The Hot Water Pipe Balls Up

The worst mistake I ever made as a kid.... Was flood the house.

Yeah, so... my parents had a new central heating system put in, all the floor boards up job, British Gas did the work... and for some unknown reason they left all the floor boards up when the finished the job.

To this day, I don't know why they left the job, with hot exposed pipes in the floor space.  But they did... Pinky Swear.

So, Saturday morning my Dad set about putting the floor boards back down, he embroiled me in this, despite my not really knowing one end of a hammer from the other, he put the first board in place and started to put the nails into the holes they had come out of and tamp them down.

He handed me the hammer and said to put in the two nails at my end.... I placed the nail in and hammered it once.... Handing the hammer back to my Dad and we crawled forward to the next joist.

And then I felt wet on my knee... Water was merrily flowing up out of the nail hole and across the wood... warm musky water... heating system water, fresh fernox.

OMG!!!

But my brain said "hey Dad, there's water coming out this wood"... which in retrospect is one of the most spectacular brain farts I can ever imagine, they were the words my brain delivered so my mouth spoke thus.

Panic!!!!

We pull the board up... to put a finger over the hole... but we can't... the hole is in the side of the pipe... the nail had gone down, turned about 60 degree's and gone into the side of the pipe... how it managed this I'll never know, unless I buy that house strip that floor board out and dissect that joist.

So this hole in the pipe was well out of reach below the level of the joist in this cut, you could not put a finger in it... and the heating was on, this water was getting burning hot.

We wrapped towels around it, all sorts, i got scolded pretty badly by it... British Gas wouldn't come back, their home care insurance cover for this didn't cover us for our sticking a nail in the pipe, despite the argument that they pulled the bloody boards up why didn't they put them back down!!?!?!!

To this day I'll never understand why they were left like this.

But this all became my fault.

A plumber arrived about an hour later, he drained the system, cut the pipe, two compression joints and bosh fixed.

I never lived this down of course, this was over 35 years ago, but I still hear about it, and I've even written about it right here, so it plays on my mind.  Not for my ineptitude with a hammer... but for the physics of the thing, how did a nail, driven in straight as far as I could tell... How could it turn like this and stick into a pipe's side, it's lower radius of that side even from a straight above shot?

Pulling it out, the nail had a bend added a perfect bend, as though it had gone slightly into the joist and just turned.  The other nail was still straight and true...

Plastering Machine Required

So, the move is over... So many little jobs have been completed, from wiring, changing switches and today plastering a wall from which the pink finish had crumbled (no idea why the prior owner left it to get in such a state, it only took an hour to strip, brush, seal with PVA and replaster...

Which brings me onto the topic of today's post... An invention... Which mixes plaster...

Yes, this would be a huge money maker, but there must be a reason it doesn't exist on the domestic market.... Now I'm pretty sure there will be a huge hundred grands worth of professional mixing machine somewhere, but I'm talking about the small job, a single wall or room in a home.

What might this need?... Well, it needs some sensors for the mix, thickness/turbidity, water, weight, temperature even?  You pour the dry powder in some hopper, it's tested, you set the mix type (finishing or main coat etc) the water is maybe filled straight from a tap to the machine... and the computer does the rest, mixing and preparing...

When its ready, you can open a spigot to layout out the perfect mix onto your plastering hawk.

All this for say £80... I'd buy one, bet most of it could be made from plastic too, just a single mixing motor, one inlet valve... The sensors would be the key I feel, the better and more accurate the sensor the easier the mix.

The final item would maybe be a high pressure jet attachment which you close into the mixing tub at the end of your task, and which belts out the residue plaster, this time you direct the spigot to a dedicated sluice bucket which you dispose of properly.

I dunno, maybe it's a fantasy, maybe it's a money maker, whichever way, you heard about it here, first and when some other frustrated (more electronically able geek) has the same plastering problem as me (i.e. not being able to actually mix very well) then this may exist, and I want a cut of the profits... 20% sounds fair?

Weekend : New Cooker

It has been a long weekend, we've been doggy sitting, and also finally we've had the new oven arrive, so had actually got to eat properly...

