Cricalix.Net

It’s been a pleasant two week vacation.  Caught a train and a bus down to Heathrow on the 22nd, and crossed the Atlantic courtesy of British Airways after staring at an Asus EEE 700 series in Dixons (though I’ll wait for the 900 series with the bigger screen and 20 GB SSD).  Did my usual trick of pushing how late I stayed up, with the intent of resetting my body clock and avoiding jet-lag (which worked).  Spent the next few days imaging all of the LAN PCs for UberCon, and catching up on a bit of sleep.  UberCon ran from the 25th to the 27th, where I had the pleasure of being an attendee for once, instead of a staff member – though I still did staff-like stuff since I knew the answers.  Note to self, never go behind the desks at registration or help-desk unless I want to work.

Didn’t shoot too many photos, but got something like 30 of Mr. T. Zahn, so I’ll be checking those in Lightroom when I get home.  Hopefully there’s at least one good one we can use on the UberCon site.  I also need to get his contact details to see if he minds if I use them in my personal (online) portfolio.  Missed the tear-down of the convention by being a lazy sod and sitting in my room reading.  However, I helped pack the truck for the trip to the con, so I think I’m excused. continue reading…

Spring is definitely in the air.

The flowering cherry is covered in pink flowers, the wild strawberries are putting forth their white flowers, the Japanese maple is budding, the (crab?) apple is covered in green, with dots of pink.

A plant I don’t know the name of is covered in tiny white flowers, another plant I don’t know the name of has put forth purple flowers, the bluebells are gearing up to flower, the daffodils have had their last hurrah, the hebes are growing, the lavender is sprouting fresh new leaves, and the heather is moving along at a good clip.

And the lawn needs mowing.  Again.

Yesterday was a good day for gardening, so when I got home, I changed into my nice dirty jeans, picked up the fork, and started working on the left-hand bed in my garden. The soil quality wasn’t horrible, but it wasn’t what I’d call good soil either. Compared to other spots in the garden, the soil was quite solid, and it also dried out very easily. I decided that I actually liked the plants that were in the bed, but that I’d re-arrange them while working on the bed.

Step 1 – Start taking plants out. Rather than take them all out at once, I decided to just start at one end of the bed and work my way towards the other end, lifting each plant out as I went. The big hebe (a hebe buchananii) really didn’t want to come out of the ground, and required liberal application of the pick-axe/trenching tool to get underneath the root ball and lever it up. It also got a good trimming while I was at it, as it was a bit large for the bed. The rest of the plants came up with nary a protest.

Step 2 – Fork the entire bed over.

Step 3 – Fold in 100 litres of manure, and 75 litres of compost.

Step 4 – Choose new locations for all of the plants, dig new holes, wet down the holes and put the plants back.

Step 5 – Collapse into a chair with some hot food, as I’ve been working flat out for over 2 hours.

Mum and Dad were over last weekend – Mum was dropping off two California Glories from their garden (they’re moving, and the Glories aren’t the nicest plant to hug). A bit of labour later, and

• the hole in the pond was fixed (created by Mum and I lifting some water plants out a week or two before),
• the two plants were in the ground,
• the trench for the armoured cable was started,
• the compost bin was restarted,
• the junk crazy paving that was being used as a wall was removed, the bricks underneath were removed, and logroll was installed,
• the lawn was mowed,
• and I had three new fish in my tank (thanks to Dad, Red Dwarf Gouramis).

Last weekend, one of my neighbours knocked on my other neighbours’ door, and asked them to knock on my door.  Dunno why, I’m not that scary looking (I think).  End result was me spending 2 and a bit hours at her house, working on a computer that didn’t want to work properly any more.  (I love Microsoft Windows, really, I do!)  The culprit that was relayed to me was her son had installed Limewire.  She had uninstalled it when things stopped working, but things didn’t start working again.

So, one fix of the browser proxy, one set of virus remanents removed, various anti-virus and anti-malware tools updated and the machine was back on the net.  It managed to lose the soundcard driver along the way, and the automatic upgrade to IE 7 broke a few other things – I dealt with those this weekend.  Should have been no more than 20 or 30 minutes of work, but I got dinner out of it, and an offer to help with curtains etc in the house.  Sounds like a fair deal to me.

This weekend saw the fixing of PSAPI.DLL (which caused BTHelpNotifier.exe to go belly up, thank you IE 7), the fixing of the sound card drivers and the installation of The Sims for the daughter.  Installing the Sims was interesting – I’ve never seen a machine complain about autoexec.nt before.  Turns out it wasn’t in system32 like it should have been.  Copied it from elsewhere on the system and life was golden.  My neighbour didn’t believe I could hear the speakers clicking once the driver was installed either.  Proved they were working by firing up Media Player :>

Also achieved this weekend – painting of some of the fresh (hah!) plastering (and the process of touching up a house is apparently called walloping in Staffordshire), emptied the pond, chucked pond muck on garden beds, refilled pond half-way.  Oh, and a good load of laundry.  Also achieved last weekend – got the corkboard up on the wall.  I’ve been meaning to do that for about a year now.

I’ve been poking Zooomr.com recently – it’s pretty much Flickr, but on steroids in some areas.  Geo-tagging is really nifty – the site uses Google Maps to allow you to find other pictures from other posters who have tagged the photo as being ‘near‘ you.  Near is a relative term I think, as tags for the UK show someone in London (200 miles or so) as being near.

The peas have been producing quite well, despite the onslaught from slugs and snails.  I refuse to use modern chemical methods for getting rid of slugs and snails – they’re quite handy in other parts of my garden.  I just don’t want them near my peas, onions and carrots!

Dinner last night consisted of cold roast beef, fragrant thai rice and fresh peas – very tasty.

The oven is working out quite nicely – this weekend saw two treacle tarts (Gran style, [no lemon and ginger] but with a bit too much syrup unfortunately),  and some homemade bread.  Pity I messed up the yeast amount for the bread – the flavour was a bit off.  Still good bread though.  This weekend might see a Texas Sheet Cake – a recipe I picked up in the US that uses sour cream to make a cake.  It’s a bit odd, but it tastes sooo good.

It’s truly amazing how much work I can get done when there are no phones ringing with support calls, no salesmen punching speakerphone (for reasons I cannot fathom), no people asking me to look at this or that or the other. Went in to work on Saturday, sat down and in 6 hours, cranked out the foundation of one of the bespoke projects we have on the go right now – server OS, application software, configuration and custom web interface. Had I tried to do the same work during this week coming, it’d have taken all week.

Dad dropped by today on his way up to Leeds – I had repaired part of his lamp with some epoxy during the week. He remarked that I seem happy in the kitchen, and I’m not surprised. I love the new kitchen, and I love cooking. As with most people I dislike the washing up, but there’s got to be some downside to cooking I suppose. Lunch was a nice slab of roast beef, perfectly pink in the center, fresh picked peas from my garden, sliced carrots, yorkshire puddings and gravy – traditional English roast lunch. Next on the list of things to cook will be a stir fry tomorrow night – noodles, bean sprouts, carrot, fresh peas, pork, satay sauce. Then perhaps a treacle tart…

Went to B&Q to find a plate for mounting and sealing the bathroom vent, but had no luck, so Mum will check around for me. Ended up buying a set of 10 solar powered lights though, so they’re now installed in the garden. Should see in about 15 or 20 minutes how well they light up. Also spent yesterday afternoon dozing in my garden – pleasantly warm afternoon, warm breeze, birds and bees bouncing around. Nice and pleasant way to relax. Then shot about 80 photos of birds in the garden that evening – I need to offload that card and see if there are any good ones.