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Jan 10, 2020 11:04:06 GMT
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On the pavements. Wrong way up one way streets. Wrong way up one way streets on the pavements. Ignoring traffic signals. Ear phones in so they don't have a clue what's going on around them. Red lights on the front, and that's the ones that have any lights... James, you do realise you have just beautifully described 99% of pedestrians, cyclists, motorcyclists, taxis, Jeepneys, police cars, ambulances, general motorists and, quite often buses, here in Manila? How the hell this country has a population the size it has, when we should be picking the bits out of tyre treads, escapes me. I knew someone who married a Columbian lady, nice girl, one of their ‘upper class set’. Obviously they had to go to Columbia to visit in-laws, with his parents, And hired a car whilst they were out there My friend asked which side of the road he should drive on He was told it didn’t matter! |
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Jan 11, 2020 20:28:41 GMT
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As much as I'm enjoying being a moaning old fart and reading your experiences, sadly I've done something so we have to deal with that. The radiator turned up. Did I get my plumbing in the right place? First, a conundrum. The instructions for the radiator say water must come in at the end opposite the bleed valve and exit under it. Fair enough. Except I've got two pipes sticking out of the floor and no clue which way the water flows. I could work out which way round they are at the boiler. And I know how they run under the floor under the bathroom. I know how they run under the office floor. But how they all join under the landing is anybodies guess. Easy, lift a floorboard on the landing and take a look. If only Mrs Sweetpea hadn't had the carpet put down. Damn it Janet! (Mrs Sweetpea isn't called Janet by the way, It's a quote from some something or other.) Needed a cup of tea and a sit down while I thought of a plan. It was hard to concentrate 'cos I seemed to have some song about 'time warps' in my head. ("It's just a jump to the left. And then a step to the right...") Eventually it was obvious. So obvious I don't understand why I needed to think about it.  Take an old piece of pipe that I took out last week and join the valves together. Turn the heating on and see which end gets hot first. So, did the pipework wind up in the right places?  As luck would have it, it would seem that the pipe work did wind up in the right places. Right, as you were, back to cyclists and toilets. James |
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Jan 11, 2020 20:51:39 GMT
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Very tidy office, some good woodwork.
Looks like the office is nearly done that can only mean its time to get back on with the MR2?
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Jan 11, 2020 21:05:00 GMT
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Very tidy office, some good woodwork. Looks like the office is nearly done that can only mean its time to get back on with the MR2? If only there wasn't a large double decker in my life... Update being written! |
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Jan 11, 2020 21:39:23 GMT
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Very tidy office, some good woodwork. Looks like the office is nearly done that can only mean its time to get back on with the MR2? If only there wasn't a large double decker in my life... Update being written! A double decker should only take 10mins to scoff down whats taking you so long.
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Jan 19, 2020 18:38:03 GMT
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Time to update my threads... Mrs Sweetpea has moved back into her global headquarters (AKA 'the little bedroom', AAKA 'the office'. There was some shifting and assembling of desks and cabinets but nothing exciting. Oh I forgot, I got a promotion too (in Mrs Sweetpea's empire). So as well as... Global President of Carpentry. Chief Operating Officer - Painting and Decorating. Chief Engineer - Electrical Infrastructure. Engineer in Charge of Plumbing and Heating. Chief Technology Officer - Information Technology and Networks. Head of Logistics (Although I think this means 'humping desks and cabinets around'). I'm also now... Senior Executive Officer - Global Telecoms Systems. This came about because her new VoIP phone thingy wasn't sending a ringing tone back to the caller so they didn't know what was going on until, suddenly, a voice said "hello". It took me ages messing about in the menus just to get it to put a call through to the hand set. This turned out to be because you can set business hours for the 'Company' and for the 'Staff' and it took a while to work out what each stage was doing. And then, working out why it wasn't sending a ring tone back to the caller took a few more hours but I found a tick box that turned it on. In the old days if your phone didn't ring either it was broken, or more likely, you had no friends. You wait until you get a VoIP phone. There are an unbelievable number of ways of making it not work while not actually being broken. I'm expecting a significant percentage uplift in my remuneration for taking on this new role. I reckon 20 or 30 percent sounds reasonable. (What's 30 percent of nothing?) In other news, I finally fixed the Christmas lights from the outside of the house.  These are all LEDs. Ever wondered why an LED would fail? I mean it's not like a filament bulb blowing...  You see the leg on the right is shiny inside the LED but the one on the left is dull? Water has tracked between the leg and the plastic of the LED until it got to the actual light emitting diode bit right inside. The amount of moisture that got in would be infinitesimally small but that's all it takes. Pop! Speaking of moisture where it shouldn't be... I've been playing with the car too. |
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Last Edit: Jan 19, 2020 18:42:09 GMT by Sweetpea
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Jan 19, 2020 18:49:23 GMT
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Christmas lights?? You’re either waaaaay too early or you’ve missed it! 😜
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Jan 21, 2020 12:35:07 GMT
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we have these IP phones (sure you know but for the benefit of the jury they use office network, rather than a land line) took me 4 months to clear the voice mail icon, and when i did it was just 5 seconds of dead air.  |
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npp
Part of things
Posts: 121 
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Jan 21, 2020 21:36:00 GMT
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we have such things as well. They have one big advantage: You have to log in every morning for people to be able to call you. If you forget ... Let's just say nobody's called me in the office since we've had this system installed. (And before that it was mostly people trying to speak to the fire station which must have a similar number.)
