This weekend saw the staging of the often exciting Canadian Grand Prix. Does anyone else think that
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.
I think my blog must be like a bus then…
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.
About two months ago the TV blew up. We got another and put it on the stand. It worked well.
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!!
A little while ago the clutch in the car started to make some nasty, expensive sounding, noises. So, once I was sure that funds allowed me to fix it, I booked it into the garage to be done. This was going to be done at a garage near where I work - minimising the hassle of having to take any time off work.
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:
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.