Well, Friday evening, after returning from work and Happy Hour I had a quiet evening in, just me and my Amiga, playing with the Workbench 3.1 disks and seeing what programs on the ST/Amiga Format cover disks either still worked or worked with the A1200. I also did a little bidding on eBay for a monitor which should work with all my older computers, unlike the Microvitec CUB which can’t handle separate sync video.

Actually, I did do other things on Friday night, such as talking to Leila on MSN. OK, still geeky/spoddy, but hey!

Saturday I had planned to go to Witney and get my hair cut. However, due to not sleeping well overnight I decided to give it a miss and have a lay in. So, I got up at about 10ish, had a lazy breakfast before popping into Sainsbury’s for the weekly shop reurning in time for “The Sky at Night” on BBC 2. Following lunch I wandered into town via a local garage where I got my car washed. OK, it was a car wash but I don’t see the weather being good enough for a proper hand wash for a while yet so it’s better than nothing. The only real reason for going into the city centre was a desparate need for paracetamol tablets as I failed to get any a fornight ago in Reading. However, even Oxford’s Superdrug only had a couple of packets left. It must be something to do with the epidemic of colds going around at the moment or something.

The evening was again spent playing with the Amiga, finding out about the ways to get old games to run on the newer hardware and hence discovering how to get Starglider 2 to run. (Starglider 2 was one of the few games which came out which had both Atari ST and Amiga versions on the same disk.) There was nothing on the telly so i didn’t bother turning it on all evening.

Today’s been quite productive, really. After listening to Broadcasting House and then talking to my parents on the phone I got up at about a quarter to eleven. I immediately got to work pulling apart the Amiga so as to give it a good clean and also so that I could prepare it for the hard disk and new Kickstart ROMs which I should find in my pigeonhole at work in the morning. The hard drive mounting bracket needed modification because, for some reason, 2.5″ hard disk drives have changed their mounting screw positions. So, it was out with the workmate, drill and so on. While this was happening, the case was sitting in a nice bubble bath, soaking away the years of grime. With some good scrubbling with a nail brush the dirt of the years fell away. It was obvious that this particular A1200 had had a hard life. Its internal sheilding was mottled with rust and the sides of the keys of the keyboard were spattered with water colour paints. In all it looks as though whoever had it had abused it in their bedroom and afterward left it to rot in a shed. Amazingly, however, it survived and is now recieving some well deserved TLC. I even managed to get the floppy disk light to work which it hadn’t before I started. (Though I don’t know why it didn’t work in the first place.)

Subsiquently, I packed up the QL and other stuff and put it up in the loft, ready for setting up the Amiga up stairs and done various housework. That’s about it, really, so far.

Well, the machine arrived today. So, it’s definitely a positive first experience of eBay.

Now all I need for the machine are a set of Workbench 3.1 disks (which I’ve put an order in for at AmigaDeals (£16 inc. delivery)) and a monitor cable to connect to the back of my old Ferguson TV/RGB-monitor. (But I’ll need a trip to Maplins to get the DIN and D-shell plugs for that.)

Just before the weekend I decided that I needed to fill a hole in my computer museum/junk pile, namely a Commodore Amiga of some kind. I’d looked on eBay to see what was available before asking on the Junk mailing list what people thought was the best sort of machine to get.

The general reaction from Junk was that the A1200 was super-dooper, but I also got an offer of a free A500 with lots of disks. Unfortunately, Jane hadn’t realised that Bob had taken the machine (and left the boxes) previously. Oh well.

The upshot was that this morning I had a look at what was available on eBay and found an A1200 on sale with about 10 hours to go until the end of the auction and the current bid was £14.00. Hence, I bid £14.50. It wasn’t long until my bid was overwhelmed. I had a further think and bumped up my bid and added a maximum bid of £20.00.

All was fine, with no other bids ’til about 5pm when another person pushed the price right up to my previous limit. Now, I wasn’t going to spend more than £40 including postage for any old machine, so I upped my max bid to £25. With less than 2 hours to go the bids bounced up to £24.01… where it stayed. I won!

Paying with PayPal wasn’t too much of a headache other than the unexpected delay between the e-mails confirming operations and the display on eBay changing. It make you think that you may have made a mistake.

Of course, now I need to wait to see if the machine turns up.

So far, then, it seems a relatively painless process.

When my parents came down to visit on Thursday they brought with them all my old Atari ST and Sinclair QL floppy disks and microdrives.