Here's the new baby cooking Sunday's Chicken Roast.

Indesit, Fan assisted, Electric, A rating all for less than £170... I can't complain.

I was very busy during the wekend, I've still not managed to get teh X55 rehooked up to the re-installed PC, but I did get to play some WarThunder, and ran into two nice fellows from across the Atlantic, CircleVIII and EvictedSaint, with whom I saw my energy fighting techniques are not that bad, just perhaps I need to start flying with wingmen, as we never lost a match together.

About wingmen, I've been promising to get back to the Wolfpack application I made, and get back onto their TS, after the fun of the first meeting, but I've found the serious high amounts of time for simulated play have not been coming my way.

I've been in a bit of arcade and a lot of realistic level battle.

Network Hardware Time

Yes, we've been back in the old house for a while now, and since I stripped all the networking gear out of the man lab in the other house and returned I've not touched it.  It's all been sat on my desk doing not a lot for over six months.

This weekend however, it's time to run a new Ethernet cable from the virgin cable feed, up through the first floor into the front bedroom, this cable is a bit of a beat, I've bought a double shielded cat5e, so I should finally be getting an unfettered full bore connection from my main rig.

The big tasks are going to be drilling the hole, from above this is simply through the floor board, and I've got a wire/pipe detector to make sure it is safe.  But from below the hole in the ceiling has a pelmet and the room is immaculately plastered... I kind of wish Ken had of listened to me when I asked for wiring conduits to be added, but hey ho.  So, hopefully I'll get through the pelmet and border and through the plaster board and into the lath & plaster Victorian ceiling without issue... Once I've gone up like that I'm going to use a plastic pipe to feed it through the hole and cut it off, giving a clean smooth drop for the cable.

Finally, I'm going to feed this shielded cable along the skirting in the room to the desk, and then spend Hours... and I mean HOURS.... sorting the cables.  My cabling solution is just all hanging at the moment, so I might look for some cable tied, tie a bunch into position and then hot-glue those bundles onto the underside of the desk.

Wish me luck...

In other news, you can view my last play sessions on Twitch: http://www.twitch.tv/xelous/manager/past_broadcasts

General Update -Elite Dangerous - Houses - Money

So it's been a long couple of months, our Christmas was severely cut back, and we've been waiting for the house sale to go through... It should complete Friday... So today I'm busy taking my excess hours off of work and going down to give the place a once over and then to the estate agents to hand in the keys ready for hand-over.

It has been a rather stressful time, not least with the ex-tenants we had being chased from pillar to post for debts they've racked up.. The best one being the illegal sub-tenant being prosecuted by Derbyshire City Council over a parking ticket... She appeared in court - how they summonsed her I don't know... But she still put our property address down as her own, in court, in early January 2015, despite not living in our property since October 2014...

I'd call that perjury, but I'd also call it incompetence by the court because the wife and I are on the council tax & electoral register, it'd have taken minutes to discover this and shows they didn't confirm the guilty party's address!

Needless to say, when the notice of impending removal of goods arrived, the wife ripped it open and nearly fainted, I've sent them a letter now, but we're still expecting burly blokes with bad attitudes to arrive, so the wife has her ID out and ready to show them through the window.

With all this going on Money has been an issue, hopefully tomorrow it gets a lot freer as the house funds get cleared to us, my plan is to wire cat6 shielded network wire into the upstairs and remove buy new springs for my X45 control stick.  All to aid my enjoyment of Elite, as well as WarThunder and some other games.

I've not been able to play any simulator battles in WarThunder for a while, because the spring on my stick is now as slack as a wizard sleeve, so straight and level flight is almost impossible, accurate gunnery is impossible.

I'm looking at ordering a set of springs from a place in Redditch and have a friend; a Redditch native; bring them up.

Coding wise, as you can see I've got the OCR tools working, last night was the first time I didn't do any collecting of data, I sat down with the 5 systems I had done, and I just used the tool (as shown in yesterdays post - pt6)... It was amazingly good, I tweaked one trade I had been taking Gold about for $45,000 profit (in my cobra with 36 cargo), but found I had a palladium source and consumer upping that first leg to $49,500.

