TV Times

 Last weekend was the best weekend I've ever known for watching stuff on TV. I barely went to sleep on Friday night because the Alex Balwin trial was so exciting. It ended up with the prosecutor herself on the witness stand trying to explain why the defence hadn't been allowed to see all of the evidence. The lawyer who's livestream I was watching was shouting "plead the 5th and call a lawyer".

Then Donald Trump was shot – but barely scratched.

Then England was in the finals of the European football championship – we lost.

I did also do some of the gravel project outside my house, but I run out of energy and enthusiasm much earlier than I run out of daylight hours.

Richard "Arec Balrin" B

Your Powers are Weak Old Man

I’m old! Last year I turned 50, I made a big deal out of it, I had a celebration and I quite liked being able to say "I'm 50!" Now all I can say is the much more pedestrian "I'm in my 50s". While I did have a very nice meal and some good wine on my birthday, it wasn't a celebration of my birthday, it just happened to coincide with another event. I got a smattering of gifts, and nobody made a big deal out of it.

Richard "1973" B

Throwaway Culture

 There seems to be a complete lack of tuning parts available for my kettle. I bought it in Woolworths in 1998 when I moved into my first house, so it's almost brand new. There's a power switch on the kettle itself with an over-centre latch. The kettle gets power from a circular base and when you lift the kettle off the base a little spring flips the power switch to off. The little spring broke, so the kettle was slightly too dangerous for me. I uprated the spring from 22SWG to 20SWG. Sadly the slightly different shape and size of the spring meant that I required a set of shims for the plunger that actuates it. Neither uprated springs nor matching shims seem to be available for my kettle (or any other kettle) and I had to manufacture both. I had a surprising amount of piano wire and small brass bar in stock, but I don't have anything (other than a cold chisel) to cut piano wire and I don't have a watchmaker's lathe to part off the shims.

Richard "Beyond Repair - no. Beyond Economical Repair - yes" B

The Good Life

 Outdated reference to an outdated reference: In the late 90s one of my best friends moved from Plymouth to Surrey. There he met a girl, and the first time I met her and her friends I made a very poor impression on them. We were at a party, one of these women had a ludicrously posh (to my westcountry ear) accent and a slightly imperious manner. I heard her say to her (then) boyfriend "Jason, fetch me another beer". I couldn't help but say "Chequebook Jerry" in my best Margo Leadbetter voice and the two people near me erupted in gales of laughter. Nobody else had heard what I said, but they heard the laughing, and then my friends proceeded to repeat and explain it.

The posh girl and her boyfriend are now married. I went out with one of the offended women for a number of years. My friend married somebody different.

Richard "Penelope Keith" B

Coram

 Welcome to the boring world of Positive Crankcase Ventillation systems. Little did I know that on modern (post 1960's) cars, they connect the crankcase to the inlet manifold so that blowby doesn't pressurise the crankcase, and so that the blowby and the oil mist get burned in the engine. Damn Los Angeles and their smog problem!

I took my sports car to Snetterton last week and had a miserable time. I got black flagged twice for making excessive smoke. So much in fact that people came out on to the pit wall to gawp and speculate. While we did get to do some high speed driving (after the oil level had dropped), and engine ran pretty well it used A LOT of fuel.

I have since done a compression test and the engine looks a bit worn, but not catastrophically so. This is my best guess about what went wrong: The engine is just a bit more worn out than it was the last time I used it. The oil was topped up right to the top. There's a long right hand corner which pushed the oil up towards the PCV system. This combination of factors overwhelmed the PCV system and pulled a load of oil into the inlet tract and we burned it whenever we opened the throttle wide. The soot has messed up the lambda sensor in the exhaust, and it's now overfuelling wildly. The engine is already out of the sports car and in the back of the Fiat Panda waiting to go down to the engine builders.

I record this here just for the next time I have to do it: It takes more than a day, but less than two days to take the engine out of my Caterham. You have to have three people present when you crane it out. I know we've all seen Ed China do it with one assistant, but I simply cannot replicate that.

Richard "Catch Tank" B

Zip File

 The Mandela effect is nothing but data compression, but it's going on in the human brain. One of the main techniques in data compression is to look for commonalities and to encode repeated data in a shorthand form. Just as an example, imagine we're trying to compress some text. You could replace the word "the" with the letter "t" and it would save you a couple of characters each time it came up. You'd then lose a few characters if somebody used "t" as a word on its own and you had to disambiguate it. He was wearing a white do-not-expand-t shirt.

