CatWithNoName

Little bikeride, lots of mud

I’ve been really enjoying the weird weather we’ve been getting the last week or three. Lots of quick strong squalls. It does mean that outdoorsey poor me must either stay inside or be prepared to be ubermuddy.

Today, as work was ending, I realised that the mud was going to get me on the way to the train station no matter what, because there was a LOT of rain. Perhaps mud isn’t the best description - it’s more like black water. I popped quickly into my biking shorts and pedaled along to the station. By the time I got to the station my pale white legs were pale white legs with lots of dark grey splotches that made them look really hairy. (eeeewwwww lol). The muck that is flicked up off wet roads is really nasty - I like good honest mud more, I think. I got off the train two stations early at Kiveton Park, and biked along the muddy canal towpath that I regularly ride / walk down. I experienced a lot of naughty child pleasure by cycling into muddy puddles and not slowing or trying to avoid them.

It’s a lovely time of year to cycle by the canal. There are still a lot of young birds, either on their own or with their parents. admittedly most other times of the year are lovely times too. Juvenile coots were still all fluffy and downy, even if they were sized like adults. Most of the ducklings were grown up enough to look like normal mallard ducks, but I did see a few small downy ones. I bothered two herons, some swans and cygnets, and a couple of young black balls of wool.. errr… moorhens.

A couple of days ago, I also saw a couple of parent Canada Geese with their single gosling. I’ve been keeping an eye on these three all spring - it’s really lovely to see the tiny gosling (who used to look like a little fluffy yellow duck) now almost completely mature. The parents were really protective of it when it was young, but nowdays they were barely waiting for it to catch up as they ran along the side of the canal. I wonder how much longer before they separate from it entirely.

I’ve not seen my Mandarin duck at all recently. I think it must have left the canal at some point during the winter.

It was a lovely quick cycle ride - 5 miles or so of canalside. When I got home, I was muddier than I ever recall having been. This is a good thing!!! It just makes me smirk inside and outside. I chucked my cycle shoes in the wash because they were filthy and smelly. Hopefully they’ll come out in a nice condition. I really need to get a couple more things if I am going to continue cycling in the mud - a hose with a good spray attachment to clean my bike off and perhaps some dorky overshoes. Some mountainbike tyres with deep treads wouldn’t hurt either, since my current roadbike-ey tyres have almost no tread at all, and hence no traction.

Laptop repair!!

I get to fiddle with a laptop today! Darren’s aunt texted me the other day saying windows wouldn’t start. I talked her through the basic stuff she might be able to do on her own, to no real avail, so the laptop has been given to us to investigate / repair. In the past I’ve has to do a system restore on this laptop (I think it had a missing system file or something?) and I’d vague suspected at the time that the hard disk might be failing, but it had definitely failed this time. The laptop is an HP - supplied one and has a system restore partition that should put everything to rights if your OS is screwed up. That wouldn’t load, so I tried the backup CDs we had wisely made (at the time, Darren told me I was being silly. We’ve used them twice now. Well, once successfully and once less so….). The CD wouldn’t load either, so I asked the BIOS to scan the integrity of the hard drive. It estimated that would take about 41 minutes, but gave up with a disc read error after about 30 seconds *lol*. So basically, her hard drive is fooked. I suspect the laptop has probably had a drop or seven - if they weren’t so expensive I would strongly recommend that Darren’s aunt should invest in a solid state drive that’s more shock-proof.

HP’s warranty had expired so there was no point pursuing them for a replacement drive. We priced up a new hard disk - a 120 gig drive was the most inexpensive option, which is amusing considering hers is a 60 gig drive. It’s really, really simple to swap hard disks - I’d be happy to give a non-techy person a screwdriver and tell them to give it a try. There are three screws to unscrew, a cover to pull off the back of the laptop, and presto! There’s the hard drive. It’s so tiny compared to a desktop hard disk drive! I could hide it under the palm of my hand quite easily. The drive we chose was about £33 pounds including shipping, so I told Darren to tell his mum to tell his aunt (long chain here I know) it would be £35 to repair - not really charging for my time but just preferring to round the numbers off a bit. Darren made me agree to give them a quote of £45, so I’d charge a weeeeeeeee bit for my time. And then when he rang his mum she said “You have to charge for your time!” So Darren said “Ok, make it £50 then” *l*. It was amusing to watch the amount escalate even though it was still minimal.

