘Operational Procedures’, almost got the hang of that now. Finally got up and walked Sasha. Had some toast. Then I went to do a home check for a horse sized dog. Hmmm. “Where will the dog sleep at night?”. Lets just say an incorrect answer was supplied. There’s a few other things as well. I think I have only ever failed about one home check before. But have to think of the dog, wrong type of dog this time for the situation. Drove to Curry’s, tried to find a Hero 4 black edition, no chance. Got stuck in the car park. Got back home, then went out for a couple of hours, there was a fairly new Geocache over towards the station so walked there. Spent about ten minutes standing under a bridge up to my ankles in water. Found it eventually. That takes me up to 214, which sounds much better than 213. Did the accounts. Think I’ll have a bath now. Flying tomorrow.