The return leg I had been carrying Liquor for around £11,000 profit, I upped that to $18,500 by swapping to Power Generators.

Rinse and repeat, the viewer tool as you see in the previous screen shot worked great, a lot better than the first revision I'd put together.

Running the game in a window (though full screen border less) also gave better interactive results, I could have the collector running, and then slide the mouse out the client to use the data.  I need to add a refresh - or even an auto-refresh which detects file changes as data is collected - but for now this suits my purposes.  And it achieved results I earned a little over $800,000 credits trading in the short two hours I had to play last night... Taking me from Peddler to Dealer ranking to boot.

I am looking for testers, or backers, if you want to help, or offer advice, or offer support (in the form of servers for data collection or just money to pay for the hosting I think we'll need, just drop me a line in the comments below).

Gloriously Impatient

Good news, good news... Most all the decorating is done!

Yes, in the last three weeks, we've gutted the bathroom, laid new floors, painted lots and lots of gloss onto surfaces, repainted the kitchen, sanded and re-varnished hard wood floors and generally made the house a better place to be.

The reason being, we're moving back to the old house at Brinsley, we're not sure on the old rental market or valuations so that's all going on, but our old tenant is leaving so we're having a new hearing system put in up there and going into that.

The major difference will of course be the lack of storage, the Brinsley house has not got a Utility room, nor a cloak room, nor a loft space, nor an 18 foot out building... So where will we be putting our crap?.... Who knows.

The Virgin Connection is being switched over on the 16th November, so that gives you a heads up when I'll do full dark before hand.

The one worry we have at present is, I headed up to the Brinsley house to give the tenant her finalising letter and get a schedule for her moving, so I could get the plumbers in on the case with the heating, and instead of the tenant another girl hung herself out the window... "What you want?"...

"I want to come in"

"No F**king likely perv"

"No, you miss understand, I'm the landlord, the owner, I have an appointment to measure up for my new heating system, where's XXX"....

"Oh I live here now"....

Oh no you don't lassie, and so she's been oiked out, turned out the tenant could not fully afford it after her last relationship broke down and she got this girl in from her work to share the bills... This girl is the dirtiest schmuck I've ever seen... Uses feminine hygiene products thrown in corners of her bedroom, the carpet stank, she had dirty clothes and rubbish everywhere....

And when I mentioned this needed cleaning up she said "You starting?"... To whit I could only look at the used tampon and say "No, but it looks like you have".

Dirty, disgusting pig... 

The ex-tenant has to therefore pay to clean that carpet professionally, and clean the whole house...

The other thing I noted was that nearly every light bulb in the place was popped... These were new light fittings put in before they took possession, they're less than 11 months old, how did they pop them?.. And how, if "they've been gone ages" did they see, because the landing and stairs run down the middle of the house and are very dark....

Anyway, the lots of decorating will continue I think Friday is a key day, with the estate agents coming.. Then Sunday we have the bathroom ceiling being plastered, so when he's done I'll paint the bathroom wall and lay a new bit of lino... and finally when that ceiling is dry I can paint it.... I don't envisage many WarThunder or Code hours to myself in that time.

However, what I do have in the works is my own personal, and hopefully comprehensive, series (4 parts) covering my fascination with the BF109 fighter, I'm posting this 4 part history from my own sources soon, and also developing a series of "In Game" videos for the type.

I already have one large (45 minute) video ready for upload, but that was from pre-v1.43, so I'm trying to get sometime flying the type post patch.  And when I say "Flying", we're talking exclusively Simulator Battle level detail.

My Week Off & Software Dependencies

I've just had a week off, well when I say off I mean I didn't have to get up and go into the office, instead the house needed tending to... Lots of tending to...

I've laid a new floor, had a wall demolished, removed tonnes (literally) of old fencing, painted life preservers (for by the canal side), cut down (clipped not chopped) tree's to size, visited our second house to check on the tenants, and I've done multiple runs to the tip to get rid of tonnes of this junk.

All in all, I'm exhausted and thankful to be back in the office... So what has software been doing without me?

