So after the trauma of the last “incident” where we suspected an EDS air con Ltd van ran into our garage, damaging the door and the uPVC facias (less than 7 months old!)….Olly spoke to the residesnts that own the van. They told us that the driver was no longer with them and the van would not be parked there any more. What a load of bollox! Guess what i saw parked in front of our garage less than 1 minute ago….yes the exact same van, parked in its usual spot , in front of my now damaged garage.

Luckily for me, the resident that owns the van was out in the road, happily twittering with other neighbours in front of her house, were there is a pick up truck and two other cars parked. I told her in front of everyone that the van had to be removed from in front of my garage, as last time the driver caused a lot of damage (which surprise surprise – they won’t claim on their business insurance if they have any!). I also informed her that it was residents parking four our courtyard, and that the freeholder was putting up signs shortly. I have now been pro-active and found a sign making company to produce the parking signs. I have also chatted to other residents in the courtyard who are happy for signs to go up on their property, providing we consult them as to the exact locations. I swear to god, as soon as those signs go up, if that van parks there i am going to phone the police and council straight away!

People complain about having problems with travellers/gypsies parking on their land – we just have a chavy irritating resident outside of the courtyard, using the courtyard parking spaces, damaging our garages and damaging the tarmac courtyard residents will need to pay to replace! I really have to wonder why people are so selfish. I am contemplating parking my car in the annoying neighbours driveway – in front of their garage….perhaps that will make my point clearer?

So I eventually managed to find some internet to connect to the world!

My trip got off to a rather hectic start, the bus to Heathrow thought it would be fun to break down before it picked us up from Milton Keynes. Of course this meant that when a replacement bus turned up it was getting rather late. Then the new bus decided that it would go to Luton, now Luton airport I don’t mind so much, but for some very odd reason the driver went to the town centre first, in rush hour. Then, because we were obviously ahead of schedule, we went via Hemal Hempstead, sigh. So by the time we got to the airport I had less than an hour to get on the plane…..

Now the bus drops you at the central bus station at Heathrow, turns out terminal 4 is a train ride away from there, sigh. On the train I jumped, it didn’t matter how much I was willing the train to move, it didn’t (note to self: improve Jedi mind skills to train moving level). Eventually it left, then when I arrived the running began…..

I ran to the bag drop point (having eagerly checked-in online), then I waited. And then I waited some more. Eventually got to the front, now as much as I love to laugh about my passport picture with people, there’s a time and a place, and when I have less than 30 minutes to catch a plane it is not one of those times, admittedly it is one of those places. But definitely not the time.

So bag checked I began what must have looked like a scene from a bad film where some lunatic runs across the airport, weaving in and out of the crowd, jumping bags and the like (I wonder if I could ask B.A.A. for a copy of the C.C.T.V.). I got to the security gate and amazingly there was only a few people in front, still, gonna be cutting it close.

Through the security gate, of course it beeps, even though there is nothing metallic on me (I am sure I have been tagged in some kind of dastardly secret service plot – one day I shall do it naked. Just to prove a point you understand). And then to run to the gate, carrying my belongings in my now rather sweaty arms. I look at my watch as I run, and I have minutes left, I’m gonna make it!

I get to the gate and the woman said: “Are you going to Cape Town?”, “Yes, pant pant”, I said, half expecting her to say the gate closed early, “Well it’s been delayed by half an hour” she said. “Pfffffffffffff”, I replied with my utmost disdain. So I had got all sweaty and done exercise for no reason! Still it meant that I could buy a plug adapter and get the correct currency (Euros wasn’t it?).

As you might expect, the B.A. webpage that let me pick a row with more leg room lied, and I was stuck with my knees banging the chair in front. Being an overnight flight meant that I would get absolutely no sleep (I never do on planes). So when I arrived ten hours later I was shattered. Of course it was too early to check into my hotel, so I had to go and sit somewhere for a few hours. But I got to my room eventually, and that’s where I am now.

I head up to the observatory on Tuesday morning, so until then I am an Englishman abroad, now where’s that midday sun? I need some to get on with some lobsterification……

So last week we left our house to go to work when I noticed our garage door looked a little odd, on closer inspection I realised it had been crashed into.

