a view through my own eyes

…when the car insurance is due for renewal.

Every year I get the renewal from the current insurer which is generally silly money by the time you add back in the “free hire car”, “the legal expenses” and the “protected no claims bonus” and up the excess. They always seem to range from you-are-taking-the-piss (with the extras) to quite reasonable amounts of spondoolies (without the extras).

So once again I have spent some time recently getting quotes online from some of the larger organisations as well as a couple of the “we do the work for you sites”.

But today I noticed the following, despite the fact the I put down that I have held my licence for eighteen years (am I really that old?) it only shows on the online quotes as “> 3 years” and that pretty much applies to all of them. So do they take the length of my licence into account any more? I really do not know and no longer have the patience to play with the quotes any more.

All in all the reasonable priced quotes came in at around the same price as in around £350, the silly priced ones were in the £400 to £600 range.

Then I noticed that one of the companies that is also known for being one of the two largest breakdown organisations gives a discount if you are a member. At that point it occurred to me that we don’t actually have any breakdown cover. We bought the car new and it came with two years complimentary cover – which expired in May. So that needed sorting as well.

So going for the cheapest breakdown option (if it breaks it is either fixed or taken to a garage) of £31.74, and then putting the membership number into the insurance quote brought the insurance quote down by a tad more than the breakdown cover and into the really quite agreeable range to the extent that it was the cheapest.

That will do nicely. The quote has been saved online and I will deign to pay it at my leisure in the next couple of weeks.

For those of you who watch Formula1 in the UK, it would be hard not to notice the Swiftcover insurance adverts, the company that does “insurance without call centres to save you money”, well thats all well and good if the website actually works. This afternoon it did not, so I did not even have the pleasure of extracting a quote from them.

The other thing that makes me chuckle is that most companies will “guarantee to beat your renewal price”, of course they can – because its rigged to start with. Now if only they gave sensible prices to start with.

In networking lectures in my student days, available bandwidth was explained in terms of plumbing by analogy to the width of the pipe.

A rummage round our ISPs website earlier this week revealed that whilst we were happy with our £23.49 a month for 1Mbit and had been for some time, but now there was a “MAX” option, £24.99 a month upto 8Mbit down and upto 448Kbit upstream (dependant on distance to the exchange, demand at the exchange, contention ratios etc etc) and still unlimited downloaded limits.

Bargain for an extra £1.50 a month.

Exacting scientific methods (well downloading a FreeBSD 6.1 iso) show that we are getting in the region of 2.5Mbit which is not too bad. More importantly SWMBOs photos upload considerably quicker – so there is happiness elsewhere in the Osborne household, and that will do for me.

Saturday was the day for Tapas at Typos, handily it was also Sarahs birthday so two birds were stoned in one kill.

SWMBO and I were asked to take the bread, so a trip to the Goods Shed beckoned. After the “card had been parked”, we managed to collect bread from Enzo, tarts and sausage rolls from Patrick and sandwiches from Jonny. All of which were superbly good and well worth every penny, I will be going there again for all of the above.

We were warned that a trip to Coulsdon could take anywhere between an hour and two hours dependant on the M25, other wallys on the road, the moon waxing into the gibeous and goat sacrifice. So it took us an hour and a half which included a drive through penalty for not knowing that the petrol station at Dunkirk had been demolished and a stop in Faversham for some at this time desperately required petrol.

Christines was grand, there was bread (us), croquettia (foo^rah), paela & tortilla (J), sangria in a bucket with ducks (liz), meatballs (adam) and muchly other stuff courtesy of Christine, Beatrice and many others I am sure. I think that we all felt fat. A water fight ensured as they do, mrspao found cats to play with and entertained with her knitting.

Christine: Thankyou.

The soundtrack for travelling was provided by Paul Temple and the Curzon Case – a Francis Durbridge whodunnit read by Antony Head.

Today was far more sedate, and lead onto dinner on the newly reclaimed patio (well done mrspao). I merely cooked and lit the lanterns.

Soundtrack for dinner and blogging is Japanese traditional Koto music (thanks Chris) and darn relaxing it is too. Unfortunately I keep thinking of sushi.

Found the Geotrack plugin earlier today.

It watches the logs for the site, gathers the IP addresses, does a known IP address/geographic location look up and generates a Google map.

Take a look here.

Well someone at work suggested that unplugging the router from the phone line, should let the equipment at the exchange reset after 15 minutes or so.

So having just got in from work, I reconnected the router which had been disconnected for around 24 hours.

It worky! Hurrah.

I no longer _have_ to talk to SWMBO as she now has the unlimited power of the internet to entertain her.

Bah!

Our ADSL connection is now in state equals b0rked.

A chat with the technical support guys at our ISP has driven me to the conclusion that either:

a) our router has died
b) British Telecom have done something

I am really hoping that it is a. as that way we can easily fix this ourselves. If it is option b. then I have to get the ISP to liaise with BT and that could be interesting. Handily the slight premium we pay for a not so cheap ISP generally means that their service is good, but can the same be said for BT.

