Feeds

I read a number of blogs, which I acess via IE7's handy feeds list in the FavoUrites sidebar thingy. One of which is Random Acts of Reality. This morning, I was a bit confused. Tom seemed to be talking about timing and rotor arms. Until I realised that I had gone onto Martin Randle's TR7 16V rally car blog. I'm off to work in a few minutes to build 300 cars. I suppose I'd better wake up.

Another National Treasure

I don't want to Murray the kid, but I think he's going to be better than Schumacher. You just watch.

Sod the housing market.

According to this post on A World To Win, which I found on NHS Blog Doctor, public sector workers such as nurses, teachers and firefighters cannot afford to buy homes in seven out of ten towns in the UK. This comes as no surprise to me. Chez MnG would cost about 10-12 times my salary, such are the house prices in this part of Derby. A deposit on this place would cost more than the 1983 purchase price of my parents' house. Not being one for saving, I'm renting this place, which in itself takes most of my salary. Thank heavens for Tax Credit, but then I suspect that if housing costs hadn't been allowed to run away, there'd be no need for it.

To be honest, owning a house is not something I want to do. My grandmother, a Wren who worked on secret stuff, former history and French teacher, wife of a Marine, had to go into a home last year because, basically, to paraphrase You, Me and Dupree, the Grandma-ness has gone. The home's not a problem. It's owned by friends of the family, and Grandma's best friend, the mother of the owner's wife, is also a resident. The problem is the money grabbing authorities. Because Grandma owned her own home, bought and paid for, my mother is having to sell it to pay for her care. At full market value, mind. She can't rent it out, or sell it to my sister cheaply. Bah.

So bollocks to it. I'm not joining the home-owning bandwagon. I'm going to carry on renting, and play the system for all it's worth, by claiming all that I'm legally entitled to. It's how I can afford to go to college.

Bleurgh

I've had some sort of dreadful lurgy this weekend. Fever, aches, lethargy, stiff neck and a delicate stomach. I feel like shit.

I did it!

So, I've handed my notice in at work, even though I haven't sorted an AAT course out yet. I had planned to stay until summer shutdown in August, but I got to the point where I didn't want to go to work, which is different to the normal 'can't be arsed' feeling everyone gets. Everyone I've spoken to is supportive, so that's ok.

The cars (both ours and the car I got for my brother, which he pays me back for) will of course go back. Hopefully we'll get some money back by reclaiming our bank charges, so we can use that to buy a second car. Something that will be able to tow the TR7. With housing benefit and extra tax credit, we should be able to offset the loss of my salary. And I'll have no more crap hours, and more time with the family.
I suppose I'll have to start exercising more, or I'll turn in to the Goodyear blimp.

A National Treasure!

RF Potts have had their shop in Babington Lane, Derby, for as long as I can remember. If you want to connect a widget to a doobrey, chances are they'll have the lead to do it, or the connectors t omake the lead yourself. Prices are good, too. The only negative is that if they don't have something, it tends not to exist (even if you know it does).
They're open on Easter Monday (today) too! So after spending £1.95 on an F-connector-to-F-connector lead, my cable and my broadband are now working. Cool.

Some work on my TR7, and bodging the cable.

I've done some work on the left door of my TR7. Here's a pic, and there are a few more pics and more details on my TR7 blog.

I nearly didn't post this entry. My broadband's been playing up this weekend. I phoned Virgin Media, and after being told to unplug this and plug that back in, et cetera, that they'd book an engineer for Thursday morning. (My wife, who phoned up, was told at one point we'd never had broadband. Seeing as we were one of the broadband triallists for Derby, that's virgin on the ridiculous. Sorry.)

Anyway, once I'd got off the phone from VM, I tried unplugging the cable modem that was fitted when we upgraded to V+. This worked for a bit. Now, when they installed the V+ box, they split the cable using a quite large metal splitter, with the piece going to the cable modem (a small box with connections, blinkenlightzen and yet another power adapter to find a socket for) being only about 15cm long. This is what's failed, I think, as I've plugged the main cable from the wall into the modem. So we've got broadband, just no cable TV, at least until I can get to the shops later.

Test

This seems to work.
--
Posted via my mobile.

This is good.

I bought this the other day. It's funny as f*ck.

It's fun to charter an accountant.

I've has an epiphany. The other day I found out that I wouldn't get a payrise this year, as basically, I'm not too good at my job. I made too many little, but important mistakes.

Also, #1 stepdaughter has decided to quit studying sciences at sixth form, and get an accounting apprenticeship. She'll go to business college one day a week to study for her AAT qualifications , and work four days, and for this she'll get £100 a week (after a 3 month probation). After 3 years, and gaining AAT membership, she'll earn a cool £300+ a week. Not bad for a 20-year old. And she can then fast-track to full chartered status.

Now I can't get an apprenticeship, being too old, but I can go to college part time for my AAT qualifications. And darling wife's vinyl graphics business is doing very well indeed. So well, in fact that all being well, I could become a house husband, letting her devote more time to the business. I could study part time, and within 5 years have a job that suits me.

And be earning a packet.

I hate short changeovers

I've just finished nights, and next week I'm on days. I do two weeks of days where I get up at sixish and get home anywhere between 4pm & 6pm; followed by two weeks of nights, starting at 8:30pm and getting home around 5am. Except Friday nights, where I start and finish 2 hours earlier.
This means I have four different kinds of weekends:

1. days-days, which is a normal weekend
2. days-nights, which is almost an extra day (I try to get a bit of kip in on the Monday, but not always)
3. nights-nights, where being a family man, I have to turn my body clock around for a couple of days
4. nights-days, which is like losing half your weekend (especially this week, when the clocks go forward).

