I find myself in the probably usual position of not really having anything to write about, but never-the-less still wanting to blog. Topics that have drifted through my head of late is just how lazy an awful lot of singers are about their diction. I suppose archetypically this includes the Bangles, but even Roy Orbison slurs his words together. I’m not great exception to this rule, but neither do I try and make my living out of it.
I’m dead excited about Harry Potter – Amazon reckon they’re going to dispatch it on the 14th July, and have a delivery estimate for the 15-16th July. There’s a part of me that would be surprised if it arrives on the 15th, seeing that the bookshops aren’t allowed to sell it until the Saturday (and are all advertising midnight opening), but I’m hardly going to complain if it does! There’s a small part of my that just wants the series to be over – get through the next two books and then that’s Harry Potter down, and in my mind a lot rests on what happens in this book as to whether I’ll rush out to buy book 7. Order of the Phoenix was ok, but didn’t grab me in the same way the earlier books did, and I certainly found Harry a lot less sympathetic as a character. Hopefully he’ll calm down a bit now?
No other excitements really; now that the hall/dining room floor is down major house renovation is on hold until after the summer – earmarked the August bank holiday weekend for re-decorating the spare room, but otherwise just little jobs here and there. Hopefully A. will sort out some blinds for the dining room, and I’ll whack those up, but that doesn’t really fall into my category of major.
Radio 2 are majorly playlisting the song by Jem called It’s just a ride. Our Tel seems to play it everytime I listen to
him in the morning. As it happens it’s a great song, and I am still very much
in my “loving female singer-songwriters” phase (which I’m astonished to
see that I apparantly haven’t blogged about before – it must have been a
real conversation!).
Each time he plays it, I get closer and closer to buying the album. It was
down to Radio 2 that I got Tambourine by Tift Merritt – specifically
the song Still Pretending, although the whole album is pretty good.
Actually I have hinted at how I’m warmed by the female singing voice
before in a Letter, but I’m surprised I’d
not mentioned it more recently!
Things I like about the song? The tune is catchy, I like her voice and
the harmonies, the lyrics are naive but still strangely resonant, and I love
the way the tambourine comes in halfway through each verse. Sad but true.
It’s particularly effective the first time, on the word “bang”.
Forgot to mention yesterday that I owe all my plumbing skills (such as they are) to my late dad, who gave me the confidence to go ahead and try it, and also showed me some of the tricks of the trade. He came up and moved our kitchen sink for us, and opened up the world of delights of soldering copper pipes together. As a result of this I undertook the bathroom plumbing on my very lonesome (except for the loo, which I (a) didn’t fancy and (b) really didn’t want to get wrong!)
Never-the-less, the bathroom involved removing the old sink and bath and shower, and plumbing in new-uns of the same, with a minimum amount of disaster, actually. The stuff that didn’t go entirely right included
Melting the (plastic) waste pipe for the bath with the blow-torch (oops – but easily fixed with a new bit ‘o’ pipe)
Leaky taps on the sink (this was a huge pain in the bum to fix, as we’d already sealed it in before we noticed the dripping)
Rotating/wobbly taps on the bath
Not actually fixed this last one yet – not a huge problem, you just have to hold the tap when you turn it on/off, as otherwise the whole body rotates. This is an even bigger pain in the bum to fix, as I fear taking the side of the bath off will mean never getting it back on again, plus I’m not sure exactly how to tighten the buts in any case. Sorely tempted to whack a bit of clear super-glue onto the base of the tap…
Oh actually one other thing that went wrong was sealing in the bath, where I used ivory sealant by mistake (instead of white) – but it’s actually peeling away anyway, and in places it’s gone a horrible black colour, which I assume is mould.So that’s got to be taken off, and the correct stuff applied instead, but that can wait for another day.
A bit annoyed yesterday. I’ve been fitting a replacement radiator in our dining room (room of new floor), but had some problems with the plumbing as new radiator is not as wide as old radiator was. This combined with the fact that I didn’t realise that valve tails (the bits that screw into the radiator and then connects with the valves) come with the value and not the radiator – so I’d thrown them away with the old radiator – meant I had problems connecting it all up. Not particularly keen to drain the whole system in order to fit new valves and/or move the pipes to fit the new radiator (it’s only a couple of inches out), I think there must be another solution.
No problem, think I – Screwfix to the rescue with their extending valve tails to solve both problems at once! (Screwfix having supplied the original radiator, you understand).
Said items arrive, and very strangely have got 15mm screws to go into the radiator, but 3/4″ connector to the valve; but our values are 15mm! So I go to Homebase, and find exactly the same problem – 15mm to the radiator no problem, but 3/4″ to the valve…
Fortunately I have plenty of 15mm plumbing bits and bobs so, think I, I’ll bodge something together with compression joints. Job done – except for the leaking.
At this point I give up, and try to call in a plumber (remember we’ve got a new shiny floor going down, so if the floorboards are coming up – or indeed if there’s going to be water flowing freely – we need to do that first). I won’t go into the plumber saga, suffice to say that he repeatedly didn’t show up, and floor chap arrives with the radiator still not plumbed…
.. who happens to know a bit about plumbing – he has a look at the problem and agrees that it should be fairly simple to solve even with the new floor down, and gets on with laying the floor. I show him the extending valve tail I’ve got and explain the problem.. he takes once look and says,
“But that’s just a 3/4″ reducer – if you take it off then you can do a standard 15mm compression joint to the valve.”
