I won’t bother with lists of not doing much since my last proper posting but I will bring you up to date on a few things.

Firstly,
i took my car to the SAAB dealer this morning.. they test drove the car (which,
unsurprisingly started working FAR better the morning I took it to the doctor)
and then took it around the back. The result, a change of spark plugs later,
costing 15 quid ‘cos they didn’t bother charging for installation, and the
car has it’s woosh back.

Apparently, SAABs, unlike any other car,
don’t have a pre-set firing order of their cylinders. When you start the
engine, the engine management system fires all the spark plugs, monitors
the voltage drop over them and then figures out which cylinder fired and
hence what should happen next. Apparently this is a neat trick, but requires
that the spark plugs be working properly. This is why I was getting a slight
misfire upon engine starting and possibly why I was getting such awful performance,
as the engine management system was making sure the engine didn’t get damaged
if there were a fault with a leaky valve or some other fault.

Secondly, I got my hair cut..

Finally,
I was about to travel back to Oxford to go to Sinoco computers to pick up
an LG DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive so that I can give my old CD-ROM to my dad as part
of an upgrade to his system. (I’m donating to him the case, motherboard,
PIII 500Mhz CPU, memory and CD-ROM but he doesn’t know this yet.) However,
passing Dixons in Witney on the way back to the car after my hair cut I noticed
that they had on sale the very same drive I was going to buy from Sinoco’s
but £15 cheaper and this was the full retail boxed version rather than the
OEM version.. So I dodged in there and bought it instead,

On the whole, a decent day’s events so far.

This
evening I’m off to a BBQ at a friend’s place in Oxford, so I will probably
wash the car this afternoon after doing the weekly shop.

PS.

I had a nice long chat with the head of the maintenance at Oxford SAAB about various things, including the fact that all the technology put into the new Vauxhall/Opel Vectra (You know, New Vectra, New Rules advert) is actually taken directly from the SAAB stuff developed for the old 9-3 and 9-5. The new petrol engines in the GM range are all SAAB derivatives also. Was it GM who bought the SAAB car division or the other way around?

I’ve been so busy at work this week it’s been a total blur. I can’t place what I’ve done when.

I do know that I managed to get out and have a drink with one of the postgrads who has handed in his thesis on Tuesday, but only for an hour or so.

I s’pose I’d better think about going and doing the washing/washing up and clearing up in a minute. What an exciting life I lead, eh? 🙂

I have had some weird dreams this week though. I can’t remember the details so much but they all seem to be set in either the village I grew up in (Houghton Conquest, mid Bedfordshire) or the county town (Bedford). It seems that mentally I never left there even if I did physically 20 years ago. The night before last included walking along the High Street of the village along with a number of people who are postgrads in the department I work. Last nights included catching a bus from the Bedford bus station after buying things in some shops there. All very strange.

At least the dreams aren’t disturbing.

After
finishing up the picture gallery stuff on Saturday (which I’ve since redone
and added a few more pictures, more of that later…) I went home and failed
to become hungry, so didn’t have anything to eat. The rest of the evening
was spent getting bored by the telly before getting an early night.

Sunday started well.. I slept in until about 11:30am. 🙂

After lunch and the weekly phone chat with my parents I was
going to wash the car and mow the lawn^H^H^H^Hgrass but I just felt too hemmed
in by the house and garden and so decided that I needed to find a nice place
to go play with my camera.

I first thought of going up to White Horse
Hill, but thought that as there was rain due and it was quite a distance
away that this wouldn’t be wise. Similarly, for meteological reasons, walking
the bit of The Ridgeway near Didcot was out. Then I thought.. hey, I’ve not
been to the Didcot Railway Centre since about 1981, let’s go there.

Anyway,
so I toddled up there in my car (which I think is having turbo problems yet
again as there’s absolutely no boost I can determine). I parked int he long
stay car park as instructed and then gumped at the cost.. £3.50! It was a
good thing, therefore, that all the ticket machines were out of action. 🙂
The second shock was the entrance charge, £6.50 for adults and £4.50 for
children, and I can’t pretend to be the latter any more. Still, I’d come
this far, so I duely paid up.

It was a pleasant afternoon wandering about the railway centre taking photos, which you can see on my Experiments photographic page.
Somehow, the place seemed to have gone down hill from when I last visited.
There seemed to be fewer coaches, fewer locomotives etc.

Anyway, today
is Monday and the start of another week. Other than a BBQ to go to on Saturday
evening, I have no plans.. but at least the job work load isn’t quite as
high as last week’s.

