Bathroom - day one

If there was a reason for putting off replacing our bathroom, it was because I didn't know how long it would take.  I know that I could manage with a building site for a bathroom (I could use the shower at work), but I'm not sure how we'd bath the kids if it wasn't warm enough for a padding pool. It probably wouldn't be warm enough if it took until November anyway. 

I know how there are always unexpected things that crop up, don't go to plan, or just take a long time.

So, with after a certain amount of peer pressure...we ordered, made a plan and I started.

A plan was carefully crafted to minimize the amount of time that the bath/shower would be out of action. So, I removed the sink and the lino floor. I didn't take a photo when I started, but I did take a photo at this point.

And that's the point I realised that the plan would have to the thrown out. The floor was rotten under the WC and would need replacing. (So I couldn't simply add 6mm plywood reinforcement over the 18mm chipboard, I would have to go to the backup plan and replace the floorboards with 18mm plywood, which would be more work but better because the floor would be lower).

As for the backup plan? The joist that I had planned to replace the boards up to, wasn't where I thought it was. It was under the bath. So, any opportunity to keep the bath in place until just about everything else was finished was gone.

So the bath came out, and so did the floor.

Some new pipes - moving the radiator.

And a new floor, with new pipes in the right place for the towel rail and sink.

All creatures great and small, and then there are wasps

I'm told (and Wikipedia says so too) that wasps are an important part of the biological cycle. Specifically, "Wasps are critically important in natural biocontrol. Almost every pest insect species has at least one wasp species that is a predator or parasite upon it. Parasitic wasps are also increasingly used in agricultural pest control as they have little impact on crops. Wasps also constitute an important part of the food chain.

However, I do find them to be the most intolerable of all the common forms of life that are found in the garden, county, city, park. Well, everywhere. There's just no escape. At this time of the year, you can't eat anything outside without at least one buzzing around.

I thought that we were OK living out in the countryside; for the past two years at least we have had relatively few. It was far worse in the city where there are lots of rubbish bins and other soft targets. 

However, this year we've been hit as well. Last week there were a dozen or so buzzing round the wheelie bin, which contained little more than dirty nappies. They somehow got inside too. Yesterday, there were at least fifty around our compost bin.

Later in the evening, I did turn the compost so that any food scraps in it were buried deep within, rather than being near the top. That certainly helped with the composting as well as wasp reduction; there were none near it today.

In looking for reasons (other then reminding me to turn the compost from time to time) to justify to myself why these things deserve a second chance at survival if they come near me, I search the internet and discover that there are many different kind of wasps.  The family Vespidae includes over 5000 different species of wasps. I'm sure you only see one or two kinds though, probably the familar looking Vespula vulgaris, the common wasp

I came across this forum question that says that wasps are good for getting rid of carcasses, and the BBC's article explaining how Teesiders should love wasps because they are good at recycling (erm..making nests out of chewed up wood).

I'm not convinced.

As I look into my garden tonight, I see lots of bees, hoverflies and other flying things all eagerly visiting all the flowers. They are so interested in the flowers don't even notice when I walk past. I'm glad they are enjoying them and I'm glad to help the dwindling bee population.

A solitary wasp floating near the bin (now empty) makes a wasp-line for me as I pass, I'm sure it's looking for a fight, stinger at the ready... If I had been suitably armed, that wasp would have not survived the night. Lucky for him, I was not.

Wasps: room 101.

Much Better Way

Today at work I almost started only one small task, although I achieved a great deal more.

All I had to do was do a bit of budgeting and financial planning - cash flow, profit, the usual thing. After consistently failing to get the numbers to add up (literally) for most of the morning, I decided that our over-evolved financial planning spreadsheet was just not up to the job and could be done in a MBW¹.

The problem with TOW² is that as soon as you try to tie financial transactions that occur on different dates together (for example, you invoice in May, so you show a profit in May, but you get half cash in July and the rest in September, before paying the VAT to HMRC in November) you easily generate spaghetti links all over your spreadsheet. This is just error-prone, particularly when things change (you don't get the order until June so you invoice in June instead....which formulae do you change?...).

So after some thought, I ended up with a much better Openoffice spreadsheet-based financial forecast that actually works. It's based on the same principles as typical accounting packages - basically nominal codes and double entry bookkeeping and so on. It's got clear inputs, outputs, bits you can edit, and bits that you should not.

Not only does this mean that there are far fewer ways to break it, but it ties much closer to the accounting software that we use for the real accounts. It's faster to use, will save me lots of time in the future and it probably also gets the numbers to add up too.

So, today I did great things!

And tomorrow, I'll actually do the budgets.

^1.Much Better Way.

^2.The Old Way.

Binless Wifi

The "departure" area of the Eurostar at St Pancreas appears to have no rubbush bins, but does have free internet access.

Tube

Someone put a video of me on You Tube.

Fame at last.

Mystery of Modern Houses

Where, in a typical modern build house, do you keep your:

• vacuum cleaner
• washing basket
• towels (the ones you are using in the bathroom)
• recycling bin(s)
• 2nd car (either yours, or a visitor)
• server room

?