Arrrrggggg – one quick pipe cut to get the reducer off, throw on an olive and nut, and job done… without leaks!! I could have done it weeks ago with the first thing I bought. Why didn’t I think of doing it? Why why why? One thing I did learn though is that you have to tighten connectors to radiators really tightly. Like jumping on the wrench until absolutely rock solid. With normal compression joints you have be careful of over-tightening; not so when screwing in a valve tail, it seems. Couldn’t believe it kept seeping until I did it. Forgot to check it this morning, actually – must remember to do so tonight.
In my recent ramblings about the toys I’ve got my eyes on, I realise that I completely forgot to consider the new Playstation incarnations! On the one hand we’ve got the PS3 coming out next year sometime, which by all accounts will be awesomely powerful, has network gaming, etc etc, and is a suitable upgrade to ye olde PS2. On the other hand, at the back end of this year is the Playstation Portable, which seems to be pretty much a portable PS2.
The fundamental problem is that I don’t really have time to playstation, and it also hogs the sitting room and telly – so much so that I can considered selling it or giving it away from time to time (until I find a game like Ratchett and Clank, when I become addicted and play for hours). The PSP solves both these problems, in that I can play the games on the train, or indeed in the sitting room while the missus watches gardening programs. And of course it’s much easier to take any on holiday/conferences…
The trouble is, the PS3 looks so nice, and is outrageously powered so the graphics are going to be just gorgeous… That said, I really like the power and graphics of the PS2, and have to wonder what all this extra power will actually add? I suppose you can have huge and very detailed maps, sort of like Jak and Daxter on speed. By all accounts the price is going to be comparable for the two (I would expect the PS3 to be a bit more) – at around 200 quid. If I am going to get a new organiser and GPS then it’s easily next summer before I can afford it anyway, so I guess I could just wait and see what games are around, and what the reviews have been like.
The sensible option is probably to get a PSP, and then think about getting a new console when young master Ben is old enough to play it in – what – 5 or 6 years time? But it’s ever so tempting to bump it up the priority list, at least to above the GPS…
Very exciting day – our new floor is going down in our hall and dining room. We’ve been in this house for nearly 4 and a half years now, and when we bought it it was “in need of modernisation”. We’ve been slowly (but surely) doing said modernising since then, and it’s a very slow and tedious process, but possibly – just possibly – the end is nigh!
Once the floor is down, they’ll inevitably be some finishing touches (spots of painting here and there), and that just leaves us with our spare bedroom to paint, and then the study to paint. And then it’s finished. Finto. Everything done! Just in time to move house. 🙂
Incidently, for just about as long as Ben’s been around (i.e. 18 months), our dining room has been a banned area for him, either because of extreme splinter-ville floorboards, or because it was packed full of bits and pieces from other rooms being decorated. But as of probably this weekend, he’ll have free roam of it. I think the study will be out of bounds forever, because it’s just too hard making it child friendly.
It seems to me that ‘blogs are increasingly coming more like mini-press releases or CVS-esque logs. Whereas they all used to either be a strange combination of diary, journal, and column, now they are more and more things like “Microsoft Developer’s Blog” or “Cisco developer’s blog”. They even get pointed to by the main websites as releases of interest.
I’d be the first to admit that this ‘ere blog is inane rubbish, and for the life of me I can’t imagine why anyone would read it – it’s main purpose in life is as a creative outlet for my thoughts (although some might argue with creative), although in the mix is also an excuse to tinker with web-based stuff, and of course a historical record (far too grand a term, I know, but you get the picture). I suppose friends/family who are not in particularly close contact but remain interested might browser from time to time.
On the other hand, I’m fully aware that I find other people’s blogs strangely compelling – and I’ve certainly written about blogs before – and I can see that there would be a genuine interest in reading about “bleeding edge” development from someone on the inside… but it doesn’t seem to be in the right spirit, somehow.
PS Notice how I snuck the new search facility in there? Will do something more sensible in due course.
Can’t really win at this time of year – yesterday it was sort of cold and cloudy, which wasn’t very nice, but today it’s hot but muggy, and there seems to be loads of pollen around. I’m not a huge hay fever sufferer, but it does restrict my breathing a bit (in a hang-over from my asthma days), and occasionally gives me runny eyes and sneezles. 🙁
On a lighter note, decided to go ahead with the title thing; d’ya like?
Also on a lighter note, my ad-hoc weight loss programme is in a temporary success stage, as I’ve slipped down to a mere 77kg, or 12 and a bit stone. My target weight range is probably 70-75kg, and then I’ll have to admit that my proto-beer belly will actually require exercise to address. It’s actually quite reassuring, because I seem to have been constantly hungry recently!
Been wondering about adding the facility of titles to Letters from Leeds. Would make much more sense from an RSS point of view to have the title rather than the first line of the entry – but it would mean a bit of work to implement it, plus arguably I should back-date all the old (200 and something) entries.
I suppose it could be optional; if an entry has a title then it’s used, otherwise nothing is shown. Shall ponder.
Just thinking – the feature that’s probably changed my web browsing habits the most is the “Live bookmark” feature of Firefox. Now instead of visiting the website directly, I flick open my live bookmark, and I can see what the latest articles are, and if I want to read them. Of course it depends on said website having an RSS feed, but as I’ve proved, that’s really not too hard to set up.
So now sites like BBC News and The Register get scanned for interesting stories without having the bother of going to their front-page! And similarly a site like DPReview I can check for an (interesting) update without having to actually go there. It’s grand!
