bunn

I took my car to get the iffy wheel bearing replaced. The garage said, where is the bolt for your wheelnuts?

I said, dunno, is it not in the glovebox?

They looked. No, they said.

Then we all looked all over the car in all of its many many cubbies. We took All the Things out, and there were many of them. I found things I'd forgotten that I owned! I found a hidden trove of coins for parking machines, and a spare dog coat!

But the wheelnut bolt was nowhere to be seen.

They tried to phone the last garage that did things to the wheels to see if they had accidentally kept the wheel bolt, but the last garage was not answering its phone.

So finally, they got out their Special Device, and brute-forced the wheel off and fixed it. So all was well.

But I thought: well, I feel I should know where the locking wheelnut bolt is hiding really, what if something bad happens to a wheel and I need to apply the spare (which frankly is a job I would always try to call a rescue van for, but there are places where there might take ages or no phone signal, after all)

So I took up my car, and went to the last garage to operate upon the wheels, where a helpful gentleman was eating a potato that he put aside at once to attend to my diffident enquiry as to the location of my locking wheel nut bolt.

And he went straight to the glove box and the FIRST THING he took out of it was the little yellow bag with the bolt in it. Which I would SWEAR wasn't there when I looked, and when the two Other Garage Blokes looked.

Then he returned in triumph to his potato. I suppose I did get the thing back and that's the main thing, but blimey I felt an absolute utter twit. :-D

I just took a backup of my entire LJ, including all the 3000+ photos and comments, using Bookblogger. The result is a massive 724Mb PDF file.

I very much hope that the rumours that the Russian internet will be cut off from the rest of us by a virtual Iron Curtain are untrue. That would be a grim thing, even if the fact that we can all talk so relatively easily to one another now about shared interests and experiences hasn't had the impact I once hoped.

The rumours pushed me in the direction of taking a copy of my own stuff, anyway. I have a copy on Dreamwidth, but not of the photos. Though glancing through the PDF, it hasn't caught all of them, even then - it looks like places where I put a number of photos together without any commentary between them only caught the first image. And I can't remember where I was hosting images before 2009 but it seems to have vanished. Ah well.

It had a long list of passwords that it thought it knew and wanted me to change.

I assume that it got them from some very ancient data dump. There were a bunch of things on there I'd forgotten I ever had a password to, and of the things that I actually still use, none of the passwords was even close to being up to date. I wonder why it assumed that I was still using passwords from... idk, probably around 2010, at a guess? Maybe earlier.

New dishwasher arrived and was installed and they took away the old one very efficiently, all masked and with the windows wide open for a healthy draught. This year has been all about the healthy draughts so far, the whole thing of 'keeping the heat in' has rather blown away...

It seems they don't make the kind of dishwasher with a sort of 2/3's door and the controls on the outside any more : modern dishwashers have the controls on the top of the door. So the old door panel didn't fit. Of course it didn't. I bought a new one: it was cheap, and I didn't attempt to match colours, it's a dark shiny grey, whereas the rest of the kitchen is cherry wood. But the dishwasher works and I fitted the new panel and handle yesterday. I don't think it looks too weird.

Had a house viewing on Friday: I assume if they had wanted to buy they would have sent us a message by now. Hey ho. We air the house out and clean it, then go out for the morning so the estate agent can let the viewers in, so we never actually see them.

Theo is enjoying Virtual Dog School and is getting quite good at walking to heel. He and Fankil the Grey Cat are good friends at the moment: they both like to come upstairs together in the mornings to wake us up at breakfast time. They don't tend to arrive too early, so I don't object.

Made squash soup, walnut bread and apple crumble today. Mum was supposed to be coming to bubble for lunch, but the roads were icy so she decided not.

Need to decide whether to sign up for Worldbuilding Exchange. I sort of want to finish some of my long WIPs, really, but they all feel a bit draggy at the moment, so it's tempting to sign up to do something new instead. On the other hand, that sort of attitude isn't going to get the WIPs finished!