Sigh.

Sadly I couldn’t use the spare USB modem last night to test the line with as I couldn’t find the driver CD and besides I am fairly sure that it did not have OSX drivers anyway.

So tonights job with downloaded drivers courtesy of works bandwidth is to test the old spare modem. If that works then we can either:

a) buy a new router/modem/wifi all-in-one-box to replace our router, switch and access point
or
b) lash up a PC and use the USB spare modem that we already have

Each has pros and cons though:

a, is going to cost somewhere between £60 and £170 depending on whether we want a good flexible box that will do usefull things ie QoS and VPN, so we can allocate bandwidth to certain protocols etc and get access in from the outside world in a sane manner or just a cheap and cheerfull box that will do the job.
b, is initially free and gives us plenty of scope for QoS, VPN access and potential central file store, but requires some effort to set up.

We will see.

I don’t usually post about work, but yesterday an example of political correctness gone mad appeared fron the Equal Oppurtunities and Diversity Office.

Apparently there are things that used to be said that are no longer acceptable, some highlights follow:

chairman/chairwomen:chair, chairperson, convenor, Presiding Officer
christian name: first name, given name, forename, personal name
coloured: black
dyslexic: person with dyslexia
forefathers: ancestors, forebears
homosexual: lesbian, gay man
husband, wife, spouse: partner
mad, mentally ill: mental health conditions/issues
man or mankind: humanity, human kind, human race
oriental: Chinese, Japanese, Far East Asian
sex change: gender reassignment

Note that the above list is merely the edited highlights the full list is considerably longer.

My colleagues and I came to the conclusion having perused the list and accepted the changes that it must have been produced by a mad single parent sex change dyke who had dislexic oriental forefathers none of which were a chairman and whose christian name may have been Lesley.

Once a year or thereabouts I make a little trip back to Deal. For the last few years SWMBO has joined me, this evening was this years turn.

I spent twenty five years in Deal until I left to go to Uni, I have only returned for what is now my annual pilgrimage or to see my mum. Seeing as my mum is no longer an option and has not been for the best part of two years it really is just a solitary annual visit.

So this evening off we went.

The traffic was mad (sorry has mental health issues – post on politically correct thinking coming soon) so we turned off the main road and went via Martin Mill, Martin and Coldblow Woods. All of which were haunts from my youth with my school friends, memories came flooding back, of bike rides in the holidays, climbing trees and hide and seek amongst other things.

We eventually arrived and had a wander round to see what had closed down, what had changed hands etc in the small seaside town. Usefully Skarsdens chipshop as it used to be known – it is now known as Middle St Chippy, is still open and the now elderly couple are still there. They were there when I was young and how much longer they will be there I don’t know, but it is a family business and the son works there so I am going to hope that it stays that way.

The fish and chips were as good as ever (double fried chips in lard and fish in beer batter) and for a novelty we were not plagued by the gulls as we sat on the beach looking out to sea. The waves lapped gently upon the shore and we could see people fishing off the pier, not sure that they had much luck, but then I never seemed to have any joy fishing off the pier as a kid either.

The town seems quieter than ever now, there is not really any work in the locality the youth are leaving. Deal in a few years will just be full of retired people watching the waves lapping against the shore. But I will continue my annual pilgrimage.

Well with the recent furore over the film The Da Vinci Code upsetting some of the churches and people boycotting the film it seemed only appropriate for me to claim my two pennies worth of time.

Not only was Leonardo the artist of the Mona Lisa, invented helicopters and was an all round engineer and scientist. He invented something even more fundamental which has had a massive impact on man kind.

Allow me to present:

Yes its the Da Vinci Systems kharzi paper dispenser as seen in John Lewis of Regent Street, London

A close-up of the evidence.

I have been looking forward to today for a while as to be honest I have been missing something and felt almost naked without it.

A few weeks ago mrspao and I decided to get our wedding rings polished – this year being the fifth anniversary it seemed a nice idea. So we pootled back to Hadfields where they were made for us and asked for them to be polished. They said it would take a couple of weeks as its very busy at the moment due to it being the wedding season.

So a couple of weeks ago we went back, the rings looked good but to be honest mine was a little tight and has been for a while. Clearly married life has not been good for my figure. Mrs Hadfield (for that is her name) noticed that it was a squeeze and said that they can resize the ring without any trouble but I would have to leave it for a few days and could I wait whilst she checked with her husband. A moment or so later her husband appeared from the workshop and said that he would like to do the heavy bit now to ensure it the right fit and then finish it off later on.

That was fine by me.

Mr Hadfield in workshop beating the ring with a hammer after weakening on one side with a hacksaw and softening it with a blowtorch. It made me wince to watch.

The returned, resized and polished ring.