I looked out of the window at six this morning and -- WOW! -- had it snowed. Grabbed the Shelbster and off we went to blaze a trail. Up on the golf-course, the snow was a good six inches (that’s a foot in my books) deep. So deep in fact, that Shelby was wading with her nose in the air. As we came round the loop and back up Luker Avenue, Mr Claim had been at it again ;
Mr Claim is the bloke who, when it snows or is icy, moves his car and parks it -- side on -- at the bottom of Clements Road, hoping that someone is going to come slithering down, miss the corner and T-bone him.
Schools are closed, so I went out early for a tear-up in the Chilterns -- out over Fawley, Turville and Ibstone. Absolutely fantastic! Deep, deep untouched snow and not another car in sight ……. until I got back down to the Marlow Road and headed into work.
So, picture the scene …… snow on the road ….. snow falling ….. everything slushy and slippy. How would you drive? Well, I guess it depends whether you’re driving a BMW or not ;
Then we got to the notorious Danesfield Hill ;
No problem, of course. Diff-lock on and away we go ;
If you’re reading this from anywhere in the UK, then you’ll have experienced the little winter wonder that we had this week. It’s been great – a lovely dump of snow at the beginning of the week, loads of trudling around in Atomic having fun then, yesterday, the usual UK thing happens;
The snow starts to melt, we get a sleet blizzard and the temperature plumments below zero faster than a cryogenic suspension chamber. The upshot of all this? Ice.
Not just a bit of ice, but a solid (ish – actually it was a little bumpy in places) sheet of ice over pavements and roads – a good half an inch thick. In fact, it was so slippery that – when I took the Shelbster for her walk last night – I stepped out of the front gate and started sliding down the hill on the pavement. I didn’t stop until I’d reached the middle of the road fifty feet away. Then, as I tottered and minced my way down the road with said hound, I realised that it might be a bit of fun in the morning.
Poor old Shelbs. The ice, if anything, had become thicker so we just had a plod down the Fairmile and back (Yes, that’d the Fairmile that Tanya wanted to know the length of).
So, why are 110′s great? Simple. Diff-lock and low-box. Whilst all around were wailing and cursing trying to get their Chelsea Tractors and Euro-boxes anywhere (even on the flat of Luker), Atomic and I first trundled Jules up to her school and then the Jenster to hers.
By the way. Eighteen years old this year and she sailed through her MOT first time. Atomic, that is – not Jenster.
What a wonderful day! First off, I’ve been getting a vast amount of “SEO” hits on the site from some sites spamming the sales of blue pills. After a bit of digging around in the logs, I found that they were all coming from *.pool.ukrtel.net
A bit more digging around reveals that this is a notorious Ukrainian spam host so, courtesy of the fine folks at Hostgator, I’ve blocked the IP range 92.112.0.0 – 92.112.255.255 and the spam is no more.
I’ll give it a few days and remove the block to see if they’ve given up.
Not only, but also. I need to renew Atomic’s insurance so have been getting quotes off t’internet. The only place that I hadn’t tried was Confused.com, so gave them a try. Within minutes of the quotes coming back, I got a call from
0800 8401009
If you answer the call, you are cut off immediately. This carried on throughout the day till I got so hacked off with it I called them back. Well, surprise, surprise, it’s a premium rate number for UKFIS Limited – whoever the hell they are.
A bit of digging around reveals that UKIFS are, in fact, AutoDirect Car Insurance (and a whole bunch more). A quick call to 118118 and I had another number for them
0800 0280112
I called that and got through to a nice young lady who I asked to remove my number from their system.
Two minutes later I got a call from 0800 8401009 again. This time, though, there was some cocky twat on the other end of the line.
“FARK OFF YOU ANNOYING LITTLE KNOB END” I advised him.
What a wonderful Christmas all-round eh! Despite being ill, the kids were all happy, Jules was happy and we all had a fantastic time. I’ve even gotten round to updating the PHP in the site to turn the custom HTML into widgets – which, believe it or not, has sped things up a bit.
All that’s left to do now is get Activision off their lazy arses and replace the drum kit on the Guitar Heroes game and spend a couple of months giving the credit card some much needed tlc.
Even diesel has now dropped to 96p a litre – which is an absolute treat. Atomic has stopped losing oil, Gina’s got (another) boyfriend – so she’s happy, the Jenster’s back at school – so she’s happy ……. blimey, must be a nightmare round the corner somewhere.
As I pottered past the thieving gits in the Taj Mahal garage this morning (diesel 101.99) to the Jet garage, I was greeted with the impossible sight of diesel 99.9 a litre!