The Mandela effect is where a large number of people all have the same false memory: Nelson Mandela died in the 80s. Darth Vader said "Luke, I am your father" Pikachu has a black tip on his tail. It's fun to think that they're connections to alternate histories, or artifacts of programming changes in the simulation that we're living in. Sadly, after a long chat with my boss I now believe something much more prosaic.

The only Mandela memory that really bothers me is the Fruit of the Loom logo. It's a company that makes cotton goods, their logo is a pile of fruit. I remember the fruit being in front of a horn shaped basket, but it isn't. What we think is actually going on is that every time you see a pile of fruit in that style, it's in front of a horn of plenty. You've seen it on pub sigs, menus, invitations, and countless other places. When my memory filed away the Fruit of the Loom logo from when I bought a packet of sewing needles, it coded it as just another example of fruit in front of a horn of plenty. Every time I retrieve the memory it comes out with the basket included. It's quite disconcerting.

Richard "cornucopia" B

Grow Up

 Since my last blog a general election has been announced. I had a delightful chat about it with my barber, and we are now part of a grassroots political campaign. You should join us! Like me, she doesn't think that any of the political parties represent our views and our values. Unlike me, she was unaware of the idea of a spoiled ballot. She loved the idea that she would still have to attend the polling station, and so couldn't be accused of not taking part in the democratic process. She loved that spoiled ballots are counted, and that there could potentially be more spoiled ballots than votes for a particular candidate. She then correctly pointed out that we could draw a crude little picture – "like you used to at school".

The only political positions that I want to hear about for the rest of this campaign are when you spoil your ballot, whether or not there are going to be veins visible on the shaft, and whether there will be teardrop shapes shooting from the tip.

Richard "can I count on your support?" B

Imaginary Cat

 In my late 20s and early 30s I was in a serious relationship with a woman. There were a couple of memorable things about her.

Looking back at 20 years remove, I think that in one respect I was slightly less sympathetic to her than I now am to an imaginary cat. I lived in Plymouth, my girlfriend was studying in Southampton, so during term time I would travel up there by motorbike every couple of weeks. The journey was cold. noisy, uncomfortable and time consuming. It was made even more hasslesome by her worrying about me. I thought that I was the one taking the risk and who would be inconvenienced or injured if anything went wrong. I found all the checking in to re-assure her a chore. It didn't, however, discourage me from using a motorbike.

I now live alone and I often consider keeping a pet. I realised that if I had a cat at home which wouldn't get fed if I wound up in hospital, that I wouldn't dare to get on a motorbike for fear of starving the cat.

Imaginary Cat:1, Wendy:0

Richard "slightly autistic?" B

Hedge

 At the weekend I made several chainsaw mistakes. Not the types of mistakes that put your limbs in danger, but that type that spoil your day and hit you in the wallet. As well as a sweet little baby chainsaw I own a big hedge trimmer and I had agreed to help trim a hedge for a friend of mine's parents. Mistake number 1: I didn't go and look at the job before agreeing to do it. It sounded like I was just going to have to give an ornamental box hedge a haircut, but it turned out to be much more than that. Mistake number 2: I put my chainsaw in the back of the car, thinking that I might have to cut one or two bigger stems with it, but I didn’t bring the tools that go with it. I wore chainsaw trousers, sturdy boots, long sleeves, ear protection and eye protection. Mistake number 3: I didn't take a sunhat.

Giving the box hedge a haircut was simplicity itself. However there was an overgrown hedge on the other side of the garden made of leylandii, bamboo, and bramble. It was all too sturdy for the trimmer and the whole job had to be done with the chainsaw. Somewhere in the middle of the hedge was an iron post that I ran my chainsaw into and blunted it. Mistake number 4: It seemed to still be cutting, so instead of driving home and getting the sharpening kit I carried on. I overheated the bar and the chain jammed up. Mistake number 5: Even after seeing the householder's tools I still didn't drive home and get proper tools. I stripped the bar and the chain off it with inferior spanners that didn't quite fit.

When we had "finished" we discovered that the householders were in fact responsible for both sides of the leylandii hedge, and we had to go on a long steep walk to find the overgrown footpath at the side of their house, and start the whole job again.

