…grayblog…

Author: graybo

  • Not quite full of beans

    We’ve just had our first harvest from our runner beans in the garden. However, one bean does not a meal make.

    Still, it was very fresh and tasty. And there are more coming.

  • Tinkering

    Some of you may have noticed some oddness here. I’m working on it. Expect great change.

  • Something to thank some keel slugs for

    cardoon

    Thanks to some evil keel slugs, I’ve discovered that cardoons have scented flowers.

    We have a huge and handsome cardoon that somewhat dominates one corner of the garden. Early in the year it gives us impressive silvery leaves. Now it has huge stems, around 7 feet tall, bearing enormous fist-sized spiky thistle flowers. Unfortunately, I hadn’t noticed that a small group of Milax budapestensis and Milax sowerbyi had set up home in the bottom of my Cynara cardunculus, and the former chewed through the stem of the latter and felled our beauty as a hairy checked-shirt-wearing Canadian might fell a spruce. Woe indeed.

    Determined not to have all our gardening fun destroyed, I immediately set about a scorched-earth treatment of the garden with small blue metaldehyde-laced bran pellets, with the result that there are now corpses everywhere. I also cut the fallen stem and put the thistley heads into a vase on the dining table.

    This morning, as I came into the conservatory (where our dining table resides), there was a distinct scent of honey coming from the cardoon flowers. This explains why bees are so attracted to them and is a discovery I’ve made thanks to the intervention of the evil keel slugs.

  • Stella Knives

    Is it me, or do The Young Knives sound similar to mid/late ’90s Croatian rockers Stella Maris? Or am I just being too obscure?

  • Any gain in high gain?

    I’ve recently purchased a new wireless router here – a LinkSys WAG354G – and I’ve been thinking about fitting a high gain antenna (probably the LinkSys HGA7S) as the signal drops about two or three times an hour when I am in my office. The router sits on a shelf in the kitchen and my office is in the summer house, so the signal passes through about ten feet of clear conservatory; then through the window; across around twenty-five feet of garden; through a thin wooden wall and some rockwool insulation; and then a further three feet to my laptop. I currently get between 49% and 61% signal here and transmission speeds between 2.0Mbit/s and 11.0Mbit/s.

    I have no experience of using a high gain antenna and all I can find online are endless repetitions of the LinkSys blurb, which naturally espouses the virtues of the device. Have any of you had any experience of using antennas? Would I be better advised to upgrade my 3Com 3CRWE154A72 WiFi card?

    UPDATE: I’ve ordered a cheap DabsValue 5dBi antenna to see if it makes a difference. I did get tempted by some very expensive kit that would have permitted me to wander off across four or five fields, park myself and my laptop under a tree and still listen to the live stream of Arrow Jazz FM; but that would have been, well, unnecessary.

  • When a book would be better than the Internet

    I’ve just seen a lovely bumblebee in the garden. I like these fuzzy-bottomed creatures, but I’ve never seen one quite like this one – a slightly tapered bum (abdomen, I think) with three distinct amber-coloured stripes around the tip. The problem I have is that I’d like to know what type of bumblebee it is and whether I’ve spotted something rare or unusual. It’s this sort of thing that shows the limitations of the internet. If I had a book of insects, I could open the page of bees and compare all the different sorts until I spotted an illustration that best represented the creature I saw. However, the net relies on me making a search using the name of the creature I am seeking (looking for "bumblebees" is too vague). Wikipedia only offers a detailed description of the most common species.

    Any suggestions? I’ve had a similar problem when I’ve spotted an unusual butterfly or moth. Birds are another group of creatures where I go straight to the bookshelf first.

  • Not a good week so far

    Let’s make a list:

    • broken router
    • broken down car
    • tenant in H’s flat has served notice to leave – we’re advised to expect two months without rental income
    • car still faulty
    • two hours on hold to BT
    • uncomfortably hot
    • one of my customers is misbehaving and it could, potentially, end in litigation
    • mother-in-law melted some of Tom’s bottles (don’t ask)

    And it’s only Wednesday.