Now that may mean nothing to my American visitors who are still bleating about fuel being a peppercorn a gallon over there, but that represents a drop of 33% in the last month and a bit.
As you can probably guess from the image, Shelby has been in the dog-house this week. Utilising the cat-flap to the best of her ability, the neighbours phoned up lunchtime mid-week to let us know that she was sitting in the middle of the pavement contemplating the world and then, the next day, whilst Jules was in the kitchen, the Shelberator decided that she’d pop down the local park by herself.
Never fear though! I have employed an Enterprise solution to customise the cat-flap and all appears to be well for the moment.
Other than that, the site is now listed upon Stumbleupon and is really banging traffic in now – lovely, thank you.
It’s been a busy week – hence the update today and not more recently. I will, however, bung some more Ubuntu tips up in the next day or so – as the CTRL+ALT+DEL page is proving an absolute winner.
Not only, but also – for no particular reason – I’m going to add a to-do/to-want page for Atomic and, get this, I’m going to get my hair cut. Fantastic! I’m looking too much like cousin Devon at the moment.
First off, the Bodyglove XT bluetooth headset. I changed the ear-holding bit from the “Extreme” rubberised loop to the supplied “normal” plastic clip and, I have to say, it now sits wonderfully in the ear and clamped to the side of my head. I did have a bit of a glitch with it the other night whilst talking to Denman but, other than that, I’ve got no complaints at all. In fact, it’s still running off it’s original charge.
Now to torches! I took Wensley’s no-brand single LED out with Shelby the other morning to see how it fared (after I told him how amazing my E2D was). It cost him a massive fourteen quid and, for the money, isn’t too bad. Expert that I am, I’m guessing about thirty lumens – it has a very wide throw and not a great range. It did, of course, have that lovely blue-white LED beam though.
It turns out, after ordering a spare bulb for the E2D, that it was the eBay batteries that were crap, so I bought a couple from Tesco (nearly ten bloody quid!) I took that out the next morning and, wow! It definitely p-d all over Wensley’s LED. The beam didn’t strike me as too yellow – good for an incandescent bulb, and the range was absolutely superb. Battery life of and hour and twenty though ……… hmmmmm.
So, I eBay’d the PSP that I never use (the E2D is on there too if you want it – plus two batteries and a spare bulb) and, once the money that I got has shifted out of PayPal, I’m getting a Fenix TK11, a re-chargeable AW18650 (that’s 2200Mah) battery and a quick recharger. All from Fenix, which means they’re all compatible. That will give me a grand total of 60 lumens for twelve hours per charge or 2.7 hours at 225 lumens. Lovely!
Other than all that. After six weeks, I’m finally getting fit. My right leg (at the risk of sounding like a dull orienteer) has almost stopped hurting in most places. Shelby’s not spending so much time at the end of her lead either.
I’ve also managed to pretty much fix the (latest) oil leak in Atomic. For reasons known only to itself, the dipstick sheath had sheared off inside the bolt holding it to the engine block. There appears to be no socket known to mankind to remove the thing so, after loads of trial and error, I found some kneadable steel (it’s called something else, but I can’t remember) and tried that to re-attached the sleeve to the block. First attempt failed – as I was trying to leave the bolt free for future use. On the assumption that, if I ever need to remove this un-removable bolt, then the engine’s probably buggered anyway, I used the rest of the steel to complete enshroud the base of the sleeve over the bolt and engine block.
For a bit of a laugh on the way back from Beale Park yesterday, I took a trundle along Dog Lane – from Rotherfield Peppard to Rotherfield Greys. (Here’s a map for you)
As far as I’m aware it’s a BOAT and is only a couple of miles or so in length. This time of year it’s pretty overgrown and my handy home-made* limb-risers worked a treat. It’s a mixture of gentle mud with a few places filled-in with sand and rock, with a couple of inclines. In places it’s very narrow – and eventually opens up somewhat into a hardened surface.
Next time I go down, I’ll film it for you.
*Why pay twenty quid or so when you can make them for a fiver?!
You will need about five metres of steel cable, four cable clamps and a couple of eye bolts – assuming that you’ve got a roof rack and bull-bars like me. If not, then you’ll need four eye bolts.
Drill a hole into each forward facing corner of your roof rack and attach the eye-bolts to them.
Cut your cable in half and thread it through each eye-bolt and clamp with cable clamp.
Loop the remaining end around the outside front of the top bar of your bull-bars and, once again, clamp.
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As I pottered past the thieving gits in the Taj Mahal garage this morning (diesel 101.99) to the Jet garage, I was greeted with the impossible sight of diesel 99.9 a litre!
Shelby, Shelby, Shelby – you little sod.
