21 May 2011 (Saturday) - A Day in the Life

I was rather late to bed last night, as the kids next door were still screeching at 1am. They started screeching this morning at 6am. But I won’t complain – it just gives me free rein to make as much racket as I like when the need arises. After all is said and done we get on reasonably well with them and it’s good to be on speaking terms with at least one set of neighbours. Whilst feeding my fish this morning those neighbours shouted at me. I did laugh – she’d seen something by the pond and she thought it was a cat or a fox trying to eat the Koi, so she tried to scare it away. She was mortified when she saw it wasn’t a cat or a fox, but it was me. Once she’d overcome her embarrassment she laughed too.

There was a minor moment of panic this morning. Whilst mucking about on my PC, the antivirus software asked me if I fancied having a major software upgrade. Seeing how the antivirus stuff is free, something for nothing is always good, so I agreed. I clicked the “oh go on then” button. There was some downloading, clicking, fizzing, buzzing, and just at the point where in Doctor Who smoke would have come out of the back of the PC, a warning popped up that I had no antivirus software. Then the PC restarted itself and eventually came up with another warning that I had antivirus, but that no components were active. It’s finally resolved itself, but there were a few “brown trouser” moments along the way.

Talking of which, the wireless modem needed rebooting earlier. Let’s hope that was just  a one-off.

I then spent a little time on my latest silly idea. I have a plan to make my work blog available for the Kindle. I downloaded some software, and had this naïve idea that I could just click the “suck on this” button and it would convert a word document to an e-book.

It transpired that it’s not that simple. I would need to fart around editing the word document quite seriously first. Removing tables and hyperlinks is easy enough, but is just time consuming. The main problem I am faced with is that (as anyone who reads this blog will realise) that my writing style is such that I include the subject of my rant as a hyperlink in the text. This works fine in blog format, but won’t work as an e-book. I would need to set up the hyperlinks as a set of references.

I know this is possible as I’ve read e-books that have that functionality.  I wonder how I do that?

And then an afternoon’s fishing. There was a minor panic at the pond when the Rear Admiral realised he’d lost his car keys somewhere along the way. So rather than interrupting the fishing we phoned home and sent ‘er indoors ^TM on a mission to retrace our steps and find the keys. She found them at the fishing shop; he’d left them there when we stopped to buy some bait.

Talking of bait, my latest experimental bait failed miserably. I had heard how good strawberry flavoured baits were, and so I had this plan to get some tinned strawberries. I thought I could use the juice to make up a paste, and use the strawberries on the hook. The shop didn’t have strawberries, but ‘er indoors ^TM had a tin of sliced pears she said I could use. In theory they might have made a good bait. I tried them. But the fish from Del Monte said No!!

Thank the lord for maggots – a dozen tiddlers made sure the day’s fishing wasn’t a complete washout. Even if “Daddies Little Angel ^TM ” caught twice that many.

And then home for a quick wash and a bite of tea and to fall asleep during Doctor Who. I woke to find the clans had gathered, and we set off to Kings Wood. The Tree Huggers were staging a bat walk this evening. It was by prior booking only, and we’d prior booked. As had loads of other people. The bat-biddy didn’t seem impressed at the amount of people we had present – there was over thirty of us. After a little introductory chat, we set off into the woods, and the bat-biddy immediately started nagging that those in front were walking too fast. As one of those in front I can categorically state that the problem (if indeed there ever was any problem) was that those at the back were going too slowly.

Bat-biddy (bless her) had good intentions, but clearly didn’t realise that trying to organise more than three people is akin to herding cats. She would have been best off telling people what she was doing, then doing it, and letting people follow her, or do their own sweet thing. But we had a good evening; using bat-detectors tuned to 35MHz we were able to detect the ultra-sound generated by me scratching my bum. And then using bat-detectors tuned to 50MHz we were able to hear the bats squeaking. We heard lots of bats squeaking; and by adjusting the frequency of the bat-detectors we could determine there were at least two different sorts of bat. It was a shame that at the end of the evening someone had nicked one of the bat-detectors, but such is life.

And then home. Via McDonalds. Shame it was closed….