Space Age Security

We all know that using a password like "password" isn't very sensible if you want to stop people guessing your online banking passwords. Actually the very fact that "password" is too guessable indicates that we don't all know it...but anyway, I was most surprised to find a web site that insisted that passwords:

• Consist of at least 8 characters
• Contain at least 1 uppercase character (A, B, C)
• Contain at least 1 lowercase character (a, b, c)
• Contain at least 1 numeral (1, 2, 3)
• Contain at least 1 symbol (` ~ ! @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) _ + - = { } | [ ] \ : " ; ' < > ? , . /)
• You password can't contain:
• Spaces or non-English characters
  

So, now we all know how to make a super-strong password like "Passw0rd."

Another website insisted that as well as a password, you have to fill in information that only you can possibly know (but that's another story..) i.e. the name of your first and last school as additional security questions.

Even with such easy questions, it took me less than 20 minutes to get myself locked out of the site. ..how did I manage to not know the name of my last school 20 minutes after typing it in?

The kind gentleman on the telephone in their "Reset my password" department obviously had visibility of my log-in attempts and only when he politely informed me that "Please note that the security questions are space sensitive" did the penny finally drop.

The answer was simple. When you first enter your security questions in, you type them in a normal text field where you see what you are typing. However, when you log in and you are asked to type them to confirm your identity, they appear in a "password" text box, and the characters you type are replaced by asterisks. 

As you know, super-strong passwords cannot contain spaces and when I type the name of my school into a password box, my brain automatically skips the spaces between the words. It does this for at least 3 consecutive tries, plus a further 3 times after clicking on the "Lost my password" button.

Normal Service Resumed

After a short break from both posting here and air travel, I'm back in the emergency exit seat again. I should have taken the train to Paris last week.

In other news, I am so pleased that I took a TomTom with me!

My planned 30 minute taxi ride from the station to the airport was shattered by the discovery that a suburb of Paris was lacking in taxis. According to TomTom, the 30 minute drive was only a 40 minute walk..so I gave it a try. TomTom took me on a pleasant walk through the countryside, up hills, round a lake through the woods. In smart shoes and trousers, mud was no object and I arrived safely at the hotel, although hot, sweaty and muddy. Yes, it seems that TomTom knows all the muddy footpaths in Paris!

Marketing

When did "Excel" become a synomym for "spreadsheet"?

Walking away

We've all read the books about how you must go into a negotiation knowing your walk away position. However, I find that it is rare to fail to reach an agreement, so you never really need your walk away position.

Today I discovered that there is something satisfying about walking away from a negotiation.

I was looking for a new pair of shoes. In the first shoe shop I found (Clarks), I found a nice pair of shoes at a reasonable price. Unfortunately, they don't have the right size for my foot. (This is no great surprise, I don't have a large sock.)

They do however have my size in this very similar pair at £70. They were indeed comfortable. I had aimed to get something under £50. In the current economic climate I decided to see if they would be tempted to reduce the price to get the sale.

You aren't meant to reveal your walk away position, but the salesman's generous offer of (shocked face) "we don't do discounts" didn't quite do it for me.

So I walked away, wearing my old, worn out shoes and a smug smile on my face. I'm sure there's some irony here.

The shop round the corner had an almost identical shoe for £20 less, which did me fine.

Grumpy Science

Are bus drivers grumpy? After a spate of particularly grumpy drivers a few weeks ago, I decided to do some science.

Hypothesis: most bus drivers are grumpy.

We'll need to know what grumpy means though.

Definition of Grumpy

Exhibits one or more of:

Facial expression is one of general displeasure

Makes a negative comment

Emits grunting sounds in a negative manner

Does not acknowledge the passenger except for dealing with ticket

Eye contact limited to glaring or frowning

Complains about something

Definition of Cheerful

Exhibits one or more of:

Smiles or has generally positive facial expression

Makes smalltalk, excluding where it consists mainly of grumbles or complaints

Emits a positive comment

Eye contact, excluding glaring or frowning at passenger

On each bus journey I take, I'll record whether the bus driver is grumpy or cheerful when I board the bus.

The results will appear in another post.

Powerless

Today we (most of the east side of York apparently) had a power cut for about 2 seconds.

What mayhem this caused!

At work, most office computers and a server rebooted, some work was lost, a quite important file was corrupted. And we all had to stop for 10 minutes to discuss technical reasons why the building's forced ventilation fans didn't restart immediately after the power cut.

At home, I've only got to reset the time on nearly all the clocks in our house (binary clock, cooker etc.) and turn on a few things that have soft power switches.

We are far too reliant on a stable 240V AC supply. Can you imagine what would happen if we had to go without electricity for any serious amount of time? We probably wouldn't be rubbing sticks together for energy, we'd be working out the details of installing a UPS (uninterruptible power supply) to keep the PCs running.

Office Move

We moved to a bigger, shinier office today. The move went smoothly (and I didn't have to organize this one). The new office is really rather nice and spacious. And still tidy.

We now have more than twice as much window, which is really nice. There's a nice leafy view, but unfortunately one more obstacle to really feeling like we are playing in the green fields: none of this vast expanse of daylight actually opens to allow the scent of spring into the office. Doh!