They did give me £20 for the petrol, bar oil and my tea, and a VERY nice bottle of gin.

Richard "HS-45" B

Heavy Metals

 Over the weekend I did the first trackday of the year in my Caterham. It was quite a big deal for me because it's the first time the car has been used hard since my friends and I had then engine out to change the clutch. We've also rebuilt the cooling system and some of the rear suspension. It all worked like a charm.

Unfortunately during the day a badly maintained Radical sprayed my car with oil. It didn't seem to cause any problems and we wiped the worst of it off. The next day I washed the paintwork, but when I checked over the car the front brakes seem to have been badly contaminated. There was a greasy, rusty residue on the inside of the disks and the pads seemed oddly "crumbly" when I tried to clean them. All of which is to say that I needed to buy a new set of front brake pads.

Environmentalists and bureaucrats can spoil all kinds of thinks that I like. We can't have proper solder any more, so all our appliances go wrong and get thrown away. We can't have low temperature silver-solder any more, we can't have real creosote, naptha, absinthe, and codeine is always cut with something.

Over the years I have discovered my favourite brake friction material. It's made by Mintex, it offers excellent braking and thermal performance on a car as light as mine, it doesn't produce a huge amount of dust or chew up the disks too badly, and it offers a good balance of cost and longevity. Although it is a bit squeaky. Back in the day it used to meet the basic European standards. For the last couple of years it's been marked "Not for Road Use". Now it's no longer available and has been replaced by a less poisonous, less polluting compound. I can only image it'll be inferior.

Richard "Farewell Mintex M1144" B

Outdated Cultural References

 My new favourite thing to spot is outdated cultural references. I introduced one of my friends to the pastime when she was visiting Plymouth. While I explained it we were driving past a carpet cleaning business called Captain Rugwash. Within a few seconds she'd also mentioned how much she liked a restaurant called Veggie Perrins.

Captain Pugwash was made from 1982 to 1984

The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin was made from 1976 to 1982

Richard "Sunshine Desserts" B

People in Glass Houses

I live in a bungalow with a lot of windows and a conservatory. I'm also a cheapskate so I'm set on cleaning my own windows, rather than paying someone to do it. The caretaker at work has 30 years of window cleaning experience and he graciously agreed to give me a squeegee lesson. I'm starting to pick it up. There's a skill to it, and a sense of achievement when you start getting it right.

The two most valuable insights he gave me were: 1) Don't make too good a job of your own windows – your neighbours will ask you to do theirs. 2) Don't step backwards to admire your work – if you're up a ladder.

Richard "Ettore Steccone" B

Bush Bush Bush

 At the weekend I helped a friend of mine with some gardening. He had dug up a bush that he wanted to move, but it was too awkward and heavy to carry. Neither of us owns a wheelbarrow, but I am reasonably strong, and I was wearing dirty clothes. I thought that if we could get it up on to one of my shoulders I could walk round to the back garden with it. I was right about being just able to move it, I was wrong about the clothes that I was wearing. My dirty gardening jumper is quite loose at the neck and a lot of soil from the root ball went down my collar. I had forgotten that I was also wearing a fine lambswool vest which is now heavily soiled. Worse the vest funnelled quite a lot of earth into my trousers and pants. I had to shower and change all my clothes as soon as I got home. There was mud all over me, and I left a trail of mud wherever I took off a garment.

Richard "Beast of Burden" B

Cocktail Club

 My favourite cocktail is the French 75. It's gin, syrup and lemon juice shaken hard and then double strained into a glass and topped up with Champagne.

The most luxurious gin I've ever drunk is called Roku and it's Japanese - not to my eyes a nation famed for their gin making heritage.

A friend of mine recently turned 50 and I bought her a luxurious bottle of Bollinger Champagne. I chose it not because I know anything about high end Champagne, but for brand recognition - basically because that's what they used to drink in Absolutely Fabulous.

I engraved "50" in the bottle with a cheap diamond burr and a high speed drill. Sadly it was an awkward process and I don't have a steady hand so it looks rather childish.

I was very nervous putting a bottle of Champagne that I couldn't afford to smash into the big vice to engrave it.

I'm very glad to say that I was invited to drink the highest specification French 75s that the world has probably every known.

They were delicious.