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Feb 14, 2020 21:16:05 GMT
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I’m broken! Last weekend we took Mum In Law back to France. My main job was to get the mower going and to mow the lawn. Hmmm. The mower, an MTD, is a brilliant thing. But the lawn is more of a field, was very wet, and very long. It’s so warm and wet there that even the daffodils are coming up! It was very hard work and I badly over did it. To compound the error there is a drainage ditch between their fence and the road that they are supposed to keep tidy. Well I ran the mower across the top of the bank and, at one point, lost it down the bank. It actually rolled completely upside down, kept rolling and wound up back on its wheels. Still running! Nearly broke my wrist in the process though. So I thought I’d drag it along the ditch and cut the sides of the bank since it already had its wheels in the beck at the bottom. And then we drove back on the Sunday that the storm hit and pushed everybody from the ferry onto the Chunnel. So, having massively over done it with the mower I was then stuck in the car for 12 hours. My back gave out on Monday. I’m recovering nicely but I think I must have pulled every single muscle in my midriff. And probably quite a few in other peoples midriffs too. Anyway, all this is just my latest excuse and to beg your understanding as to why I’m on light duties for a while. I need to achieve that balance of pushing myself enough to regain strength but not so much that I break again. I’ve not always been that successful at doing that. I tend to push myself too soon. So I thought I’d do something that I’ve been intending to do for ages. I want a computer in the garage. I can have the car’s manual on it. I can look things up on the net if I need to. And I can play music off the storage box in the house. I’ve tried WIFI but our house is made of radio opaque materials. WIFI, mobile phones, even radio locked clocks all struggle here. I can just get a WIFI signal in the garage, but barely. To do this properly I need the network extending into the garage.   So I pulled a couple of CAT5 cables across. By the way, the WIFI router is just through the wall on the left of the photo and the garage is just through the wall on the right. How can it not work!? But it doesn’t. The house is made of 1930s breeze blocks and I think they had a lot of power station ash in them. I wonder there is a high metallic content in them. Anyway, I had an old monitor going spare so I just needed a computer. Pie anybody? Raspberry Pi…   Cheap as chips and I don’t much mind if it gets trashed. I need to tidy the installation up and maybe get a box for the Pi. Might actually get a later, faster one. So now I can work in the garage, stream music from the house, or off the net, and…   …Learn about the space program at the same time. Did you know the first woman in space was a Russian? Track 7 - Valentina Tereshkova. She is still the only woman to do a solo space mission. (Sandra Bullock in ‘Gravity’ doesn’t count - that wasn’t real!) Some people suggest Valentina was also the first civilian in space too. Certainly she wasn’t in the military when she was selected for the program. She worked in a factory. I’ll bet she would be a fascinating person to talk to if you happen to speak Russian. |
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Hope all the King's horses and all the King's men do a proper job this time!  The house is made of 1930s breeze blocks and I think they had a lot of power station ash in them. I wonder there is a high metallic content in them. D'you know, you may just have cleared up a mystery for me. Ever since Mount Pinatubo blew its brains out in 1991, those wily Filipinos have been using it's ash instead of sand in blocks and mortar. There millions of tons of it still being harvested from river banks and on every building site, there's a guy with a manual riddle, sieving the lumps of pumice out. I'm wondering if the possibly high metal, and definitely high silica content, would explain why you often can't get a useful mobile signal indoors?  Yup, still plenty left. |
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Last Edit: Feb 15, 2020 4:50:21 GMT by georgeb
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jpsmit
Posted a lot
Posts: 1,274
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Glad the wifi is now in garage. FWIW we have an apartment over our garage which was outside when the house was built. We put in an extender that runs through the house electrical wiring. Not expensive and works brilliantly.