Plumbing sanity

If there is one thing that is essential when designing something intended to hold water (like a sink or a toilet cistern), it is that the holes in it (plug hole, and where the flush comes out) must be able to be sealed...right?

Typically, a seal is made by squashing a bit of rubber tight against a flat surface. 

So, why is it that:

 1. My new sink's hole for the drain does not have the top and the bottom of the hole parallel? That is, you put the drain in but and the nut + washer at the back are at an angle to the surface they are meant to make a seal with!

 2. My new toilet cistern does not have the base of the cistern at right angles to the back of the cistern....so that the flush mechanism fits wonky. If you make a good seal, the flush mechanism cannot align with the button on the lid of the cistern, or if you want the flush to align with the buttons, then you cannot have a good seal.

If these simple design details were right, then the fitting the appliances would have taken a fraction of the time it's taking me now. Surely, everyone who buys these items will have the same problem.

After a couple of false starts, the sink was not too bad: plenty of silicone instead of relying the rubber washer did the trick...but the WC is still a work-in-progress. I suspect that since I prefer the fail-safe (no leaks) over functionality (being able to flush),  I'll end up with something can can only do single-flush, not dual flush.

Do real plumbers have these issues...come on, what's the trick?

Gremlins

Watch out! The gremlins are about..

They've already beheaded our compiler (by making it eat its own stack), caused the simple software update that was meant to fix the compiler to break network file handling, and made my web browser crash.

Otherwise, it's an ordinary day.

Gushing Water and Another Mystery Solved

I woke up this morning at 2:30am to the sound of a header tank in the loft quietly refilling. I don't know how that woke me up, but it did.

Part 1 - the gushing water

Coming to my senses, I realised that no header tank has any business to be refilling in the middle of the night when no one is using any water. Earlier that evening, I had removed the toilet, radiator and other water-related things from the WC, so I thought it prudent to take a look downstairs.

During the night, one of the (disconnected) thermostatic radiator valves had started to leak water; which was now gushing all over the place where the floor would have been, if I had not removed the floor earlier that evening too. So now it was just gushing fairly harmlessly onto the concrete sub-floor.

I checked that the thermostatic radiator was set to "0" (off) and then managed to tighten the thermostat a bit tighter onto the valve which stopped the water. So, I let the water system fill up again, ran the pump for a bit and bled the radiators, before checking that there was no further leaking and returning to bed.

Just as I was falling asleep again, could I hear a header tank filling up...?

Part 2 - A mystery solved

Some time ago, I fitted thermostatic radiator valves to our radiators. They are easy to fit and apparently save you money. However, they came with an extra bit. You can choose whether to screw the thermostat onto the valve, or you can choose a normal non-thermostatic "tap", like the old valve that I was removing.

At the time I didn't understand why I would want this extra bit - the whole point of the product was that it was thermostatic. I kept the bits anyway (I'm like that).

Perhaps it was the fact that I was now shivering in my dressing gown and slippers, standing on a soaking sub-floor that was at outside temperature in January that made everything finally fall into place.

What is that  extra bit for? It's for when you don't want the thermostatic radiator valve to be thermostatic, of course! For example if there is no radiator connected to it and it's freezing cold because there's neither floor nor heating. On a thermostatic valve, "0" does not mean "off", it just means "very cold". So when the temperature really gets very cold, it turns the valve on.

So, I grabbed the non-thermostatic extra bit, stopped the water with my thumb while I switched it over, and of course it turned the valve off properly. I  let the water system fill up again again, ran the pump for a bit again and bled the radiators again, before checking that there was no further leaking and returning to bed again.

And the moral of the story?

You can bleed radiators in the middle of the night without waking up the household.

Moist Maker

If you ever saw the friends episode with Ross' sandwich and thought it sounded nice, I can confirm that it is in fact excellent, especially if warmed slightly in the microwave. Yum.

Christmas Presents

Great Christmas presents for the geek who has everything.

• Meccano 
• Lego
• Binary clock (for the living room!)
• Domino race
• Big garden loppers

I had a great Christmas! :)

(OK, the Lego wasn't actually for me.)

Rates

Today:

Savings rate on my ISA (4.75%) > my tracker mortgate rate (3.75%)

So I guess that answers the question.

Inflation is 4.1%, which is higher than the mortgage...what does that mean for the building society?

Mortgage vs inflation

From time to time, you hear of little celebrations: "I finished paying my mortgage this month!" On enquiry, you find that they won't really be much better off; their mortgage payments being £25 per month, or some incredibly low figure compared to a typical mortgage payment when you buy a house today.

This repayment amount presumably was a considerable burden on the monthly outgoings when the mortgage was taken out. The repayment schedule is not affected through the years, but due to general inflation, the amount becomes a less significant fraction of the income towards the end of the term.

While it is clear that over-paying the mortgage in the early years will drastically reduce the interest paid, is it worth bothering when the actual "cost" of the mortgage will probably decrease to such an extend that in 30 years you won't even notice the payments?

I'd get out a spreadsheet and play with some numbers...if I ever have enough spare cash to have to decide whether to pay back early or not.