Richard "don't think about the price" B

The First Rule of Nerd Club

 If you're trying to pluck up the nerve to ask a woman on a date, the standard advice is that "the worst that can happen is she says 'no'". This is clearly untrue. She might have later handed a loaded gun to Alex Baldwin who shot and killed a cinematographer, you might then be called as a witness at her trial. You would then have to answer questions before god, a judge, a jury, lawyers, the entire gawping general public at home, and the woman you asked out (looking quite delightful in her best "don't send me to prison" dress) about your advances towards her, about whether you hoped to pursue a sexual relationship, about how she ghosted you, and about whether you pestered her.

Worse, you might not have had any idea about how much cocaine she owned or used, and your presence at the trial turned out to be completely pointless.

My own experience is nowhere near as humiliating, but I should by now be old enough to know that nothing good comes from trying to impress people. I heard that one of the organisers at my nerds' social club was single, and I'm quite taken with her. In trying to make a good impression on her I agreed to deliver a short technical lecture at nerd-club. Some time between agreeing to do the lecture and actually doing so I got the opportunity to talk to her privately. She had no interest in going on a date with me, but I still had to do the lecture.

Richard "every girl's crazy about a TED talk man" B

Weekend Getaway

 I've recently come back from a weekend getaway in Norfolk. As well as socialising, eating, drinking, and looking after the family plot in the cemetery, it was mainly a residential safety course.

I got a demonstration of skid control and recovery. This was performed unexpectedly on a patch of diesel on the Norwich Distributor Road in an unloaded Toyota Hi-Lux which was in rear wheel drive.

I got a lesson in chainsaw practice and safety during which we felled and logged a tree.

I got a lesson in how to use lockwire. My final project was judged by a licenced aircraft engineer and was at a standard that would have been certified as safe for flight.

Richard "Tourist Information" B

City Break

 A couple of weeks ago I hosted my brother and one of his friends on their "gents city-break in Plymouth". We ate pasties and drank Plymouth gin. We maintained a length of my ancient Devon hedge. We observed bleak grey seascapes in heavy drizzle, we looked at moorland from indoors, we saw the ugly brutal architecture of the city centre in cold heavy rain, and we saw the inside of several (warm, dry) pubs.

I was reminded of a conversation that one of my colleagues had. "Isn't Plymouth beautiful?" "Yes, when you've got your back to it".

He's absolutely right, it's surrounded by moorland, rolling Devon hills and wooded valleys, cliffs, islands, estuaries, lighthouses, and harbours. But the city itself isn't much to look at.

Richard "Tourist Information" B

Molatov

 For the latter decades of my curatorship of the family lawnmower I had a very nice fuel mixing bottle, but I gave it away with the mower. Now I am a chainsaw owner I need the same thing again, but they're all trash. The top on the one I bought leaks terribly and I have been unable to fix it. Literally every other mixing bottle (except the expensive Stihl one) is the exact same moulding, and I can only assume is equally badly made.

Fine. I'll do it myself.

All I need is a clear bottle with a good screw cap, and a narrow neck, so that the measurements are somewhat accurate. I finished a bottle of rum and bought a measuring cylinder and I've now marked the empty bottle at 700ml and 714ml so that I can mix up a batch of 50:1 two stroke fuel.

Yes, since I own a measuring cylinder I did calibrate all the measuring jugs in my kitchen, wouldn't you

Richard "Lambs Navy Petrol" B

I Bet You

 I've got involved in a massively convoluted and expensive wager. One of my team can't drive and is starting to find it mildly inconvenient. I have previously wondered aloud whether I'm good enough at circuit driving that I could get a race licence. So we've challenged each other, who can get their respective licence first.

I will keep my readership informed of any important updates in this wager.

My rival has edged ahead as she's already applied for a provisional licence, while I still haven't actually ordered my Go Racing Pack from UK Motorsport. The bit I'm most worried about is what car I'm going to be in and which circuit I'm going to be at when I take the test. As far as I can tell the only hard and fast requirements for the car are that it has a passenger seat and an H pattern gearbox. Whether the driving school will accept my kit car, which has both of those, and which I'm confident driving, is another matter. Hiring cars at racing circuits is spendy.

Richard "Phileas Fogg" B

Fault Report

 Once, back in the old days I was adding a new feature to a ferry company's online booking system and I got the best fault report I've every received. I had added the feature to be able to take a bicycle on your crossing, and I'd done it exactly how they'd asked me to. However they had certain business rules at their end that I didn't know about. A bicycle is a type of vehicle and it makes its crossing on the car deck. When you book a vehicle their system might know exactly how much space it takes on the car deck, but if they've never heard of it before they assume that its 1.9m high and 5m long.