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Feb 16, 2020 18:18:42 GMT
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Glad the wifi is now in garage. FWIW we have an apartment over our garage which was outside when the house was built. We put in an extender that runs through the house electrical wiring. Not expensive and works brilliantly. I've heard they are good but I've never tried one. It was an easy enough job to jun wires in as it happens. And you can use them for all sorts of other things. We run audio through the CAT5 stuff so you can hear the hifi in the kitchen and front room. It would be fairly easy for me to plug up the garage too. In other news... When we took Mum in Law back to France we brought back a car load of stuff. She will move back to England later in the year (probably) so this was the beginning of that process. Well, we brought back part of their record collection and spent part of yesterday listening to some stuff. There are a few points to make here... A good record on a good player sounds fantastic. But an average pressing sounds utterly terrible. They own some dreadful rubbish! The environmental disaster when we send all this plastic to landfill will make the news headlines. But most of all... The kids of today just think music is a thing that appears on their phone or is streamed, magically, from somewhere - we don't even care where so long as it just works. They have the entire world of music at their finger tips and don't think it's in any way odd. And, I suspect, don't really appreciate it. Almost none of them will understand the absolute pleasure of getting a precious 'thing' carefully from it's packet, loading onto a machine that will convert this delicate recording into wonderful sounds, and then closing their eyes and letting the music wash over them. Transporting them to another world. And then getting another precious thing with more wonderful music out of its packet and letting that one transport them to another place. In my world it's one of the great pleasures of life.  And it's very sad that people are missing out. Well I think so anyway... |
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Feb 16, 2020 18:29:27 GMT
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My Dad used to have a record player you could stack the vinyl on.
So it had the one playing and 4 more waiting. Brilliant thing.
I must root one out .
I still have a few records somewhere.
Thanks for the reminder.
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glenanderson
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 4,361
Club RR Member Number: 64
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Feb 16, 2020 18:40:23 GMT
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Ah, an SL12-10. Smashing bit of kit. I sold mine maybe ten years ago.
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My worst worry about dying is my wife selling my stuff for what I told her it cost...
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Feb 16, 2020 19:30:05 GMT
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Love my old record player it even still gets used on occasion.
As you say there is something about the sound of a good player with good speakers.
Nice work with the pi i was thinking of setting something similar up in my workshop but it might be too tempting a distraction.
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Feb 16, 2020 20:11:36 GMT
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The workshop Pi came into its own today. I wanted to repeat something I'd done years ago so I read my own blog. I couldn't tell you if it's a good read, I only looked at the pictures!
Anyway, that'll be in the MR2 thread later...
The SL... It's a 1200. I think the 1210 was the black one.
Any road up... For years I had a Dual 505-2 which was an ok machine if not particularly exciting. But, for some reason, Dual connected the pitch change knob to the control underneath using a toothed belt. The belt broke and I couldn't get a new one. It also needed a new drive belt.
I'd worked with the SL1210s for most of my career. They were the 'domestic' record player of choice. (If you think I'm being cruel saying it's 'domestic' look up an EMT 948 or 950. That's a proper record player!)
Anyway, when an SL came up at a very reasonable price I jumped at it. Almost bomb proof. Quartz locked. No belts. What's not to like? So the Dual went to the great hifi in the sky and I got a proper machine. It needed a HUGE amount of cleaning and a rebuild to get it in the condition it's now in. But all the important bits - platter, bearings, electronics were good. The switch gear was a bit crusty and the arm needed a rebuild though.
Lovely machine.
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We have a pretty decent sound system, and sourced a reasonable player to go with it. Nothing like cranking crystal clear 'Money' for the neighbours to enjoy! |
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Poem shamelessly nicked from ‘Planet Rock’
Roses are red
Violets are blue
When I listen to Motörhead
My neighbours do too
😀
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Feb 17, 2020 11:18:57 GMT
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The thing i like about LP's, which only just survived with CD's, is it prevents track skipping. You are almost forced to listen to a whole album and discover the songs that take a while to grow on you. Today alot of people say the album is almost dead.
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