Monday, October 31, 2016

October 30th

After dropping the old hot tub cover closed yesterday, there was a load of crap back in the hot tub, so while it wasn't raining, I opened it up and cleaned that out.  Now I just need to get new filters, and I can look at filling it and starting it up again for the winter.  Vic picked up a big tarp to cover the thing in the summer, as it's the summer sun that's destroying the cover (and eating the stitching, which is the reason it starts to leak).

October 29th

It was supposed to rain all day, so in between playing Warcraft, I went out in the dry spells and made a start on cleaning out the hot tub, as the new cover was delivered in the week.  I got everything clean, and got Vic to help me taking off the old cover, which I did with it open (it had a load of water in it, so I didn't want to close it and put all that back in the tub.  As I was standing on the lip, something happened and I was knocked into the empty hot tub, so I've hurt my back and my leg.  We got the cover off, and the new cover on.  We also managed to get the old lid over to the recycling drop off, yay.

Wednesday, October 26, 2016

October 22nd

In the afternoon, I took the Flightstar out for a bit.  It was a bit bumpy, but I'd gone out earlier than I usually do, so I guess that's to be expected.  I ended up back at Lincoln to shoot a couple of landings (between Lee doing the same thing) before packing everything up and heading home.

Friday, October 21, 2016

October 20th

In the office again, when we went out to lunch there was obviously something afoot - seems there was a bomb threat.  There seemed to be a lot of traffic on the way home, so it took about 2.5 hours.

October 19th

I got up stupidly early and rode in to work.  Despite having left the house before 5am, I hit a lot of traffic around Fairfield, and started filtering.  I thought "this is going to be a long day", but all but one lane was closed, for whatever reason (you generally don't see the road being worked on when this happens).  When I got to work, as usual the sensors in the car park couldn't see the bike, so I pushed it around the barrier and parked, then found that my RFID key wouldn't let me in.  When Candace showed up there were a couple of us waiting, and it seems old cards were turned off by the building management.  I could still get into our floor, just not into the building to get to the stairs.  That's supposedly been fixed.

After a day of meetings, we went out to dinner, where I got to try popcorn in liquid nitrogen.  It's cold popcorn.

Having a couple of beers with Nathan, he found out that I have a paralysed arm - he's never noticed, despite us seeing each other from time to time in the office for several years :o)

October 16th

It rained pretty much all weekend, so I got to play Warcraft, getting my first toon up to level 110.  Oh, and I replaced the wipers on the Jeep, as we're now aware that they needed replacing.  And ordered new tyres, as with over 50,000 miles over 6 years, it needed doing.  Vic'll take the Jeep in on Tuesday to get them fitted.

Sunday, October 9, 2016

October 8th

We got up early and went over to the airfield to fly to Sutter for the Ragwing Roundup.  Gary left in his Pietenpol just before we did, but he was headed over to the river, and we flew pretty much straight there.  He beat us there.  As did Bruce, who wasn't even at Lincoln when we left :o)  After lunch, we flew back, and it was a lot bumpier than the way there - this is why I don't tend to fly at lunchtime.

At home I've been thinking that the problems with the HTPC seem like a hard disc problem, and I was thinking I'd try swapping in another disc, even though Windows said there was nothing wrong with the disc every time I checked it.  I fired the HTPC up (out of sleep mode) to shut it down properly, and found that Windows now thought that there was a problem.  I pulled the HTPC apart and hooked up a spare disc and fired up Acronis, only to find it didn't want to talk to my wireless USB mouse and keyboard.  I don't have a wired mouse and keyboard any more, as we have no spare PCs at the moment (2 of our PCs are home built, and the other didn't come with a keyboard), so I went out to get a cheap mouse at the very least.  Fry's didn't have the mice I'd seen on their web site that were supposedly in stock at Roseville, so I went to Best Buy, where a mouse and keyboard wasn't that much more than just a mouse, so I got both - it's always useful to have spares.
At home, the HTPC running Acronis still wouldn't see the mouse and keyboard.  I figured it was a "problem" where the new Z170 motherboard wasn't driving the USB ports the way the Acronis software wanted.  It was time to put the drives in my old Z97 desktop.  The first time it booted I couldn't see the CD drive to boot Acronis because the SATA connection had come undone in all the shuffling.  The next time it couldn't see the CD drive because the weight of the extra hard drive hanging out the side had pulled the power connector off it.  Once I got that fixed, it wouldn't get past the POST because the drive was throwing errors (so it's probably the controller rather than bad sectors).  I turned off the SMART testing, booted Acronis and cloned the 1.5Tb drive onto an old 750Gb drive.  I put my desktop back together, and it still works.  I put the HTPC back together and everything seems a lot better - I watched something I'd recorded in the week and there were a couple of drops, but that was down to problems with the recording, rather than the system hanging.  I reckon it's time to get a new drive.  With start of all the Black Friday nonsense being 6 weeks away, I'll wait and get something then.  And go through a lot of this again to get everything cloned again :o)

Friday, October 7, 2016

October 5th

I went to Lincoln for the EAA board meeting.  Afterwards, we went to the hangar to see the sign all lit up, only it... wasn't.

As there are 3 strings of LEDs, I figured it had to be a power problem, and we checked the wiring and everything looked OK inside.  The problem was the (old) 12V power supply we'd thrown in - it was putting out ~3V.  Jim had a 9V power supply in his car, so we tried that and everything lit up.  Ron was suitably impressed :o)


October 2nd

It was forecast to rain, so I stayed in and played Warcraft.  And rain it did - we got over an inch in about 10 minutes :o)  It washed out some of the front garden stuff, as the gutters were overflowing, so they weren't being directed down the driveway.

When it stopped, I got up on the roof and cleared all the gutters - hopefully now the trees are gone, I'll have to do that a lot less frequently.

Saturday, October 1, 2016

October 1st

Another new month, so here are the power stats:
Power billed

Power generated









I got up early and headed to the airport, where I threw in an hour and 20 minutes' circuits before putting the plane away and meeting Jim at the EAA hangar.  While we have the lift, we took the EAA letters off the outside wall and installed some LED strips I've had for this very purpose for months.  Obviously it's daylight so you can't see that they're lit up, but flipping them on and off again means you can just about see that they're now lit.  We're hoping to surprise Ron, the president, on Wednesday at the board meeting :o)

I went over to the Norcal Flight Centre and picked up the CHT probes I'd ordered (obviously the CHT has been fine the last few weeks, but whatever).  I then stripped the top off the air shroud and replaced the probes and the spark plugs (it's been 50 hours since they were last done).  I put everything back together, but couldn't be bothered to take the plane out again, as I was pretty damned tired, so I went home.

After tiring Tilly out, I played with the HTPC - I had to reinstall WMC after the Windows 10 Anniversary build was installed, and it's almost unwatchable.  I think it's something to do with the now obsolete Playready DRM, so I've stepped back to the previous build that still has it, run through all the setup again and we'll see if that fixes it for good.  I've also disabled the Windows Update process, so hopefully we won't be in this situation again.  Time to take another look at Kodi, I guess.

September 30th

I had a lot planned for tomorrow, so I got up on the roof and washed the solar panels today :o)