Pither.com

We moved!

Simon — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 10:07:00 +0000

And we don't intend to do it again for a very long while!

Two interesting things we've learnt...

when a van rental company suggests a van "big enough for a three bed house", get a bigger one if you intend to move from a two bed house.
if you visit a new house the afternoon before completion and the builder still has teams (must have been 10-20 people) working on it, the chances of it being finished the following day are slim.

We got confirmation from our solicitor that we had legally completed at about 11:30am. The builders (Bellway) weren't ready to give us our keys until about 4pm!

Needless to say, this meant we were still moving late into the evening (thank you very much to all our helpers!). Thankfully Bellway hadn't sold Liz's house (which we part exchanged) yet, so they were happy for us to hold on to the keys until the following day. Which also allowed us to finish cleaning there.

Onto our new house...

So far our snag list is 115 items long! About 40% of them are paint related and the builders concluded that there were enough bad bits that it would be easiest just to entirely repaint the inside of the house!

The repaint started around the middle of last week with them patching and filling tens of dents, holes and missing bits throughout the house. Since then they've painted all the ceilings (some twice to get a good covering), all the walls and most of the woodwork! They finished this morning.

Some other bits, like the gap for the washing machine being blocked by spare bits of wood, missing turf, no garden shed and a lack of external cabling for a BT line (it took them over a week to fix that!!) have also been sorted out. But we still have a list of well over 50 snags awaiting attention! Hopefully now the painters are done, they will get on with some of the others!

New home, finally

Simon — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 17:42:00 +0000

It was over a year ago that we put down the first holding deposit for a new home. At that point is was nothing more than a fenced off muddy bit at the back of the development.

Since then we've watched it grow steadily, if rather slowly...

July 2007:

September 2007:

October 2007:

February 2008:

March 2008:

April 2008:

June 2008:

July 2008 (less than 4 weeks to completion):

It was about this time that the builders (Bellway) contacted us and said that they wanted to fix a completion date for 31st July.

We were very excited and pleased to finally know when we would be moving. Then we thought about it a bit. A few days later we phoned them back and asked them if they were sure! Apparently they were, despite the apparent lack of windows and such. So we've been busy booking vans, packing and telling people our new address. :-)

When we saw it last weekend (1.5 weeks before the completion date set by the builder) it was still missing:-

some bits of the double height bay
kitchen wall units and appliances
paint
flooring (except partial tiling in the kitchen)
patio
turf
garden gate, fence and shed
a gas connection
a vent on the boiler
an outside tap
some guttering
probably other things that we couldn't tell as we couldn't get in to really see!

The builders assure us they will be ready, yet when arranging our pre-occupancy briefing today they asked if we could do it on the day we complete (they are normally done 7-10 days before!). Then they went on to enquire whether we were planning on staying the night on the day of completion!!

We're not worried, no, not at all!

Another one!

Simon — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 08:30:00 +0000

It would appear that the sleepless nights, stress and hard work haven't taught Liz and me anything!

I'm proud (and scared, again) to announce that Liz and I are expecting our second baby around the middle of January. :-)

The first scan was a couple of weeks ago and everything seems to be fine. Although I think the baby's going to be another stubborn one. After quite a few minutes and various approaches to getting the baby into the right position to be seen, we got sent off to have some sugar and take a walk around the hospital! Thankfully that did do the trick, at least just about for long enough to get the information required!

Hello family car

Simon — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 16:15:00 +0000

With my RX8 lease ending I had to find myself a new car. I actually found this quite tricky, given our list of requirements...

automatic, so that Liz could use it to learn
manual look-a-like, so I can pretend I'm not driving an automatic!
five doors, for easy access with Edward and to the boot for all of his stuff
reasonable size boot, for all of Edward's stuff
within budget
"nice", to drive and look at
keyless/hands free entry and driving

After much browsing and pondering I got around to test driving a couple of cars.

First was the Toyota Auris, which was OK but nothing exciting. The automatic/manual gearbox also wasn't great, generally giving rough changes, although they could be smoothed out a bit once you knew when they were coming.

Second was the Honda Civic. This was much more impressive - fantastic looking dashboard, amazing internal space, although fairly small back doors. Sadly still fairly rough gear changes (although better than the Auris). I couldn't decide if I like the external look either.

After finally deciding to go for the Civic, I found that it didn't actually meet the budget requirement. Generally speaking most cars that sell for about 20k can be leased for about £300/month (or hopefully slightly less). But the best I could find the Civic for was around £350/month. :-(

So back to the drawing board.

At this point I decided to drop my desire to have a (pretend) manual gearbox, as I didn't really need it and it narrowed the options a lot. Having looked at the huge key that you get with the Auris to provide hands free entry I also gave up on my hope of avoiding keys (as a lump the size of the Auris key wouldn't fit anywhere more convenient than a normal key anyway).