I keep thinking that at last I am being Efficient and Getting Stuff Done, and then I find something I have utterly forgotten that seems like the kind of thing I'd normally remember. Today, it was the live session of Dog School, which I forgot was at 11. And I am astonishingly behind on comment replies, which usually don't seem like anything at all. Still, at least the laundry is clean.

These have just appeared outside the pub. Weirdly, I would be happier if someone in the village had grown the pumpkins, but they have not. I saw the sticker before the pumpkin people were built: they are from Tesco. I am not sure why this matters.

I've been off adventuring in Middle-earth last week and will post about that once I've finished writing it up & sorting the photos, but that may take a bit longer since I must face the fact that my laptop is dying.

It has long had a knackered SD card slot, and several knackered USB ports, and more recently, the N key is hanging on by a thread and you have to hit the spacebar right in the middle if you want spaces. And more recently the space bar has taken to flying off completely! But the latest thing is that the widget inside the machine that detects if you have closed the lid has decided that 'closed the lid' is now defined as 'moved the lid in any way' and it is requiring more and more persistence to persuade it that the computer is officially open again.

I was thinking about either fishing around inside OR sending it to A Bloke to see what they could fix, but thinking about the list of ailments, I'm now thinking maybe it's new laptop time. This machine is 4 and a half years old now, and the important bits are still working, so I may go for an Asus again.

Oh, and I am way behind on posting Things Written here, for some reason, but it was the Innumerable Stars reveal yesterday, so here are two things wot I wrote:
Mind's Delight : In the dwarf-city of Belegost, teenage Elrond and Elros are bored, and Maglor is not sure what to expect of half-elves.
and
Unbridled Turmoils : The vampire Thuringwethil is a servant of Sauron. Meássë is a servant of Morgoth himself... in so far as Meássë serves anyone but chaos. They're made for one another.

Yes, the boiler has died again! As usual, I am glad we have a gas fire and an electrically heated shower. I have sent an email to Artifice Plumbing, the nom de guerre of our current Boiler Man, and live in hope.

It's actually surprisingly warm for March, with primroses and daffodils everywhere, gardens full of flowering magnolias and camellias, the hedges full of flowering blackthorn and even the odd bluebell showing. Probably a good thing, considering the whole boiler thing.

Current Mood: chilly

At the moment, all the cats are staying indoors, because Nenya hasn't quite completed her vaccinations, and also none of the cats has yet worked out how to use a catflap, and we also want to make sure that Fankil will come back before he gets to go out. I think he will: he's pretty good about coming when called, now, though we still can't touch him except very gently to boop his nose or stroke his chin.

I've taken Gothmog out a few times to explore the great outdoors with me, but she doesn't seem keen to go far and it's tricky taking her out and keeping the other two in, because Nenya was VERY keen to explore.

( cut for bodily fluids and a dead newt )

I could have done without this, because I am still stricken with a horrible cough, sore throat and hurty lungs. I feel FINE as long as I sit still and do nothing much, but we took a gentle walk with Rosie this morning which was moderately hilly (because Cornwall is moderately hilly, there's no escaping it) and I then duly felt appalling.

I really hate the style of form captcha where one must demonstrate that one is a human being by choosing all the photos that contain cars, or all the photos that contain street signs, for example.

I don't know how people with vision impairments get past them at all. You have nine poor quality fuzzy images, some of which show part of an item that might, or might not, be a car or a street sign. And then there is the 'is this a car / street sign?' question. I just failed a captcha because an image showed me a thing that I would call a bus. But apparently to a captcha, it's a car. And if the 'street sign' shows a different language or indeed alphabet, sometimes you can't work out exactly what it is. Or it shows you a photo with what are probably cars, but they are tiny and far away!

Aaaaaaaaaaa! Come back, mental arithmetic captchas, all is forgiven!

Phonecall from NHS: will I come in for checkup? Well, OK I say, and agree a date and time.

