23 June 2009 (Tuesday) - Fixing Broken Things

Today’s photo is one I found whilst browsing through my PC. “Ugly Sheep” lives on the BatFarm, and no one has told the dozy beast that he’s supposed to run away from people. When you walk into the field, ten thousand sheep charge away from you, and one charges toward you. I like Ugly Sheep. I need to go visit him again soon.

Well here we are into the fourth week of being on Blogspot, and I have to say, I love it. Where I used to blog was a dull website in comparison. Over on 360, I could change the desktop theme, and that was all. I can fiddle with so much more here. Whereas I would make up a slideshow of my pictures and put that on You-Tube once a year, Blogspot does it for me as I go along. I can make obvious links to friends’ blogs, and Blogspot arranges it so that the most active blogs are the most prominent. People don’t need to sign up to anything to leave comments, unlike where I used to be.

And the hit counter… it doesn’t count my own return hits whenever I’m continually tweaking. Did you know that the most popular time for my blog is between 1 – 2pm. Lunchtime reading ? And I get most hits on Mondays and Thursdays. And I’ve had hits from the USA, Ireland, and Canada. Most of my loyal readers are using Windows XP. About a fifth are on Windows Vista. And there are hits from Mac users and even from one person who’s still on Windows 98 (who *is* that?). IE 6 & 7 are the favourite browsers, with Firefox in third place.

And it’s even got a fish tank too…

Meanwhile back in reality, the chodbin’s packed up again. It won’t flush. I would have a go at fixing it myself, but in all honesty, I wouldn’t have a clue how to go about it. I suspect that it would be better just not flushing, than having had me fixing it.

Something I could have fixed myself, but refused to was the coving in the hallway. Over two weeks ago the people installing the new door scuffed up the coving whilst putting the new door in. Some chap from the firm who’d installed it came round today, and tried to say that the problem was the material that the coving was made out of. I suggested the problem was that when they were installing the door, they’d clearly put the door through the coving by mistake. And bearing in mind how substantial they claim the door to be, the coving would need to be made of armoured steel not to have been scuffed. The bloke grudgingly conceded defeat, and fixed the damage.

Something else I couldn’t fix was my car’s wing mirror. Despite having folded the thing in last night, a blue vehicle has clearly scraped along the mirror at some point. I’m suspecting a bus, but of course I can’t prove anything. I can probably scrub the blue paint off at some point, but the mirror glass was shattered. To the Renault garage where I spent over thirty quid on a replacement. I was expecting it to be a fiver at most, but these mirrors come with a built in heater for when they ice up at winter. I’m just hoping it lasts long enough to get iced up. I suppose I should be grateful they fitted the thing for free.

And so to work. I’m not sure what was going on at the hospital at Margate today – it sounded like they were having a “Red Alert”. All sorts of sirens and klaxons were going off. My first reaction was that it was the fire alarm, but since no one at all seemed to be in any hurry to leave the building, I rather assumed it wasn’t. I can’t help but wonder what all the noise was about.

I didn’t pop in to Margate’s shed shop on the way home today – I bought exactly what I wanted cheaper off of eBay. Lets hope it arrives. The mobile phone battery I bought off of eBay last week didn’t. They sent me an email last Tuesday saying it was in the post, then on Sunday they refunded my money (with no explanation at all). I’ve asked them what they are playing at. I shall give them a negative feedback for lying about posting the thing, but bearing in mind their feedback is in the eighty thousands, I doubt that they would care….