This morning I had a look through the disks. Oh dear, it wasn’t a good sight. Cornish mildew had eaten into every one of the floppy disks. Some disks were worse than others, varying from one or two spidery patches on the surface of the disc to complete coverage of large areas. This means that ALL of my old Atari and QL software held on those disks is lost.

Thankfully, all was not lost. The microdrive cartridges have a far better design which keeps them air-tight plastic containers and hence free from atmospheric problems such as damp and biological interference. So, I powered up the QL and tried all the cartridges, loaded programs etc. No problem at all. I can remember when the QL came out that everyone berated Sinclair for fitting microdrives saying that they were far too slow and unreliable. Now, 20 years later, the only data source I have which has proved 100% reliable are.. the microdrives! Yes, they’re slow and they only hold 100K (as opposed to 720K for the floppies) but at least they last.

Still, it does mean that there’s very little point in setting up the ST again as most of the stuff I would have used it with no-longer exist. The Cornish environment is one of the worst you can have (other than Caribbean hot and damp) for magnetic media and computers in general. I just hope that when I test the Atari TT when I get back down to my parents’ at Easter I’ll find that it still works and the hard disk will run.

This weekend I journeyed 180 miles to the ENE and found myself in Norwich, the castlated city in the middle of the flat lands of Norfolk. And there I found a bearded fellow called Steve Howe, his 15 year old daughter, Leila, and a visiting Madrigal called Lindsey.

And it came to pass on the Saturday that we did go out into the shops (eventually) and did introduce the Leila to the wonders of clothes shopping (using my debit card). If you’re interested in some before and after photographs, here’s a few… Before and After and another After.

Sunday was spent mostly eating chocolate croissants before a brief but very cold visit to Norwich city centre where it was almost impossible to find anywhere to eat/drink which was open. Eventually, it was time to go home so we said our good-byes and I departed back home.

Well, after finding the Trek L500 the other day I popped into Beeline Cycles on the Cowley Road in Oxford and asked if it would be possible to get one imported.

The initial reaction at Trek UK, the UK importer, was that there was a 90% probability if not being able to get it. Anyway, I left it at that.

This afternoon I got two phone calls from Beeline. The first told me that yes, after initialy saying no, Trek Uk had agreed that they could import an L500 from the states and that it would take about 3 weeks after the order was placed but they didn’t know the price yet. The second, only a few minutes later, told me that it would cost me £850. I said that I’d have a little think about it now that I know the price.

I think I will go for it. Later on I may even upgrade it with the Shimano Cyber Nexus parts so that it has electronically controlled suspension and gears… maybe.

I re-did the Nerd quiz thingy from a few days ago and used my alternative answers. ie. answers which were borderline and previously I erred on the conservative side. This was the result:-

When I came back from Cornwall I returned with my old Atari ST and Sinclair QL, ZX Spectrum and ZX81.

Over the last few days I’ve been trying them out to see how time and Cornwall’s wet climate had affected the machines. The ZX81 I couldn’t test as it doesn’t have a plug on it but the other machines worked to a greater of lesser degree.

The Spectrum works as long as you don’t want to type much. Some of the silver paint tracks on the ribbon cables on the keyboard have corroded to the point where they’re no longer working. The machine must have been in a really damp atmosphere in my parents’ loft as the screws on the Spectrum+ keyboard upgrade have gone rusty. It is amazing that other than the keyboard it looks to be fully functional.

The ST Works fine, though quite a bit of the software I came back with is faulty with the floppy discs failing.

The QL along with its Trump Card expansion card work perfectly. No problem with the keyboard or the microdrives.

I do wonder how well the ZX81 works. I haven’t got the 16K rampack at the moment but even so, if it does work then that’s a 24 year old computer. OK, not quite as old as the Research Machines 380Z I have in the loft, as that’s from 1978, but not bad.. nearly half way back to the beginning of computing.

I wonder how much of today’s PC hardware will be able survive in working order as long.

This is the bike I’d really like.. pity it’s only availbale in Belgium, Holland and Luxemburg.

Grrr.. I really hate it when companies don’t sell stuff in all markets even as a special order.

Well, on the way home I popped into CycloAnalysts and talked with the owner.

We pawed over the UK distributor for Shimano products and found out that they don’t actually stock any of the Nexus products whatsoever. Obviously, they feel that the UK customer base isn’t ready for innovative design, and they’re probably right as most people are sheep and only want what they know.

Anyway, the owner of the shop is going to enquire on an international bike shop wholesale site and will get back to me in about a week.