( Read more... )

Scrolling quickly through messages telling me which IP addresses have been autoblocked on various websites that I work on, because of dodgy-looking activity over the festive season, I notice that there is a sudden upswing in Russian and Ukrainian IP addresses. (My sites are almost all hosted in the UK, because dealing with the data wrangles of hosting outside the EU is a headache I do not need).

Normally, attempts to get into my websites come largely from the USA and (inexplicably) France. The orthodoxy, I believe, is to assume that these US attacks are not really from the US, but are from US-based machines hijacked from Eastern Europe. (I don't know about the French thing. Nobody else seems to be specially targeted by the French, so I have seen no discussion on it).

I don't know what to make of the sudden prominence of Russian IPs. Have the US authorities cracked down on the hijacked machines? Are the new attacks reported as Russian and Ukrainian, actually now coming from hijackers physically located in the USA, in a kind of weird symmetry? Is it entirely chance?

I'll probably never know. I can only feel vaguely reassured that the software is doing its thing and nobody is complaining.

I have recently become particularly sensitive to cries of 'Noooooooo!' at climactic moments in movies. I may even have gone so far as to say 'I don't think people actually say 'nooooooo!' in moments of crisis.'

And then this evening, Ruggie tried to go trotting into the house, having fallen over in a thick muddy puddle, and being deeply encrusted with mud. The noise I made as I leaped to grab him before he hit the carpet was pretty much exactly : Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

I just randomly inflicted a video of April and June the Devon Ladies on

topum and then it occurred to me that possibly, the fame of April and June might not have spread to all corners of my LJ friends list, and therefore I should inflict them on the rest of you too. So here they are. Topum's idea of turning on the automatic captioning on this video made me laugh, although I'm impressed that the autocaption did at least guess the right language....

I wrote a series of tiny stories about readers Not Leaving Kudos on ArchiveofOurOwn, prompted by a thread over on the

ushobwri community. Kept them in a file for a bit and added one when I thought of one, and eventually in a fit of randomness posted them on Ao3.

I woke up this morning to find that 600-word story suddenly has way more kudoses than anything else I'd uploaded there. I find this hilarious.

It's here.

Every time I see the label on an Ebay listing that says 'fast and free' my brain automatically fils in 'the last whose realm was.. fast and free.. between the mountains and the Sea'. no wait that's wrong.

EVERY time. Sheds an intriguing light on Gilgalad's catering preferences, and indeed on Elven cuisine in general.

While walking the dogs, I met in passing a chap in our village. He was outside a house having a smoke, and he greeted me with some observation about the weather, and patted Brythen.

Normally I would have chatted back in a more enthusiastically friendly manner, but I had a vague feeling that someone had told me something was suspect about this particular person, so while polite, I made rather more of an effort to move on quickly without engaging than I would do normally.

Only about five minutes later did it occur to me that my vague feelings of distrust and suspicion had their root in the fact that he bore a noticeable resemblance in appearance and clothing to Owen Harper, from Torchwood. Whoops.

People who tell you to 'go with your gut instinct' presumably don't suffer from this kind of problem. My instincts are constantly swayed by being bathed in a sea of suspicious and dubious characters and improbable scenarios from around the galaxy. They rarely seem to have any validity.

Was in a medieval mood today, so we went to Cotehele house for an outing. Here is my mum, demonstrating doorways designed for seriously short people only. This would probably be more helpful if I could remember how tall my mother is. 5'1-ish ? Less? Considerably Shorter Than Me, anyway.
IMG_20140727_155337

This morning as I was returning with the hounds from a morning walk (thankfully, much cooler today than it has been: Oh! the humidity!) I was accosted by a woman waving the implement whose name causes controversy. Some call it a fish-slice, others, a spatula, and I think last time we debated this matter there were other suggestions too. The thing you use to turn stuff in a frying-pan so it browns on both sides. Anyway...

