Be Excellent To Each Other

My Dad found out last night that his Mum had had to have her leg amputated. I wasn't quite sure how he'd taken it.

I asked him why it needed to be amputated and he said "I've no idea, and she's as stumped as I am." *

I replied with "God, I wonder what her mental state is. If it was me I'd be pretty unbalanced."

We both laughed. I love my Dad.

* it had to come off because of poor circulation apparently. And they couldn't knock her out because she might not have woken up from the general anaesthesia, so she had to be awake while they hacked her limb off. Ouch.

Well, last night I managed to smash by toe on the doorframe. It is now purple and bruise has spread half way up my foot. This considerably improved my mood, after somehow managing to ride bike down to job centre, and hobble in. I got ticket number one, and then was called. Turns out, I was meant to be in the other job centre. Across town. So I hobbled over there (what should have taken 10 minutes, tops, took 25) and went in, saw a man, who sent me upstairs to see another man, who sent me to see another man, and I've to turn up, with evidence of what I've been doing, at 3-50pm every other wednesday. In Oxford.

Sighs.

Off to kent for a wedding at the Shepheard Neame brewery this weekend, so that should be cool. No dancing for me, though.

Dude, fuck this shit, just start robbing.

With obvious sympathies, further recommendations from when it happened to my Grandad include "Hasn't got a leg to stand on" and "Could get completely legless".

Someone I knew in school had a nasty motorbike accident in which he lost his foot, from about the mid shin down. He spent weeks telling everyone about this excellent diet he'd discovered, he'd lost half a stone almost instantly.

He also claimed it improved his cricket game, as he'd always batted a little down and the prosthetic had more bounce in it than a normal leg.

Did you reply with "Pull the other one"?

Ok so i have been stuck at a petrol station for two amd a half hours. Got petrol and on return the steering lock failed.. aa could not fix. now waiting for a tow truck. ho hum.

Why were you stuck there for two and a half hours?!

First of all apologues for the typos. I was typing it on my phone which is never easy.

I was on the way to future Mrs Chinnys house with everything ready for our holiday departure in the morning. I stopped to get petrol. When I got back into my car the steering lock wouldn't disengage. Being a VW the steering lock can be a bastard but this time it was properly stuck.

After much fiddling I called the AA and it took them about 45 minutes to arrive. In the meantime I managed to roll the car out of the way (luckily I'd pulled up dead straight)

The AA man tried for a further 50 minutes to fix the car but it was a dead loss. The key just didn't feel right in the ignition. So he called for a tow truck that took a further 50 minutes to arrive.

But there was a further problem as I had no steering so the car couldn't go home (you need steering for our driveway). So the AA man suggested we drop the car outside a main dealer. So we dropped the car at the dealer half a mile up the road from my house. As the AA man pointed out, we could drop it outside a normal garage but if it needs new keys/chips if they need to replace the entire ignition then VW would need to do it anyway. So best drop it outside a VW garage.

So this is both a pain in the arse and expensive:

A) It's cost a hundred quid so far just to get home as I had the wrong sort of AA cover and had to "upgrade".
B) The car is now parked up outside a VW main dealer. Fuck me, it's going to be expensive.
C) I want to be in Devon by 5pm tommorrow for the holiday I worked fucking hard for.


So looks like I'll have to run down the dealer at 9am and see what can be done. In all probability I'll have to leave the car with them and get someone to collect it when done.

Meanwhile poor future Mrs Chinny will have to do all the packing, drive 40 miles in the wrong direction to get me, back to my house, then to her parents to get the bike, load the bikes onto her car (I'm *dreading* that bit) and off we go.

Lots of expense and pain in the backside all at the wrong time.

And my tea consisted of a Gingsters and a chocolate bar from the garage.

Apologies for sounding off, but if you'd just spent the best part of 3 hours on the forecourt of an Esso Garage you'd need to sound off!

Condolences chinny, that's the worst thing that can happen at the right wrong time. Cheerfully this now means you're due for a massive stroke of luck at some point.