  • Fifty six kay

    This post brought to you with the aid of string and sticking plasters, as my broadband connection is currently not working. BT’s problem-reporting call system is worse than useless (being told by an automated voice that, as BT are not my broadand supplier, I should contact the company that supplies my broadband *click* – this in spite of the quaterly invoices that BT send me for broadband provision!) and it took me several attempts to get through to a human being – not impressed.

    BT have promised me that they will have an engineer to sort this out within 48 hours of it being reported. I reported it early on Saturday afternoon, so I’m already beginning to wonder if I’ve been forgotten or shoved down the queue. Helpfully, I got a call on Saturday evening to tell me that my telephone is ok – well, I knew that already – and the engineer helpfully told me that broadband was nothing to do with him but there was a broadband fault logged on the line.

    So things may be a little quiet around here for a while. It’s all shown up how much I rely on my broadband connection, as my work rate has slowed considerably since the failure (which coincided with a big electrical storm during which I’d unplugged all my kit) and there are a bunch of tasks on my to-do list that I can’t do until the nfault is repaired.

    In addition, the exhaust has failed on Hels’s car (which also had a puncture last week), so this is proving to be a troublesome week all-round. Harrumph.

    EDIT: it turns out that my router has failed – it’s still working as a wireless router but is failing to work as a modem. This is either related to the storm or to heat damage, I suspect, as it runs very hot indeed. I’ve ordered a new LinkSys piece of kit for dabs.com, which should be here in the next day or two. In the meantime, I’m using a BT-supplied modem, but it means that I’m tied to the phone socket by a cable.

    FURTHER EDIT: I’m convinced that the storm caused the problem. I unplugged all my kit from the electricity supply, but left the modem connected to the telephone. Our telephone service comes to us via overhead cable. That’ll learn me.

  • Implied presumption

    I always find this sort of news story interesting:

    Police searching for a missing East Sussex pensioner in West Africa have said they have found a body.  

    William West, 76, of St Helen’s Park in Hastings, had been with his wife Kate, 26, at their holiday home in Gambia.

    The couple were on a day trip to Senegal when he disappeared after going into a shop on his own on 3 July.

    Sussex Police said Gambian police had contacted them after a body was found. Four people are helping authorities abroad with their inquiries.

    A spokesman for the Sussex force said the four people were a 26-year-old woman and three men.

    With the information released and the tone of the reporting, we are led to believe, as readers, that the wife has bumped off her husband in an African country. Our imagination takes us on to the notion that she might have done it for the insurance money or to escape an unhappy marriage of convenience. Perhaps she chose an African country in the belief that the criminal investigation system there might not reach her. Already, we’ve bounded to the conclusion that she is guilty – we have been conditioned to do so by years of this sort of reporting and our own prejudices.

    The truth, of course, could be vastly different. He may well have been the victim of a random attack. He could have died from some entirely non-violent cause. She may be as innocent as a newborn lamb, truly distraught at the loss of her husband. In fairness, we can not say because we are not party to all of the facts and won’t be until the trial (if there is one) is reported in due course.

    Tabloid journalism has a lot to answer for. We assume guilt too often.

  • Childminder run

    This morning, I think I became truly middle class. I achieved this by putting Tom in his seat in the back of my car and driving the mile-and-a-half to his childminder’s house (I have considered pushing Tom in his buggy, but it’s a very dangerous lane). There were two other parents there dropping off their children and, on the way home, I had to fight my way through the congestion around Ruralville school where dozens of parents were delivering offspring.

    Tom, like the rest of us, is struggling with the current heatwave. We reached 36 Celsius yesterday here and the poor lad was wilting a bit. He sleeps in the afternoon more than usual and then is awake in the evening when he would normally be in bed. So life is all a bit upside down.

    Today the temperature is a little lower, but the humidity is up so it is no less comfortable. I’ve struggling to keep going, my PC fan is going mad and the cats can barely drag themselves around. Typical English – never satisfied by the weather.