A tall, grey-haired lady, slim and jeans-clad, with intelligent aquiline features, approached me, waving this utensil.
"Is this yours?" she said.
Somewhat baffled and for some reason, feeling rather guilty, I examined the item, and was relieved to see that it was unfamiliar. At least, whatever the dogs, cats, etc may do, the kitchen equipment is not out annoying the neighbours.
"No!" I said
"I found it in the garden. We often find things in the garden. Something brings them. I think perhaps it was from a barbecue," and she looked at me hopefully.
I admitted that it did indeed look like the kind of thing that someone might use if barbecueing.

"The thing is... I've lost a shoe," she went on. "You haven't seen a shoe..? A trainer kind of shoe?"
I shook my head in bafflement.
"Sometimes it brings things, and sometimes it takes them away. I'm hoping that if I can find where this came from, I might find my shoe."
I assured her that I would look out for her shoe, and if I found it, I would return it to her house pronto.
And she went off up the lane, fish slice in hand, looking for her shoe.

Honestly, this really happened. I assume, possibly, a fox at work? All the other explanations seem even less likely.

I have become very fed up of removing 21 tiny screws in order to open up the back of my laptop, which I needed to do in order to :
( Read more... )

So last night I rebelled and after fixing the power jack again, I only replaced 15 screws. Because I'm going to have to take them all out again, aren't I...

Apparently one of those screws I didn't replace was the screw that was causing my Windows updates to fail?

( Read more... )
Now I am installing update 12 of 37, and wondering whether this Toshiba would be a useable replacement.( Read more... )And I am absolutely, definitely never buying a Vaio again. Not only is this power jack socket cheap and horrid, (and bending it back into place so it works is starting to knacker the plastic around it) but I can't even find anyone in Europe who will sell me a replacement for it. *rage*

Current Mood: grumpy
Current Location: A land where geolocation doesn't work

I was just reading about Edward Thorndike's puzzle boxes - an experiment where he put a cat or dog into a box that had some sort of release lever to let it out, and waited to see if the cat or dog would work out whether/how to press the lever.

I now desperately want to put, say, 100 human beings into puzzle boxes, and see how long it takes each of THEM to work out that pushing a lever in a darkened room opens the door. Perhaps my view of humanity is pessimistic, but based on many of the support phonecalls I get, not only are most human beings incapable of empirically working out the solution to a problem, but they are also a species absolutely beset with cargo cult beliefs about the things that appeared to work but in the real world cannot possibly have done so...

I'm fairly sure that the people on my LJ friendslist can indeed reason their way out of a paper bag, but to be honest, I'm not sure you lot are entirely representative.

Both Az and Brythen were expert puzzle-solvers of the canine variety. Az could open doors, turn keys,and undo tent-zips, and it's a delight to see Brythen realise that he's on the wrong side of a fence and work out at speed how to navigate through a series of gates and gaps to the right side of it (when he decides to do so, and OK, sometimes he decides not to :-D ) . He can open a dog-crate from the inside, too. But These are Not Typical Dogs.

I've agreed to teach a photo preparation course for beginners, and I'm trying to decide what software to show them.

It needs to be freeware, or at least start out as freeware with reasonable functionality, I don't mind a paid upgrade path. I've looked at Sumopaint, Pixlr, PicMonkey and Befunky, and am probably keenest on Sumopaint. No, Pixlr. No, Sumopaint.

I'm planning to take a look also at paint.net, Photopos, and Photoplus, but all of those have to be installed locally, which may cause my beginners some agony, and are also windows-only, whereas the web-based tools are more cross-platformy.

They all have their downsides! Any recommendations, thoughts, ideas? What functions do you think would be most useful/entertaining/fun for a mixed bunch of people, most of them old enough to have had no computer skills training?

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Entries tagged with life is not like star wars

Locking Wheel Nuts!

Ooof

Google sent me an email this morning telling me to change my passwords

A dull update

Rural life

Laptop woes & things written.

I HAVE EMAILLED A PLUMBER

The iniquity of Cat

recaptcha

Health v system

IP's blocked

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

April and June

Not leaving Kudos

Fast and free

Reality, left. Fiction, right

Short woman, short archways. Also, mysterious Woman with Fishslice

A Screw Cargo Cult

Problem Solving

Photo editing software: any recommendations?