Someone had hit the door and bent it, and broken the nice PVC bit at the top. Very annoying given that it wasn’t that long ago that we had the whole garage redone.

Given that the PVC bit that was broken is very high up, the two broken bits at the top are the same distance apart as the uprights on a typical ladder, and the bend in the door is a vertical bend from top to bottom, it is fair to say that it must have been a van that did it.

Now as it happens a van parks illegally outside our garage every day and guess what; it has a big ladder on top that matches EXACTLY the broken bits. The company that owns the van is EDS Aircon Ltd (clearly an irresponsible company if they don’t care about hit and runs). So after a bit of digging I found out where the van owner lives and wouldn’t you know it, he is not at all forthcoming about the whole issue.

So after a few hours a hammering the door back to a normal shape it at least opens, but I am left waiting for a reference number from the police and an insurance claim to deal with.

So last July I went to an Astrobiology themed summer school in Austria, where the team I was in (the Red team) designed an astrobiology mission to Europa. It was all good fun, I met some fun people who i am still in contact with 😉 and learned lots too!

Imagine my surprise when a friend sent me this link

http://www.esa.int/esaED/SEM5PYOR4CF_index_1.html#subhead4

I have made it onto the ESA website – the picture makes me look so brainy too LOL! Though credit goes to Fatah on our team for actually supplying the maths…I was just striking a pose as the glamorous assistant 🙂

So I have been upgrading my computer recently, the main reason for this being that I spend a lot of time playing SecondLife and I thought it would be nice if I could run it in its prettiest mode. So this is what I have been doing:

1. First up I had to figure out what sort of motherboard I have. I am sure there is an easy way of doing that, but I couldn’t figure it out, so I popped the box open and read the serial number off it, how technical of me.
2. One of the key things I wanted to do was get a better graphics card, so I had to familiarize myself with them, turns out I have an AGP slot, which is being depreciated in the future, ho hum. Anyway I found a half decent card on OverClockers, I went for the Radeon 2600 XT 256MB GDDR3.
3. I also wanted more RAM, you can never have too much, well actually you can, but I still wanted more, so I bought a Gig, bringing me up to 1.5GB.
4. Then the waiting began. Then woo it turned up, then sigh, the fools had sent the wrong graphics card, they stuck the PCI-E one in instead of the AGP version, is it really that had to pick something off a shelf?
5. Then comes installation time, RAM – easy just slot it in, well actually had to take the 512MB out and put the Gig in the first slot, so really just unslot slot slot. Graphics card – not so easy. This is the first graphics card I have owned that needs it’s own power supply, so I had to jump it off the hard drive.
6. I had also decided to rebond my heat sink as my CPU had been getting to about 90 degees, so I took it off and cleaned it up with some surgical spirt (rubbing alcohol for all you Americans) and cotton wool buds. It was covered in the bubble gum type stuff that’s really messy. It’s amazing how clean you can get it with a bit of patience, see….
   
7. Add to this a longer cable for my keyboard and legal(!) copy of Norton and I am done upgrading things for now.

So there we have it, it’s now running much faster, cooler (more like 60 degrees) and it makes things look so pretty. And I have learnt never to buy anything from Overclockers again. Trouble is now I am thinking that I could do with a bigger hard drive, and a better DVD-drive. Oh and I could do with some more USB ports……

On Sunday we went to drive to the shops to get some food when the unthinkable happened; that little red warning light came on on the dashboard. So around we turned and came home. The car was really starting to judder a lot by the time we got home. Now it isn’t the most useful of warning lights, the handbook said it is a generic warning light and we should contact our dealer as soon as possible.

We got the car to the garage today and they had a look at it. It turns out the onboard compter was having issues! There are many sensors in the car that monitor many things, this lets the onboard computer compensate for anything untoward as much as it can. So they think it got confused and then compensated in a stupid way, making the car judder. They did a restart (I’m going have to find the Ctrl-Alt-Del keys) and now it seems to be working.