In reality bicycles are lashed to the handrail at the end of the car deck and take up approximately no space, however the booking system was assuming that they would take up 5m of space in an area that had a ceiling at least 1.9m high. You only had to book a few bicycles on a crossing and the car deck would be noticeably sparse, and vans would get turned away because the "wouldn't fit".

I was rung up by one of the people from the ferry company's computer centre. A woman with whom I had a friendly but professional relationship, and whom I had most certainly never heard swear.

"Richard" she said "bicycles are fucking massive this year".

Richard "lead passenger" B

Henry Porter and the Wizard's Rock

 I don't know very much about the Harry Potter cannon (I'll be Link if you are Gannon) but there are a couple of things I'd like to share with you.

Firstly: In the same way that adding "in bed" to the end of a fortune cookie message often makes it funnier, the title of pretty much every scientific paper is improved by adding "Harry Potter and the".
Harry Potter and the Structure of Deoxyribonucleic Acid
Harry Potter and the Computability of Numbers
Harry Potter and the Unskilled and Unaware of it: How Difficulties in Recognizing one's own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-assessments

Secondly: The sorting hat.

If I remember correctly each of the children are sorted in to one of a few houses when they start their magical studies. To start with this seems like a wonderful and fantastical invention by the author, but it happens in real life too. It doesn't happen to absolutely everybody, it's more men than women, and it happens at a later age, but it's the same. Something intrinsic about your character identifies you with your house. There's some degree of family lineage which might affect which house you're in. Each house has its own culture and heritage. Once you're part of a house, you can never possibly change.

I know you're sceptical, and you can't remember being sorted, but you will when you see the names of the houses:

De Walt. Makita. Ryobi. Bosch. Milwaukee.

Richard "De Walt" B

Problem Neighbour

 I have been burning hedge trimmings in a garden incinerator. I thought it was too difficult to light and burned too slowly so I modified it. There's now a hairdryer blowing fresh air in to the bottom like a blast furnace. This is what it looks like in oepration.

It was a qualified success, but I had to turn the hairdryer off shortly after this photo was taken because the incinerator was glowing red.

Richard "Max Power" B

Cheese plane

 I have a couple of unusual phobias. Door handles and cheesegraters. These aren't crippling anxiety inducing phobias, I'm just slightly more wary of these things than most people. They're not irrational either, I nearly broke my wrist when it got stuck behind a door handle, and I once cut then ends of my fingers on the grater while grating cheese.

One of my brothers used to live in the Netherlands and gave me a cheese slicer from there (he either thought I would find it interesting, or that it would be a safe alternative to a box grater). It's a bit like a smoothing plane, but the sole is short and wide, and the tote is before the throat (like a German plane). I have found this contraption singularly useless. The cheese crumbles rather than slices, and it binds up on the sole.

At the weekend I had a bona fide Dutchman in the house, and by coincidence the cheeseboard I put on the table included gouda – which is a Dutch cheese. "What you need is a cheese slicer" he said and I was able to find the one which has been cluttering up my kitchen drawers for the last 15 years. On the hard, solid and slightly waxy gouda the slicer worked like a charm – effortlessly producing thin uniform slices of cheese. I now think it's rather excellent, but not compatible with cheddar.

Richard "Grchghouda" B

The Bleaken

 In the run up to Christmas I was disappointed to see how many people in the shops were in a bad mood. Everybody is trying to live up to an impossible ideal of Christmas day and it causes a lot of stress. I've since been told that this is very common and that if you work in retail you're most likely to get shouted at or mistreated in the run up to Christmas.

I have to admit that I must have been one of those disgruntled shoppers because I started to find myself very critical of the rest of the general public with their miserable faces and short tempers.

On Christmas day itself I was walking to the pub with my sister and her husband and we were discussing Christmas stress and people being in a bad mood. A young woman stamped her way from her car to the front door and shouted "HOW THE F!*£ IS IT MY PROBLEM THAT..." and then slammed the door behind herself. I've thought about it many times, and I'd love to know what problem she'd got caught up in. I think it would be rude to go to a stranger's house and ask then if they could remember what they were arguing about on Christmas day.

Richard "that the mince pies are made with suet" B