I really, really enjoyed opening it up and looking inside. Computers just rock! I regularly think about freelance computer repair as a sideline for a bit of extra money, but everyone I know who has actually done it seems to think it’s a bad idea. Too many people think that buying a computer means the seller will teach them how to use it or fix their moronic actions when they get a virus or change some weird setting. You’d not buy a car and expect the dealer to teach you how to drive, but with computers apparently that logic doesn’t follow.

Birthday goodness and badness

Badness: I spoke to mum, and she told me Deedee (1 pic, and another - Deedee has the red coloured collar) was dead. Stupid snakes!!! It got Shake as well, but last I heard earlier today he had a huge swollen jaw but seemed likely to survive. Apparently mum gave him a human antihistamine *l*. It’s weird that my parents had five dogs for a decade and then within about a period of a year there were two snake attacks, killing three of them and hurting a fourth.

Oh yeah… that pic of Shake, shakey’s the furry creature in the front, not the one in the background *g*

Goodness:

• Cycling glasses. They’re clear, polarised and have a rubberised bridge and various other bits to keep it sitting on your face whilst doing bikey things. When you’re cycling, loads of stuff flies into your face, bugs and dust and rain. Plain ol’ sunglasses don’t do the job and are too dark in wintertime or evenings.
• A signed, numbered, first edition of American Gods.
• A dynamo LED lamp. Darren said we can go camping sometime soon!!!!!!! YAY!!!!!!!!
• An Amazon gift certificate. Booooooooooooooooooooooooooooks!!
• A running bumbag. It’s huge compare to a normal bumbag, has an airflow system designed into it, and holds a bottle as well.
• A small personal first aid kit. You can tell my beloved worries about me when I wander out on the moors and peaks *g*.
• A travel case with room for me Eee and accessories!!!! I’ve wanted one for a while!!

prezzies!

I am so so greedy. I’m looking forward to getting birthday presents tomorrow *g*.

Last night I went to the cinema to watch Wanted. The trailer looked a lot cooler than it actually was, I think. There were some amusing jokes, a lot of shooting and unlikely action scenes, and some incredibly nifty looking weapons and bullets. The plot was sorely obvious in several places, but all in all it was kinda fun, for the weird ideas and action scenes, a tleast. It reminded me vaguely of The Matrix (the last two films were eugh, but the first was nice enough), and of Aeon Flux (totally blah).

Work has been a bit annoying, but not in any serious or long term way. I’ve been dealing with some of the Executives who’ve logged PC faults at work recently a few of them have been really winding me up. I don’t understand why they seemingly are exempt from the need to be polite. Or just sensible…. I had a call I dealt with yesterday where I ended up so angry I really really really needed to go and sit down with a coffee on my own for half an hour, but it was just too busy to do so. Thankfully it wasn’t too long before lunch time so I did manage to get into a normal mood by the afternoon.

A random scenario (not related to the person who got me stressed above):

Your colour printer has yellow streaks across the page when you print. This has only happened since you last changed the yellow toner. Your toners are unreliable at best since they are recycled. Do you a) change the toner again as clearly it’s a faulty leaking toner, or b) refuse to change the toner and unequivocally demand an engineer to investigate the issue, even though the helpdesk (who probably know more about printers than you do) points out that logically the toner is at fault?

Who needs logic, anyway…

It’s been quite rainy the last few days. I know I’m not the only person who’s remembered that it was almost exactly a year ago that we had all the flooding. The liklihood of anything reoccuring is probably quite low but it still lurks somewhere in your head…*l* lovely british summertime, eh?

Everyone’s doing it

And so must you too.

Now.

Before 7:16 PM UK time. Copied from the site itself: 11:16 a.m. PDT (18:16 UTC) on June 18, 2008. That’s 11:16 a.m. in Mountain View, 2:16 p.m. in Toronto, 3:16 p.m. in Rio de Janeiro, 8:16 p.m. in Paris, Madrid, Berlin, Rome and Warsaw, 10:16 p.m. in Moscow, and June 19, 2008 at 2:16 a.m. in Beijing and 3:16 a.m. in Tokyo.

Click.