As you would expect with these things, the automatic error logging that it should do failed, so the mechanics (we really should start calling them IT support soon) couldn’t tell what caused it. I blame cosmic rays, damn you cosmic rays……

So I have spent the best part of the last three days in one of our kitchen cupboards. I kid you not, you see when the builders put our kitchen in they took the covers off two vents and installed a cupboard in front of it, the upshot being freezing coldness in the kitchen. So to fix it all I had to do was to pop the back out of the cupboard, squirt some builders’ foam into the holes and put the back back in. Pfff why can’t life be as simple as Becca?

First up; the back of the cupboard fits EXACTLY in, so it can’t pop out, and there are wires behind, so I can’t jigsaw it. I ended up spending about three hours carefully breaking the back off enough so I could see where the wires were. THEN I went at it with a jigsaw, which is the scareiest powertool I have EVER used.

Then to fill the holes; well builders’ foam seemed the way to go, that stuff is wierd. It expands to twice its size overnight and it sets from the outside in. So when I went to cut it down to size the next day I ruptured the wet stuff inside and it slowly oozed out making lots of farting noises, it really was one of the strangest things I have ever seen.

Then to putting the back back, well the old one was distroyed in the great battle of jigsaw, so I had to fashion a new one. And to cheat to put it back I braced it with lots of long screws behind it.

All in all it was a pretty professional bodge up I think.

I also put a fancy pants new shower curtain up (that took me about a day too) which is so solid that it is probably considered load bearing now 🙂 Now just the kitchen flooring to see to.

So I have spent most of today tinkering with my server, it now runs php5 🙂 I had to do this as I am thinking about playing with the facebook API and that needs php5.

All the pages on this site are finally valid CSS (including the family tree page – screw you microsoft!). The question now arises of weather I have a go making the whole site xhtml strict instead of transitional.

And who said I don’t have a life?!

So, as some of you may know, I bought a swanky new bike last week, I picked it up from Halfords on Saturday. It’s more of a road bike than a mountain bike, which, I thought, would be a sensible idea given that I only go on redways and the road. I have been using it a lot recently to go to work and it’s been great, it’s much easier to ride than my mountain bike and it’s a lot lighter too. The addition of a mini computer geeked it up to a suitable level so I could see how fast/far/etc/etc I was going. I have so far reached 37km/h on it and gone over 30km, not bad for a slacker like me 🙂

But then it happened, I had an accident. Well more of a stupid moment, and I fell off. Rather badly. I was cycling along merrily when I had to go from the road to the pavement up a dropped kerb running parrallel to the road, something I have done on my mountain bike loads. It appears that road bikes can’t do this, sigh. So off I fell sliding along the ground, I cut my hand, knee, elbow and sholder, and really really hurt my sholder and wrist, so much so that I cannot reach to put my hair up properly now 🙁 I was all grown up and didn’t cry though. I hurt more this morning so I went to the hospital to see if anything was broken, luckily nothing is, just badly sprained/bruised.

So here I am, typing one handed, with no real way of getting to work tomorrow, wondering if it is worth cycling to get fit if it is going to mame me in the process.

I have been back from Chile for a while now and figured that I should really get on with the bragging about what I did 🙂

I went to go do some observing for a collegue at the La Silla observatory, we had two nights on the 3.6m behemoth with the EFOSC2 instument strapped on it, this meant we could look for circular polarization from our targets (SW Sex systems). The facility is awesome, its about two and half hours drive up a mountain (at 2,500 ish m above sea level), there are about ten telescopes up there and lots of stuff for all us astronomers to keep us busy. The views were awesome, particularly the sunsets.

I had a few days in Santiago to do my touristy thing before and after I went to the observatory so I went to a few things. The best thing was the Pre-Columbian history museum, it’s a rather small place but has loads of cool stuff dating back forever.

Sadly, the weather turned a bit crappy towards the end so I didn’t make the trip up to the big Jesus thing that looks over Santiago (sorry Dan). Maybe next time.

As you can imagine, I took lots of photos, all in the Chile section of the photos page.

Annoyingly some fat Chilean dude managed to knock my laptop out of the overhead compartment on the plane onto the floor. So I am having much fun playing with the inevitable insurance pleasantries.

O.K., gloating over.