Well, it seems a quite able chap has been busy looking through the code, and has left a bunch of very good insights into fixes for the code, almost like a peer review, something this project sorely needed.

I've duly sent a rebuild and am now awaiting feedback, but whilst that all goes on I decided to look at some of the support tools I use, to see about sending them to various people in the building.

The first problem was this is that I didn't write half of these tools, they were written pretty much as a stop gap measure, and here they are nearing nine years old and still in use in their flaky, temporary, incarnations.

They rely on libraries people don't have, they use modules which are part of the source - meaning to use it you must have the whole source checked out - and they look terrible.

This reliance on other libraries is something I need to tackle, on some systems - like Linux - you can get away with assuming the user is able to go get the libraries your software needs (if you tell the user which are missing that is) but on windows its unforgivable to leave a piece of software to crash through some mysterious missing library problem.

And this is exactly what we get with these tools at the moment, I know why they're crashing, I know others know why they're crashing, and if other more dense users read the error message they'd know why its crashing and be able to ask for a solution.  But instead I'm met with the continual report that the program is broke, and then a wall of silence as to what's wrong with it.

So, developers out there the world over, if your software needs a library, and that library is only on your machine, let everyone know, make your software check for the presence of it, don't just let it run off the end of its runtime and crash!

Man Lab Loft Edition

This has been a slow weekend for me, I worked Saturday, which put pay to doing anything of interest... Though the wife and I were happy to go for a walk with the dogs and see the Council, or some other benefactor, had been out and cleared all the shrub and scrub from the Erewash washlands.

Now, I know the washlands well, I lived in the area for 10 years between 2001 and 2011, and recently bought a second home close by them again.  And never in that time had I seen much in the way of repair to the place, sure they repaired the wooden stand bridge and replaced the dilapidated World War 2 era concrete bridge, but they never tended the banks, or cleared the scrub.

It was a sight to behold to see the river from the raised walk way on the Western side...

Sunday however was more my time, no gaming, not even a stitch of interest on the computer, though the wife and mother-in-law did sit down and play Monopoly... Yes a board game... I'm tempted to try them on a copy of the Red Box... but I don't think 2D+4 against Fort will go down like passing go and collecting £200.

The only other thing I got up to was clearing the loft out... An interesting time, the loft area is an office, it's only accessible through a loft ladder, but it is a room, but since we moved in it has been utterly overrun with mess.  Boxes, wires, and a hell of a lot of stuff...

Today, I spend 5 hours clearing it out, and sorting the stuff... There was loads of stuff to be thrown out, including my first primer on C++ which had been eaten by a parrot, covered in ash, and torn to shreds in places... Why is this important?  Well, up there now is I hope going to be a place I can escape myself to, to play games away from the prying eye of the wife...

But up there is already a small shrine to my gaming past... My old P4 machine, the first machine I played World of Warcraft on... I hand built this machine with the last of my cash from my crash and burn job in Matlock... It was a then top of the line P4 motherboard, with 1.5Gb of top end ram with coolers, a custom cooler stack, a P4 2.4Ghz (HT) so my first dual core machine, and a pair (yes two) GeForce 8800 GTX... top of the line at the time.

I built it for other things, but I ended up living most all my World of Warcraft life in there...

Yes, I'm still thinking about going to play WoW... I don't want to, I just miss the old days, the level 60 days, the original and best WoW.  I even went as far as downloading the "Starter Edition" of Wow and playing a new Worgen character on that Free to Play starter edition... But, I got the chap from level 1 to 10 in like 15 minutes... And you know what, I didn't read or think about a single quest...

This was new content, this was new quests, in a new area, with a new back story, and... It just passed me by in 15 minutes.

What an utter and total shame.

I mean, I was pointed where to go on the map, they highlighted blue areas on the map to find the mobs to hit, they pointed to quest hand-ins, they even added the items to click (from my inventory) to the right of the quest listing on the right of the screen, so I didn't even have to open my bag to do things...

Then I noticed leveling up, they just gave me my skills, they just came to me, no need for a trainer... I mean, my first WoW character was a Human Warrior, and I remember the pleasure of running all the way back to Goldshire to around the back of the Smithy to train up, and lending a guild member 10 silver to buy their skills.... I miss those days....