Well enjoy your holiday dude. This will all seem so trivial in a week!!

since when has alan partridge been on the forum?

FTFY.

On the upside it could have happened at a far worse moment. If it cocked up once I was down there it would be bad, likewise if it went when I was back at work I could lose several days money.

Of course, with the Chinnymobile out of action the inbuilt mp3 player with "tunes" on it is no longer avaliable.

But luckily I can fall back on old technology to save the day. Just dubbing stuff off to my shiny and hardly used Minidisc player. Good job I didn't throw all those blanks out now really. The minidisc combined with my little FM transmitter should save the day as the 206 only has a tape player.

Cheers. Yes, hopefully so. Always happens when I go away. Last year I had a weekend off and the starter motor went, and at Xmas on the way back from a break the brakes went (although I should have got them services a while before).

Since Sun Mar 30, 2008 10:49 am apparently.

My 360 has just red-ringed.

Balls.

SEE I'VE CURSED YOU ALL!!!!!!!

It wouldn't have happened on a GX4000!!!

//edit: !!

Ha ha, I blew up 3 of the fuckers without trying.

I think Amstrad cheapskated on the power supplies. Also there were two connectors on the back that were almost the same size. One was 5v and one was 12v. You can imagine what happened next.....

Car update:

VW have looked at it. It's properly borked and there's nothing they can do today. So I'll have to go off and leave them to it.

What an arsehole eh?

I'm now making a chip butty to try and cheer myself up since I haven't eaten much since yesterday lunchtime. And Fentimans, natch.

I've just travelled an 80 mile round trip to a Toyota dealership in Wolverhampton to look at a Celica T-Sport to replace mine with.

Except it wasn't there.

Because some vandalistic fuckwit chucked a brick at the windscreen on Thursday night and it's in the repair shop.

Of course, it would have been far too much effort for Toyota to actually ring me and tell me this BEFORE I take an hour out of my busy schedule to drive down there to look at it.

And then they wanted me to put a non-refundable deposit down on a car that I hadn't actually seen! Madness! I told them to fuck off, I'd gladly put a deposit down but only if it was refundable. They relented in the end and I have it in writing and everything.

I didn't even realise the AA did a form of cover that wouldn't get you to a garage.

No. I have complimentry Home Start which I think only covers you for that kind of thing within a few miles of home. Otherwise they just try and fix you there and then.

All down here now. It's pissing it down and the weather forecast looks appalling for the week. There's a river running about 2 metres from where I am sitting. If it continues to rain like this then we'll be drowned by Wednesday.

I've just used the laptop webcam to take a piccy from the window behind my seat. Poor quality but I'm only on GPRS here. And the webcam is shit, natch.

Wow, excellent river! Is it meant to be there?

Tough luck with the car thing. I lost my keys once and was reduced to getting a taxi home, filling a rucksack with tools and then biking back in to town in order to steal my own car. It was barely worth stealing though, even to me. So I left the steering lock off after that and wired a couple of switches in instead, one for the ignition and another for starting it.

I heard/danced to a song yesterday, but I can't remember what it's name is. I'm pretty sure it's by Rush (I think they played 4 Rush songs yesterday...) and does something like:

circumcise me/appetize me/blahblah me, balh me, blahblahblah me.

Does anyone know what it is based on my fantastic description?

I found, in a seaside arcade, some kind of multi-choice machine that had buckets of old Taito and Tengen/Atari/Midway games. Unfortunately the selection process wasn't clear so I ended up playing Defender (badly) instead of Bubble Symphony. I then had the horrible experience this afternoon of standing at a bus stop with my girlfriend whilst half a dozen giggling teenagers were talking boastfully in German about their pharmaceutical experiences.

Everything else was great about today though. Especially the ice cream.

Yes it is. We're in part of an old water mill. The river was really high this morning but has gone down by a foot now. I'm sitting on the sofa at the moment with the river running about 3 feet behind me.

I'll try and post a proper picture later. I also attempted a panoramic view from the top of Dartmouth Castle earlier so I may see how that comes out and post it later.