I think I’ll take my car down to the SAAB dealer
on Saturday morning for them to check out the turbo and possibly go into
Witney and get my hair cut then as well.

So, what am I doing here sitting at my desk at work?

Well, I’m certainly not working, that’s for sure.

In
fact I’m attempting to create a gallery of pitcures on a web page and it’s
far more convenient to transport the pictures here on a ZIP disk than spend
days uploading them via the modem. It’s also far simpler to play with the
images and things locally than over a slow modem link.

I’m not using
the Gallery PHP script things ‘cos our web server won’t run it (it needs
the rewrite module and we have this disabled and we don’t allow user CGI
scripting for security reasons. So, I’m using the KDE 3.0 thumbnail stuff
and then re-writing the page produced by that.

You can have a look at the results here and here.

Anyway, what’s been happening this week?

Well,
I’ve been very busy witht he department opendays, Wednesday was the teachers
openday and thursday & friday were the student ones. It would have helped
if the whole design and installation hadn’t happened on tuesday afternoon,
so I had to stay ’til 8pm to get the machiens moved, in place, reconfigured
etc. ready for the wednesday morning.

Wednesday evening was spent
at the departmental not-the-undergraduate-annual-dinner, which isn’t actually
annual yet as this was the first one.. quite fun.

The rest of the week has been a bit of a blur due to lack of sleep from tuesday wednesday etc. Oh well.

Anyway, enjoy the photos.. all made using my new camera, of course.

I’ve been meaning to update my journal and had things to say but not the time to type them in. Now I have the time I can’t remember what I wanted to say.. typical, eh?

Well, it’s been an eventful couple of days.

Firstly, while cycling home last night I was hit from behind by another cyclist (I was stationary). This managed to break both front and rear wheels, the front caliper and the saddle. The bloke who did this says he’s going to pay for the repairs.. seeing as the repair cost £131 I’m not sure how this will go down.

I’ve got my matress.. It arrived at 13:45. I did manage to get home in time dispite being on my back-up bike and the bed shop not phoning me to tell me when they were going to deliver.. I had to phone them to find out instead.

I’ve got my new camera!!!! 😉

I had to go up to the courier’s offices to do so, but that’s only about 1.5 miles away so it wasn’t a problem.

Anyway, first light on the camera produced these shots though they have suffered a bit of aliasing witht he basic software I used to downsize them to 1024×770 pixels. I’ll have to find some better software.

It’s going to take me a whole to learn all the functions as there are SO many different modes of operation.

Let’s see.. what wild and radical things have I been up to.

Well,
other than ordering a new digital camera, failing to get a local shop to
lower thier price for the camera and going and hanging out with some friends
on Sunday, not a lot.

I did spend a lot of yesterday in an e-mail
conversation with the sales people at www.berridgemail.co.uk trying to get
my credit card details to work and finally had to phone up my credit card
company to sort it out. (The credit card company wanted me to authorised
the payment before they let it through but didn’t want to bother phoning
me or anything!)

Anyway, it means that by Thursday I should have my
new Fuji
Finepix S602 Zoom camera. Securicor will try to deliver it to my
house tomorrow but I won’t be there, so I’ll ave to get it redirected to
work on Thursday. Anyway, I’m happy.. I got the camera at £200 less than
list price and £140 less than Morris Photographic would sell it to me for
(and they boasted that they were £10 cheaper than Jessop’s).

Actually,
seeing as I’m going to have to stay at home for part of tomorrow to allow
the delivery of my new matress I’ve ordered, I might get the camera tomorrow.
You never know. (My old matress is a flimsy, cheap thing and all the padding
has fallen through the springs, so it’s all springs and no padding.. I’m

currently using a couple of blankets to cushion it.. it’ll be SO nice to
sleep on a nice matress again!)

PS.

I forgot to add the obligatory geek toy! geek toy! bit. 🙂

Well, I have a feeling that I might be having an urge to buy a digital camera soon. I think it’s about time the things have settled down and become mature enough technology.

I’ve had a look around and the Fuji FinePix S602 Zoom looks very attractive.. it’s brand new and is an improved model of one of the better reviewed digital cameras recently.

What I’ve missed since I’ve not had access to my dad’s Practika SLR. The cheap, £50 Panasonic instamatic I’ve had for 10 years just doesn’t cut it when it comes to proper photography as it’s point and click with no control, plus no through the lens viewfinder.

I’ve found the camera being sold for about £540 but will probably need a bigger smartmedia or microdrive for it to be properly usable.