I miss the endless running, and running, and getting level 40 and then selecting where to run to get your mount from... Do I try one from Elwynn Forest?... Do I go to Menethil?... Do I go mad and try taking the boat from Menethil to see what they have across the pond?....

Yeah, that's what I miss...

My guild, Arx... And original Wow...

Chaplin I know you're there, I miss Chaplin the Dwarf Warrior... Or even the Rogue ;)

Eesu, yes Sue I even miss you....

Eve, aye Nick not spoke to you in yonks, missing you telling us about Pork Belly....

Nightwisp...

Now, Nightwisp, I ran into him in WarThunder recently, which was nice... Wish I'd have made a note of your user name.

There are the others to... Hulalu, the first Druid I met... Yes I played in an era when Humans were in the forest and Westshire then Darkshire, long before Nightelves ventured far enough to meet us... Dwarves sometimes took the risk of legging it from Loch Modan over the Blasted Lands to meet up, and yes I remember going and opening that tunnel for people time and again....

The old tales of Wow are the best, I might try and find some of my old screenshots and put them up here, there seem to be a fair few YouTubers whom are making a good following around telling old tales, I'm pretty sure no-one who knows me would argue I played this game so much, I lived it, literally.  I knew every inch of the overworld and nearly every inch of every dungeon.

And believe it or not at level 60 I went back and found later raids to all the original content raids to complete the set... But I was so sad to see all the gear and effort and time melt away.

I mean my level 60 warrior had about 90 days played, solid days... played in about 6 hour stints... It took over a year to get to this state... a year to 60... And I loved it... Then 18 months in I rolled my first alt... It was slow, it was fun... It was life.

http://www.virginworlds.com/podcast.php?show=5&ep=70

So, if I miss it so much, why am I not back in there now... Well, firstly, I won't have the time, the wife won't let me play the amount of life away... I wish we could go back to the old days and she'd then play with me, but she'd not get it now with the hundreds of thousands of health and gear demands...

Also, the link above includes my appearance on "Shut up We're Talking"... I miss SUWT... But in this podcast I'd just quit playing, recorded in 2010 I'd been cold turkey since about December 2009... I had met the now wife in June 2009, she'd seen me playing as the "Tree waving its hands", but the good old days were already gone then... Burning Crusade was an okay, even possibly good expansion, by Wrath just had me furious.

And I point this out with numbers about the gear levels, and my predictions were right, you can see the massive health pools and silly high gear levels... I remember when level 50 gear on level 60 folks was the norm, and seeing a hunter in Dragon armour (level 65) at 60 was just amazing... I never was that swinging dick, but I saw the appeal of it.... Blizzard pretty much sold out the game I'd sold my soul to, so I quit, I griped (as you can hear) and then I met my wife and got on with life...

Could a different arc in the progress of Wow have affected my life?... You know what, I think it could... But that's perhaps a topic for another day.

Dark for a Fortnight

Right folks, I'm going to see you all soon...

I'm about to go around the Darkside, and I'm sorely tempted to quote something from Apollo 8... Going behind the moon and bricking it in the radio darkness of that lonely place.

The reason is, we're about to move, so the home internet is going dark on the 1st, but we're packing everything up, so I'm packing all my home office up and storing things safe for the move - I am taking all the PC kit in my car with me - the wife can run behind like, riding two sauce pans on a bit of rope... Just so long as my PC is safe.

So, I'm not going to speak on here beyond maybe Thursday - from work - as things come together.

I've already told the wife the kit is going back up in the dining room until the outside ManLab work is done, but basically the ManLab work begins after the move is done... I got three different people advising me already... I might just let them do it, if they don't want to charge.

The plan has however run into one BIG problem, the roof has to go its asbestos... But this is a dirty war kind of situation, I got to clean it up and get it out... I've had warnings about it going to landfill and needing permissions, or paying £4000 to get rid... But then I've also had warning to double and triple and quadruple wrap the stuff...

They pulled my old Junior school down as it was full of asbestos... And wankers ruined the buildings.

It's like... ARGH I hate this.