Part 1 is on Friday, part 2 on Saturday and then part 3 on Sunday. All good.

Then, as is to be expected, they are showing all three parts on Monday. That’s good as I fully expect Sky+ to screw it up somewhere along the line.

It then goes a little bit over the top… as soon as they have finished showing the three parts (and a “Making of”) they are then showing the three parts again. And again!

I’ll probably watch it just the once.

Or maybe twice.

So, what prompted me to try to remember the password? Windows 7… that’s what. Or more specifically “Windows Live Writer”. Wouldn’t it be so much easier to post directly from my desktop rather that have to use an awkward interface that I don’t particularly like?

Well, if you can read this my first post from Windows Live Writer worked. If you can’t then… erm…

Anyway, perhaps I can now update this more often?

Doubtful.

Update: Well… it worked! Hurrah!

The hosting provider that this is hosted on (I must point out that it wasn’t the reseller doing this) decided that any password that hasn’t been changed for a while (no definition of “while” found) then the passwords would be expired.

No warning. Nothing.

Nice.

This is why I haven’t posted anything (feeble excuse #2) for a while - there were things I was going to post but couldn’t do it as I couldn’t log in.

a) Lewis should have noticed the red light and/or the stationary cars in front of him?
b) Having decided that he couldn’t stop he had a difficult decision on who to crash into?

Congratulations to Kubica and BMW. They have certainly put the proverbial cat among the pigeons.

One of the reasons for not doing any updates is that things at work have been, well, interesting. I felt I didn’t want to post any information about it until it was all sorted. It is now.

The other reason, of course, is I am lazy.

At about the same time the broadband dropped from a reasonable 3.5mbps (technically it is upto 8mbps) to a barely broadband 0.5mbps. BT were called.

After much diagnosing and repeated calls it was no better. BT’s technical support was very polite but ultimately not very useful. Although on about the fifth call they checked the line and found a fault (although, I reckon they could check any line in the country and find a problem with it).

I did some research and discovered that a possible problem was radio interference. So, I got an AM radio (if you are young you will not know what I am on about) and tuned it to (as accurately as the dial would allow) 612khz. I then proceeded to wave it around the broadband router and wires.

It seems that the Sky box, especially from the rear, chucks out a whole bunch of radio interference in the 100s of khz band (which is exactly the range of frequencies ADSL uses). A suitable bit of relocating of wires to be as far away from the Sky box as possible and all is now well… back up to 3.5mbps.

I guess when we put the “new” TV on the stand some of the cables got moved (my wife just had to hoover behind the TV stand).

Tempted to get a shielded ADSL cable - maybe it can go even quicker!!

The Saturday before this was due to be fixed it completely gave up. Luckily I do have breakdown cover and so called them up and got it towed to a local garage. They, unfortunately, wouldn’t be able to fix it for 10 days due to being fully booked.

Typically, they didn’t actually order the parts that were required until the day they were to fix it… so it wasn’t ready until the day after. I got a couple of days peace though - we were supposed to be going up to visit my parents that week so I sent up my wife and child as per the plan and stayed at home to wait for the car to be fixed.

Upon collecting the car I discover:

• The clutch is fixed!
• The exhaust is blowing
• The “Check Engine” light is permanently on

They re-hanged the exhaust straight-away so that’s good but they didn’t have a diagnostic machine that worked with the car and didn’t have the time (neither did I to be honest) to investigate fully.

Unfortunately, given the current fuel prices, the symptoms are increased fuel consumption. I am currently getting a very scary 22mpg rather than a slightly annoying 32mpg.

I hope they fix the problem today.

Ginger Going

I’m really rather sad about that.