After some more browsing, pondering and running out of time, I test drove a Toyota Prius.

This had the advantage of not only being leasable at quite a good price (£260/month) but also coming with the promise of saving on fuel bills (being a hybrid and all). It's not perfect on looks, but at least it does come with a touch screen display that shows which engine you're using (petrol or electric)!

It's also stupidly easy to drive. It literally has two gears, forwards and reverse (hmm, and parked), it doesn't even have 1st/2nd like most automatics. Plus as a bonus the "key" is actually a small lump that you insert into the dashboard before pressing the on switch. Not quite hands free, but a good step in the right direction.

So with an acceptable choice and no more time to look, I now have a shiny Toyota Prius...

Bye bye sports car

Simon — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:27:00 +0000

This is old news (it happened at the end of April) but I don't feel I should let it pass without mention.

As I lease my car, April was sadly time for me to return my Mazda RX8...

It was quite expensive on petrol and wasn't particularly easy to get Edward in and out of (although it was possible!).

Except for in one situation - car parks! To get Edward in and out you had to open the double doors most of the way, which just isn't possible with another car parked next to you. It certainly made me appreciate parent and child parking spaces.

Regardless, I have thoroughly enjoyed driving it.

Posting again

Simon — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 14:53:00 +0000

I've not posted anything here for a while. Partly I've been busy, partly I've been lazy and mostly I've been wanting to finish off writing my own blog software before I add any new content.

Unfortunately my blog software isn't finished yet (see the first two problems above) and things (or at least blog ideas) are going to start falling out of my head if I don't post soon.

So please take this as a warning/apology for the blog flood that's about to start!

Supajam competition launch

Simon — Mon, 19 May 2008 07:29:00 +0000

One of my customers today launches their latest competition. This contest is looking for unsigned bands to upload their best track and after a few rounds and filtering and a public vote the winner will get to perform live in Spain in front of thousands of people!

Certainly not my idea of fun, but I'm sure many will disagree with me there! As for my fun, I shall be making another post about the development of their site. For now though, feel free to spread the word about the contest and good luck to anyone entering.

Edward is stepping

Simon — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 10:14:00 +0000

After many, many months of pulling himself up on furniture and crabbing his way around it, plus a short lived (twice I think) attempt at standing on his own around new year, Edward has finally decided to consistently balance himself on his own two feet.

He continued to practice that for a day and the following morning decided it was time to try out a few steps! I think his current record is three, or possibly four (do you count the stumble down to the floor?).

He still prefers a rapid crawl to actually get somewhere but seems quite happy to practise a few steps when encouraged. So we'll keep encouraging and hopefully he'll be properly toddling before too long!

cold--

Simon — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 14:24:00 +0000

What's worse than a cold?

Now I don't just mean a slight sniffle and a bit of a sore throat. I mean a cold that saps all of your energy, makes you generally ache and regularly wakes you up at night because you can't breath through your nose and breathing through your mouth is just too painful!

So, what's worse?

Obviously... having a small child who presumably feels about the same as you but doesn't understand what's going on or why.

This seems to lead to them generally screaming most of the time, quite often including during those few minutes when you actually feel just about well enough (or simply too exhausted for anything but) to sleep.

So when you're feeling really pretty rubbish and mainly just want to hide under the duvet, you actually have to get up, look after, change and attempt to play with a generally unhappy and screaming baby. 24 hours a day!

Could it get worse?

Of course it could - add one partner, who would normally care for you and help you through such tough and unpleasant illnesses. The only problem is, this cold lasts for quite a lot of days and they now have it too!

All in all, three people with no sleep and an unpleasant cold doesn't make for a very fun household!

Thank goodness colds don't last that long.

Crazy filesystems

Simon — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 16:45:00 +0000

Recently I invested in some new hard disks for my file server. The idea being to increase capacity (1.1TB to 1.9TB) and to decrease the power usage (10 disks to 3).

I finally got around to fitting them at the end of last week and set the computer copying all my existing data from old to new over the weekend.

However this simple operation failed, running out of disk space. So how can copying the contents of a (not full) 1.1TB file systems onto a totally empty 1.9TB file system run out of disk space!?

/dev/mapper/vg1-lvol1   1.1T  1.1T   46G  96% /u3
/dev/mapper/vg2-lvol0   1.9T  1.9T     0 100% /u4

Firstly I located where all the space on the target drive had gone:

-rwx------ 1 root  root  795G Nov 17 20:54 dsc02170.jpg

Then I just had to see where all that data had come from on the source disk...

-rwxr--r-- 1 simon 43857374 142P Oct 23  2004 dsc02170.jpg

Which looks like the reiser file system having gone a bit crazy.

Needless to say, this image is no longer readable in any meaningful way. On further checking it seems that most of the image files in the same directory are also damaged. Generally their sizes aren't crazy, but the content is wrong. :-(

Maybe one day Linux will get ZFS in a finished state.