Brian’s Blog - Mostly Harmless…

I haven’t added to the site for a while so I thought I’d better do an update…

The garden house is now completed, I just need to connect the electricity up. That of course means finishing the rewire in the garage and pulling a shiny new armoured cable the length of the garden. Fortunately there is a duct left by the previous occupant, this is a bit small but I’m hoping to use the old 2.5mm cable to pull through the armoured replacement. I may even put a network cable in there too, just in case we ever decide to connect the building to the outside world fully.

My earlier post regarding the Toyota was perhaps a little premature as it has developed a horrible grumbling noise from the front nearside when under load. Today’s diagnosis is a failed/failing CV joint so that needs replacing soon… in fact it’s booked for Thursday.

Along the same lines; I had a rather eventful game of golf on Saturday and not at all for the right reasons! I use a rather old set of Ping Eye2, Beryllium Copper (BeCu) irons, these have served me very well for 4 or 5 years since I bought them and had new, extended shafts and grips fitted. It seems those new parts are wearing out, all at the same time! On Saturday the shaft of both my 4 iron and then the 5 broke off at the hozzle leaving me to play almost half the round with nothing more than a 6 iron (I don’t carry any woods). Surprisingly, while I didn’t score very well, the lack of clubs had very little impact. The worst part is that I really won’t be happy using the clubs until they are reshafted and gripped; it’s far to dangerous to carry on with them as they are. Unfortunately BeCu irons can’t be worked on by just anyone as Beryllium is now considered to be a dangerous material if it is filed etc. The dust produced is apparently harmful to human health. Oh well, off they go to Ping for a service…

Thanks to an understanding pro at the club, I’ll be able to borrow a set until mine are repaired, thanks Peter!

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Filed under: Cars, Golf, Hobbies, Home, Isle of Wight

Hot on the heels of the Curd Family Get-together, a reunion for the 1967 intake of City of Bath Technical School (Bath Tech) old boys has been arranged - my god, I feel old all of a sudden!
If by some strange chance you have arrived at this page and were one of those in the same year as me at “The Tech”, please visit the Bath Tech Reunion Forum on one of my old domains, www.pubpals.com.

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Filed under: School

Yesterday I visited a lady with a few internet connection and PC problems. The PC stuff was fairly trivial with just the normal spyware confusions etc but the networking problems were something rather new to me.

The ISP involved was AOL, and they provided a Netgear DG834G, 54Mbps Wireless ADSL router as part of their package. It was a problem with this router that was causing difficulties in proving a wireless connection to a laptop in the house.

To cut to the chase, the router had old software installed on it which prevented the owner from seeing the wireless settings. It seems this was either “as supplied” or had changed during the AOL setup routines. The upshot was that no wireless details were available in any router menu screens and it was impossible to switch anything on.

A quick visit to the Netgear website and a download of the latest flash drivers appeared to make no change which caused quite a lot more head scratching. The solution? well simply holding in the router’s reset switch for 10 seconds or so with a paperclip did the trick (the reset switch is a tiny recessed button on the rear of the case). Suddenly all sprang to life and I was able to proceed with the rest of the set-up quite normally.

I’ve never been a great fan of AOL and their overcomplicated software and nothing yesterday has changed my opinion.

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Filed under: Hardware, Software, Techie

We now have a date for the family get together:

Sarratt Local History Society are planning an Open Day and Curd Family get together in the village of Sarratt on Saturday July 19th.

There will be a display devoted to the story of the family of John Curd who married Susannah Pymley in the village church 8th August 1767.

Anyone with an interest in, or connections with, the Curd family is invited to contact John Hopkins for further details at john @ curdfamily.com (there are a couple of obvious spaces in that address, so don’t just copy and paste it).

I’ll certainly be going and am looking forward to meeting a few of my “email family”..

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Filed under: DNA, Family, Genealogy, Hobbies

Over the past few days I have seen about 20 “people” try to register with this blog - I’m not really sure why. “They” all seem to come from Poland, which in itself isn’t a problem, but I don’t know anyone Polish I don’t think!

A little further investigation reveals that there seems to be no method, other than banning all user registrations, to stop it happening so that’s what I’ve done. I suspect it’ll make little or no difference to the normal operation of the blog as there is no need to register to read it anyway!

If you hadn’t already guessed, the terms “people” and “They” in this case refer to a spammer using  software to automatically and falsely register users on the site with the hope of destroying it by some means in the future.

Hopefully the total ban on user registrations will stop the problem, but I look forward to the good folks at WordPress coming up with a more elegant solution. Meantime if you see anything strange happening, please let me know via the usual email route.

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Filed under: Software, Spam, Techie