In the words of Unlucky Alf…. “Oh, bugger”. Looks as if the battery is completely knackered. So, at the minute, we probably have the only diesel car wired up to the mains…

It all started a few days ago. The car’s not been used much, as I’ve been off work, and as mentioned in vlog #5, Daddykins has had the flu, so he’s not been using it much either.

Anyway, we needed to go into the town for a few bits and pieces. On the way there, the radio died. Completely. There we were, both bopping away to Little Eva’s “Locomotion” on Classic Gold, when…

“Everybody’s doing a brand new dance now, come on baby, do the lococloofojegheiarfesgsfzzzzzzzzzzzz…..”

Off goes the display on the radio, and it wouldn’t switch back on. Oh, great, we thought. The radio’s knacked. Eventually it came back on after a bit of a fiddle. We didn’t think much more about it.

I visit the town and get some badly needed frozen curries from Herons and two loaves of bread from Iceland. I conclude my shop with a visit to the 99p shop, where I purchased two lighty-up keyrings, 4 cans of pop, and a big bag of cola bottles. Mmmm.

I return to the car. Daddykins was in the car, with a face like thunder, clutching the AA card in his hand.

“Well, we’re not going to be going anywhere for a bit” he announces, as he points up to the barely lit door light. Wonderful. So, there we were, stranded, with nothing but the dullest view in the entire world for company.

Dull, I’m sure you’ll agree. Though, I’m not sure now why I thought it would be a good idea to take a photo of it. Despite the fact it felt like an eternity, it was only 9 minutes after I took that photo that a nice man (a very nice man, a very, very nice man, to quote the old AA adverts) pulled up in a large yellow van, stuck something on the battery for a bit, then disappeared again.

When we finally got in, Daddykins slapped the battery charger on it for a good few hours to attempt to get the battery up and running. But, when he got up this morning, it was completely flat again. In fact, it was so flat, the clock and the temerature gague had stopped working.

So, as pictured earlier, it’s still on charge, in a vain attempt to get it working. Grrr.

UPDATE: Well, er…. charging it didn’t help. It went from 12 volts to 5 volts in about 30 seconds. It looks as if the alternator’s gone. Again. There’s a new alternator on ebay for £85 plus £12p+p…

Technorati Tags: alternator, broken, car, goosed, knackered

Yesterday was just one of those days which I just want to forget, but I’ll blog about it anyway

The day before yesterday, I’d been in Asda, and noticed they’d had a special on their curries. 2 for £4. I bought two, one to take to work with me, and one for Daddykins to take home, which I’d have later. My last words to him before I closed the car door were “Don’t forget to put that in the fridge”.

After 12 hours of mind-numbing “work”, I return home and enter the kitchen. In front of me, on the table, was the curry, still in its plastic bag, sitting quietly at room temperature. Grrrr.

Daddykins, was naturally still in bed at this point. I go up to see him and tell him I’m in, like I do every morning. On my way out of the room, I turn, and knock a glass onto the floor, which subsequently smashes everywhere. Oh, that’s really great. I’d been in the house three minutes, and everything’s gone tits up. I enter my bedroom, and notice that they’ve erected (huh, huh, he said erected) another crane on the building site this one is either much taller than the other ones, or much closer. I couldn’t really tell as it’s been desperately foggy for the past few days.

Anyway, I take photos, as usualand publish them on here. As stated before, writers’ block had set in, so I didn’t have much to say.

By that time, it was approaching 11am, so I was about to go to bed. But then, the phone rings, and Daddykins answers. One of my (and my dad’s) friends, who I see almost every Thursday has had a heart attack. Could this day possibly get any worse?

I go to bed, and lie there until about 7PM. I get up, and decide it’s far too late to do anything at all. Too late to get ready and go out, and too late to do anything of any merit whatsoever. So, I switch on my computer and enter #speccy. Yes, it’s almost 7 years now, but I still frequent that very same chat room. Someone who was kicked out of there a year or two back showed up again, and killed the conversation for the entire night. Oh, goody. So, not only was I in the house on my own, I had nobody to “talk” to.

