Over the weekend, we got a lot of small (but necessary) jobs done, some of which I found to be really quite satisfying. It has to be said, I’m about as practical as a teapot made of salt, so it’s been good to have done some practical “DIYish” tasks that’ve gone smoothly, and had good results, rather than my normal disastrous attempts.

One example of this was that we put the rotary washing-line thing back in the garden. And this time we used a different base, so it went in straight. I don’t know how, but the first time I’d done it with one of those poxy ground-spear things, it’d gone in straight up ’til about halfway in- I know it had, I’d checked it with a spirit level – but by the time it was all the way in, it was angled at about 30° Not ideal, as you can imagine – and it also meant I bore a certain amount of piss-taking about the entire thing being utterly skew-whiff.

The new base we got was one that screwed in to the ground – much easier to do, until the last couple of revolutions, at which point it became quite tough, and the supplied lever wasn’t really up to the job. Still, application of another length of steel through the handle rectified that – if there’s one thing I do understand when it comes to DIY, it’s what leverage and/or fulcrums can do.

Secondly – and this was something that I hadn’t previously screwed up – was the installation of two more water-butts, along with downpipe-diverters, so that water coming down the drainpipe from the guttering gets diverted into the water-butt, until it’s full and then it goes back down the drain. All very clever, I’m sure. Thankfully I didn’t design the bloody things, I just fitted them.

And it was remarkably simple. Worryingly so, in fact – which meant that neither I nor herself actually trusted them to be done correctly until we’d emptied a two-litre bottle of water into each gutter. But lo, they worked perfectly first time.

Even more satisfyingly, having installed them on the Saturday morning, when I checked them on the Sunday following the rainy Saturday night, the butts were full. 100L in 24 hours. Not bad at all. Even if it does mean we’ve now had to buy some more, and they’ll be getting connected together to the current ones once they arrive.

Sometimes my reading speed worries me a bit. But before I go on, I’m just going to get one thing out in the open – I’m a sad sod, have no life whatsoever, and need to get out more.

The reason for this admission, and linking it to reading speed? Well, on Saturday I got the final Harry Potter novel delivered – the joys of pre-orders on Amazon. Not that I’d ever queue in order to get the book – I’m not that sad, for chuff’s sake. But yeah, I’d pre-ordered it from Amazon, so it arrived on Saturday about 11am.

And by Sunday evening I’d finished it. Not that I’d sat and read it at the expense of all else, or anything like that. I think it took me about 3.5 – 4 hours of reading time all told.

I’m not claiming to be any kind of world-class speed-reader or anything. But all the same, I figure that getting through a 600-odd page wodge of book in that kind of time isn’t too shabby.

And the book itself? Yeah, it’s OK. Not great, but OK. If you’ve read the others, it’s more of the same, but at least it comes to an end. If you haven’t read the others, you won’t want to read this one either.

It’s that time of year (again) when a techies thoughts turn to redesign. Well OK, it’s that time of year where I think about redesigns, anyway.

Primarily I’m thinking about redesigning (and in fact pretty much completely re-doing) the site I have for my private business. It’s been the same way for a year or two now, and as I need to update the information on it anyway, I’m seriously debating redoing the design and back-end as well. (When I say ‘redoing’ the back-end, I mean ‘creating’ the back-end, as currently it doesn’t have anything funky in the background, just normal flattish PHP pages)

At the same time, though, I’m already contemplating some tuning-up and/or tweaking on the photography site, as the two are closely related. There’s also been the small matter of some new business cards that bear absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to the site.

The only thing that’s stopping me, really, is that once I start, it’ll be a fairly big job. Alongside that, I’m still fairly uninspired about how a redesigned site would look. I just want to do it, I don’t yet know the details. Perhaps that’s the biggest hint that I should wait.

Currently, I’ve pretty much got the time to do a redesign project on the sites. There’s a lot of other stuff sitting on the back burner, waiting for things to happen, (designs, concepts, background information, that kind of thing) and I just know that if I got into a redesign project, then all the other more important stuff would suddenly all come back on me at once. Life’s like that.

So it’s all a bit up in the air at the moment. I haven’t yet decided what I’ll do. Time will tell.

Oh, and no, I’m still not planning a full upgrade for d4d™ I know I should do. But well, I’m not.

Every so often, I realise that my swearing is becoming too commonplace, and it’s losing any useful impact or utility. It’s not a process I’m conscious of in general, but I do always suddenly get to a point where I think “that’s too much, it’s getting boring now.”

So I’m now going to cut it right back down again – I was going to cut it out completely, but there’s a big project at work that’s due for a deadline of the end of August, so there’s no chance of it being a complete cut-out.

But the plan is that I’ll be cutting it right back down from now, but definitely for the entire of August. It also means that I get to play (yet again) with new swear-words to replace the old standards, and that is almost as much fun in its own right.

While I realise that a lot of the people trapped in floods, or inconvenienced by the stopping of train services etc. aren’t having much fun, I do think it’s pretty impressive the way a number of agencies and organisations have been dealing with the unexpected effects of the weather.

Now OK, pretty much everyone should’ve known that yesterday was going to be exceptionally wet, with (according to a couple of sources) two months worth of rain dolloping down in 24 hours, but the unexpected bit came down to the effects of that rain on unexpected places. Over the last few years we seem to be getting a lot more cases where floods happen in places that’ve never flooded before – or at least have only flooded once every thirty years, or something. Yesterday, who expected that the M5 would be closed because of flooding, for example.

The quote that sums it up for me comes from John Kelly, Oxfordshire’s emergency planner (and what a weird job that must be, always expecting/planning for the worst or most bizarre situations. Hmm, must look at what it involves…)

We’ve ordered 150 sleeping bags from the Army… and some of my staff have gone down to the local Tesco to get things like towels, toothpaste and soap.
“This is part of our plan, this is a thing we plan for, and we make arrangements for, but things always go wrong.
“This is not the first choice of school, because the one we were going to had actually been flooded itself.” (from the BBC story linked above)

Yes, the place that was on the plan to be a safe haven from flooding was – um – flooded.

However, even with (I would expect) most people knowing it was going to piss down all day, how come I saw so many people in Cambridge yesterday dressed in just thin summer clothes, with no jackets, umbrellas etc. ? Did they just think that the prediction wouldn’t happen? Or that it wouldn’t affect them? Weird.

Thirty seconds after leaving Cambridge station, on the train towards home. We hadn’t even got past the river when a little voice piped up from the seating section behind me

“Are we there yet?”
“No”
“How long is it going to be?”
“An Hour”
“I’m bored”

And on. And on. And on.

Thank Christ for having a) headphones and b) plenty of (legal) MP3 files.