Alarmed!

It ended up taking most of Friday to finally get back to my prior state of equilibrium. As I mentioned, I had a quick look into pill reminder systems, but most of them seem to be rather expensive and much larger (more bulky) than expected which meant that I’d probably end up not carrying them around with me. So nice idea, but probably not very practical for me. I need something less intrusive that I will carry with me all the time.

And so, in the true spirit of innovative DIY, I sat down and worked out what I need. Which is a reminder to take my tablets, and an emergency supply of tablets, in case I should happen to be out of the house at the time. So the answer (for me) is to program my Blackberry to ring a series of irritating alarms when I need to take my tablets (because like geeks the world over, I carry my cellphone wherever I go) and a small metal mint box that is just big enough to take 1 dose of my 3 main tablets, and yet easily small enough to carry in my pocket with my loose change. And so far, so good. I’m carrying them with me all the time, being reminded to take the tablets, and actually doing so.

The only problem is that I will now have to admit that I’ve actually found a use for the Blackberry, which I find in all other ways to be a simply dreadful product.

Reality strikes home

I realised that this weekend was one of only two left before I go into surgery. I really don’t know how much I am going to be capable of doing after that, but I suspect that anything that involves ladders & DIY is probably off the agenda for a while. With that in mind, I made a list of the simple stuff that I won’t be able to do in a fortnights time, that either needs doing, or is overdue.

And so I spent a couple of hours hanging a selection of pictures on the walls. They’ve been waiting to go up for about 5 months, and somehow I just never got around to them. Shame on me.

I also wired up our third smoke alarm – this one in the lounge. Rather than battery operated alarms, I bought ones that are mains powered with battery backups, and have wired them into the lighting circuits around the house. No flat batteries to worry about, and even in the event of a power failure the alarms should protect us for a few months on their battery backup. Not that we actually have power outages that last that long…

Transport

In addition to the health problems, we seem to be having a rather torrid time with our cars at the moment. As a family we have three cars. A small people-carrier that my wife primarily drives (which recently got damaged in a car park) a small 4-door run-about that I’m currently using, and my home-built sports car (which is loosely based on a Lotus 7, and which is currently off the road waiting for me to repair the rear suspension).

On Saturday I noticed that as I was driving “my” car up to junction, the rear brakes were making a strange noise. On checking them, it turns out that the pads have worn down to the rivets. Which have scored the discs. D’Oh. My bad for not checking them more regularly, but the upshot is that the rear discs and pads needed replacement.

This is a job I’ve carried out before on other cars without any issues, so I called into the local discount motor factors, and picked up a pair of discs and a set of pads, before calling into the more consumer-oriented place to pick up a workshop manual that would show me the details of how to actually do it. Only for me to discover they don’t do a workshop manual for this car. Oh well, I figure it can’t be *that* hard to change the discs and pads, even without detailed instructions.

How wrong could I be? 3 hours later, and I still haven’t managed to even get the callipers off, let alone the discs themselves. It’s basically impossible to get enough leverage on the bolts without having the car on a lift. At this point I realise that life is too short to be messing about with this, especially when I’m not making any progress, and so I put it all back together as it was. And today I’m trying to get hold of a friend who runs a small garage to get his guys to sort it out for me.

A bad way to wake up

Daughter: Daddy, are you awake?

Me: Zzzzzzzzzzz

Daughter: Daddy … wake up

Me: Zzzzzzzzzzz

Daughter: Daddy … there’s water coming out the light switch.

Me: Zzz … water … zzz … light switch … WTF ?!!

30 seconds later the house is powered down. 5 minutes later I’m draining down our central heating system in my PJ’s. 30 minutes later (crawling around in the roof space in the dark with a small torch) and the failing component is identified. Well, sort of. I know which bit is leaking water, I just can’t work out what it’s normally meant to do, and hence what the dratted thing is called. It’s also not obvious how to dismantle it from the rest of the plumbing up there.

At this point it’s clear that my family do not consider me to be in complete control of the situation. I briefly consider escaping to work, but the look on my wifes face indicates that leaving her with no water, no heating and no electricity would be a mistake that I might not live to regret.

30 minutes on the internet, and Google is turning out to be of limited assistance. I’m now pretty sure it’s an air bleed valve that’s failed, and is now bleeding (all the) water out of the system as well as the odd bit of trapped air. I’ve learned quite a bit about air bleed systems for large commercial installations, but basically nothing on how domestic ones work, why it might have failed, or how to remove/replace the dratted thing.

Brainwave. Telephone the original suppliers of the system (from 3 years ago). Talk to their receptionist, who gives me the cell number for their lead engineer. Who, when I call him, turns out to be at home ill. But then insists on going into their office to get hold of the original design for my system. I’m amazed to hear that they still have it, but 30 minutes later, and he’s identified the part (it is an air bleed valve) and talks me through how to dismantle it from the system. This turns out to be trivial, but non-obvious – it obviously plays a pivotal role in one of those plumbing engineer initiation rites. Whatever – I owe the guy a glowing email to his boss for acting way above and beyond the call of duty.

30 minutes later the local plumbing supplies place have a direct replacement in my (damp) hands, and within the hour, the system is back up and running, at least temporarily. Tomorrow I will need to drain it all down again, and refill it, this time with fresh chemical inhibitors to stop rust and hydrogen formation. But for now, life is sweet – we have heating, hot water, and most of the house electricity supply is back on. And it’s only lunchtime.

Cleanliness is next to Godliness

Today I spent the day cleaning up my garage.  I’ve been meaning to get around to this chore for, oh, about 3 months.  Somehow I always manage to find a way to put it off. But today I woke up feeling invigorated, so I set to with a vengeance. Truth to tell, I had little choice … my workbenches were so overflowing with part-completed projects that there wasn’t room for any more. In fact, there wasn’t even room to complete any of the part-completed ones, which meant unless I did something, I was never going to get to tinker with any new projects ever again …

The main problem is that about 10 months back my home-built car ran into a rather serious engine problem, where the valves met the pistons while they were travelling in opposite directions. To resolve it required the engine and gearbox come out, which meant all the front body panels had to come off. And while I had the car apart it seemed to make sense to fix a niggling problem with the instruments. Which would be OK, but it meant that the interior all had to come out. So my garage now has my car in about 500 discrete parts scattered across all the horizontal surfaces (the workbench, all the shelves, the floor etc).  It’s ready to go back together soon, but not quite yet – I just need to strip down the fuel system first …

And the problem? Well, for Christmas I got a couple of rather geeky presents. Firstly I got some power line networking gear. Which means that I can extend my home Ethernet network out to my garage. Which means that I can finally install my single board industrial controller out in the garage.  This is good because it has a huge number of connectivity options, which means that I can start to experiment with some interesting telemetry gear that I’ve been looking at for a while. In particular, I’ve been eyeing up a weather station. And my beloved (and long-suffering) wife’s present to me was the permission to splash out and buy one…

Anyway, I can now see the benches again.  I have Ethernet in the garage, and my controller is installed and running, and I can SSH into it from my laptop. So now I just need to decide what I want to monitor before starting to order the sensors …