I spent the night writing DVD’s, as the hard drive on my main machine was starting to get full.

Daddykins returned at about 11PM and ordered a chinese. He was the bearer of even more bad news. Another one of my friends, who I used to drink in the Queens with (but hadn’t spoken to for a couple of years now) had died on Tuesday. I couldn’t wait for this shitty day to end. So, after being awake for no more than 7 hours, I ended up falling asleep on the couch. I awoke at 5AM, which is now exactly three hours ago. And, if you want to know what I’ve been doing since then, check the posting below.

I can’t wait to see what fun and games will be waiting for me in the next 16 hours.

Technorati Tags: bad day, Death, died, queens

Oh, okay, I’m finally killing off the wholly unpopular “complog”, or Jamie’s Computer Repair Log”, as it’s otherwise known. Its sole purpose up until recently is that it was there for me to test certain aspects of Wordpress, such as upgrading, installing plugins, etc. However, I’ve simply just not bothered with it recently. I’ve not seen the point in saying when I upgraded every little thing in my machine, therefore it’s just taking up server space, with no real reason for it being there.

I’m going to attempt to merge the posts into this blog, so hopefully, if there IS some information on there worth keeping, then it won’t be lost.

EDIT 1: Well… er, I think it worked, though I don’t like the way it looks now, with 7 or 8 extra categories in there now. Before I start deleting stuff, I’m going to do a backup of the site, which means it might go down for a few minutes, then I’ll start deleting tables and the old complog directory.

EDIT 2: OK, it’s gone. Everything’s been deleted. Other changes which are not worth mentioning are that I’ve reinstalled the backup plugin for Wordpress. It wasn’t until I decided todo this that i realised that the latest versions of wordpress do not come with any type of backup plugin, and the last backup I did was at the back end of January. Eeep. There’s a lot happened since January, and it would have been a shame to have lost it just because I hadn’t backed up the database. It’s done now, however and thanks to the wonders of modern science (or rather, modern programming), it now also backs up automatically. Hurrah!

Another thing I’ve noticed is that the database itself is getting a little untidy. This means, that now I have the automatic backups, I’m going to try and “tidy” them. I noticed some of the old plugins I used to use, still have entries in the database, so I’m going to tidy those up.

Technorati Tags: complog, merging, old posts, website

Yes, they’ve put up another crane out the back of our house. The first one was big, the second one was bigger, and this third one is huge….

Yes, those are people walking over the top of it.

Well, that’s it really. I think I know why Coatesy is being secretive after his last comment. Though, I’ll turn the tables on him, and let him work out what I think… Below this post will be a passworded post. I’ll take the password off on around the 11th of May. Bwaaaahaha!! Actually, it’ really just a test to see how secure the passwords are on here, and also how they appear in the XML feeds, etc.

I had a good night at work. Thankfully, I’m off until Sunday now, though going back on what should be the Sabbath day doesn’t make me a happy bunny.

Right, that’s it. I have writers block. I’m going to put the laptop away and relax for a bit.

Technorati Tags: crane, photo, view, window

Well, I wasn’t on The South Bank Show, and they didn’t show that much of ISIHAC. Bit of a disappointment, seeing as they recorded the whole program, yet only showed about 30 seconds of it, and only one, maybe two shots of the audience. Grrrr.

Coatesy is still being secretive about his reasons for cancelling Sunday, but has given an exact date to reveal his secrecy (see comment in post below). This both confuses and worries me, though I’ll not mention it any further on here.

I’ll cut this short is lunchtime is over. Depending on the weather, I might go for another walkabout after I finish work. It was too foggy yesterday, and today isn’t looking any better.

Technorati Tags: chris, isihac, south bank show