I embark on a week of nights by having a lateish night Sunday, getting up at about 8am-ish (when the kids go to school), hopefully getting a couple of hours kip in the afternoon, and then hammering my body clock into submission by working all night. It takes me a couple of days to get the swing of things, which means that by the end of Friday night (about 3-4am), I'm still wide awake. I can't sleep straight after work at the best of times. I can't usually get to sleep before 5ish, so I don't wake up again till half of Saturday's gone. Bah.
Then again, Easter weekend is a type 2 weekend, so I've almost got a 5 day weekend. Bargain.

SitePoint Blogs » Adobe CS2 and the Case of the Disappearing Thumbnails!

SitePoint Blogs » Adobe CS2 and the Case of the Disappearing Thumbnails!

This page tells you how to get Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop CS2 to display thumbnail icons in Windows Explorer. Useful stuff.

What is a classic car?

With cars from the early 80's coming up for 25 years old now, this is a question that keeps coming up. Cars from this era are the early consumer cars, with ECUs and ABS, comfortable, reliable, economical and kind of soulless, really. My daily driver, a 55 plate Toyota Corolla, ticks all of these boxes. It's a nice car to drive, but only inasmuch as it's effortless and doesn't detract from the purpose of the journey. The enjoyment comes when you get to B, not necessarily in the drive from A to B. Although a good song on the stereo helps.

Because of this, there is an arguement that early 80's cars aren't 'classic' cars. Here in the UK in the mid 90's, cars 25 years or older became exempt from road tax. This was frozen in 1997, when the current Labour government came to power, and now only cars built before 1973 (I think) are exempt. There is a call to restore this 25 year exemption, and herein lies the rub. In 2007, 25 year old cars tend to be in better condition than in years gone by. So there are more 25 year old common or garden consumer cars around, which many people would not consider classics. Having said that, the throwaway consumer society means that older consumer cars are being scrapped before they're truly worn out, as the cost of replacing expensive components is more than the value of the car.

There is an element of agism, in that an Austin 1100 is more likely to be considered a classic than a Metro, but both are small family cars. My TR7 wouldn't be considered a classic by some owners of earlier TRs. On this page of his 1941 Buick restoration, Matt laments the scarcity of '40s cars at American classics shows, being underwhelmed by 'ordinary' cars from the '50, '60s and '70s. But then his Buick wouldn't have been considered a classic in the '40s.

To me, 'classic' is a bit of a cliche. A better word would be 'cherished', in that a cherished car is a car used and maintained for the love of the car itself. Of course this definition includes chavved-up Corsas, so for older cars (say 25-30 years old) I'd favour the term 'historic'.

And tax exemption? For purely selfish reasons (my TR7 is 26 years old), I support the 25 year cutoff being restored, but maybe the cutoff date only changing every 5 years or so.

New boxes

We got a V+ box installed today. That went well, but the separate cable modem (needed because unlike the Samsung cable box, a V+ box has no modem built in) took me all morning to set up after being passed around ntl's Virgin Media's phone system, including an internal tech support section. Eventually I got through to a helpful chap who said "I see the problem. There you go, it should work now." And it did. The old Samsung box, which they moved upstairs because crazily enough it's cheaper to have a V+ box installed and the old box moved (£5 a month x 12 = £60) than to pay to have the old box taken away (£75), still doesn't work. Must ring Virgin tomorrow.

Stoneleigh

I went to the Triumph spares day at Stoneleigh Park, Warwickshire last Sunday. And I enjoyed the day immensely, despite being on my own (my mate Paul couldn't come on pain of pain, as it was his other half's parents' wedding anniversary. Wuss.). So apart not talking to anyone who wasn't taking money off me, I amused myself by looking at some fine cars (including a blue Dolomite that would be perfect for #1 daughter's first car if she didn't want something boring 2modern, safe and reliable") and buying a few bits for GOVerness's restoration (viz, a satin black aerosol for the quarterlight glass frames, some bits to hold welds together, a twisted wire cup thing to get rid of rust and paint and a set of nut splitters for the bolts on the bumper. Hehe.)

Oops

Seems I made a mistake. I tried to be flash and use Blogger's custom domain feature to set my blog as a subdomain on my website (http://www.marknotgeorge.co.uk if you're interested). But it didn't work and so my blog's been invisible till just a few minutes ago. And my "L" key seems to have a crumb or something stuck under it. So apoogies for any misspeings.

Bugger bugger bum

Been working on the TR7. I managed to get the left hand door off ok, after trying and failing to get the seat belt reel bolts out a few days ago. Then I started to investigate the rusty bits again. Poking my trusty screwdriver in the bottom of the rear wing, I caught my finger on a jagged edge.


Ouch. I'll have to have a tetanus jab now.

Ha Ha Ha Ha

Here's something funny:



Thanks to Tom Reynolds and Peter David for sharing this.

Bah!

After downloading various applets for my Nokia 3230, and wasting a couple of quid of phone credit, I've drawn a blank on finding a one-shot photo blogging solution for my phone. Ideally I want something I can email or preferably MMS to my Blogger account. But nothing as yet works with the new Blogger Beta API. Bah!

testing

This seems to work.

EDIT: No it doesn't. There should be a picture of #5 being a monster. Oh well.