Lucky sod. Free electricity for life.

Here's a proper picture of the river at about 9am this morning. There was a flood warning last night so the landlady told us to take stuff off the floor just in case. Judging by where the river was it was a foot above normal. Another foot and we may have been under water.

I did stich together my panoramic view of Dartmouth but it looked so shit it was embarressing. Gah!

Bit's and Bobs Blog On...

Lave's You don't want to know, but I'm going to tell you*

It's 10:04 PM on Sunday and I've been alone in my office all day! I've got to send a draft of a chapter off tomorrow. Tonight is not going to feature much sleep!

It's about the data I took with the middle telescope:



That meant driving through cloud to get there



And after it all produced data THIS FUCKING RUBBISH






* It's cathartic

If the dotted line is the fit and the solid line the data then yeah. That's fucking rubbish.

Yes, yes it is...

But yet it still counts as a three sigma detection!!

4 hours+ beating on a Planetary Nebulae to attempt to detect a molecule that is soooooo fucking weak that no one else has seen it. Resulted in shit data. Who would have thunk it!

To be fair the spike next to it is probably emission too.

Oh, these are emission spectra? I'd say that looks like a bimodial distribution, yeah. Two emissions perhaps. What are the units then? Some MeV derivative on the vertical? Horizontal could be, I dunno, time? Or azimuth?

Craster slaps the fuck out of gaywood.

It's nice to have a post thesis Bezzie about!

x = Velocity km/s (LSR) -- The velocity the material is traveling with respect to the local rest velocity. Calculated by 'neeh naah neeh nah' ambulance-wooshing-past-you style dopler shift.

y = main beam Temperature detected by telescope (in K) (basically intensity) - calculated by seeing how the hot the detector is.

Yeah, one of our Planetary Nebulae (CRL 618 Frontier fans!) has two peak emission confirmed and wonderfully the peaks correspond to two known regions in the PN, a doughnut of material that surrounds the PN and a jet of material being ejected.

Technically you could observe 3 peaks, (the torus and both the north and south pole yet...) so the extra peaks aren't anything to worry about, we are just pushing a telescope thats not really good enough to see them to 'have a go anyway.'

EDIT: Ungeekified - a bit. So Craster doesn't slap me.

At least you had good weather, you...git.

This is all very well and good, but have you considered the possibility that the telescope's cabrinators might be damaged, hence the shit readings?

I also understand bits and bobs of this, having a physics degree from Manchester where a good part of it was Astro shit (including my dissertation) since we had Jodrell Bank on our doorstep.

Reboot the telescope.

It was you who was holidaying there wasn't it? I've never seen it when it had snow, that is incredible!

We actually had quite bad weather for observing, but lovely weather to take photo's at.

The irony of these two comments is that they are basically right. On the first night that my mate observed (who was in charge on our trip) involved his very first action being to get the Telescope to point at a star that was beneath our feet at the time, getting the telescope to strip a gear and flip its fuses and pull itself to an emergency stop.

Which ment the support astronomer had to leave a party he was at 14,000 ft below, come up and press reboot. And the stripped gear, fucked up the nights data.



Ah yeah! We had a quick chat about it down the pub when I conned Craster and Grim... to buy me drinks. Ho ho ho!

You see.. that is what I wanted it to be like. I've waited 27 years to get there, the least I could ask for is to see the sunset!

(And for my wife not to get altitude sickness.)

Still, at least I made it. And I've got a reason to go back. The rest of the photos will make it onto our flickr - the wind sculpts the snow into some pretty weird shapes.

I really wish I'd changed out of the tuxedo before making the ascent. *spook*

Hit it wiv an ammer.

Good News:

My toe is now not as painful as it was, as I do believe I had just dislocated it, and was able to pop it back into place on Friday night, leaving me able to walk a bit better, and even dance at the wedding. Mrs A got locked in the Brewery...

Must have been handy for getting cash out.

Oh wait.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/hi/enter ... 492620.stm

AS beats death.

FUCKING tube!

Heh. I read that as 'lube'.