The Ramble

Last weekend I was a guest at the wedding reception of a friend. It was a wonderful occasion with everyone dressed up and looking so happy.
Unfortunately this was followed on Tuesday by attending the funeral of a work colleague.  John worked as part of our technical CAD team and will be sadly missed by myself and the rest of the guys there. He was a real top bloke as we say round here and no one could have a bad word to say about him. If you needed his help with anything he was never too busy to assist. As a Sheffield Wednesday supporter, he gave as good as he got with the football banter and enjoyed going out for the odd pint of real ale.
For all the ups and downs you have at work, it’s the people that you work and interact with that have a large influence on whether you’re happy there and working alongside John made it a damn sight better.

It’s now 9pm. Four hours since my mood changed to depressed from varying degrees of anxiousness. Two hours before that I’d been relatively happy if a little nervous. Why is this? Football.
This afternoon all Sheffield United had to do was avoid defeat and we they would have survived a season in The Premier League. That’s all; just not lose to a team below them. Sadly for me they couldn’t, and I should have know they wouldn’t.

Supporting The Blades is like the proverbial rollercoaster - plenty of ups and downs but always ending up at ground level. Take today, the goal that sent us down was scored by a player we gave away back in January. That one goal was the margin of goal difference that meant relegation.
Thirteen years ago to avoid relegation all we had to do was not lose (sounds familiar?) and if we did 3 other teams all had to achieve a positive results. We lost in the last minute having been winning & the other three all got what they needed.
In-between these two we’ve lost a play-off final the last kick of extra time. Put in the worst performance in years to lose another play-off final 3-0. How about an FA cup semi final defeat? You got it. Once, twice, three times including one where the referee sets up the opponents winning goal.

I feel sorry for the players and the staff that put a lot of effort in striving to stay up. I’m sure they feel worse than I do. The pain and the numbness was clear to see on their faces after the final whistle as they just stood there not knowing what to do.
I’m sure and would like to be doing nothing more than celebrating staying up right now.
Plenty of criticism will come their way – “not good enough” “not fit to wear the shirt”. Perhaps they aren’t good enough but you can’t have a go at someone for trying their best, which I think they did.

I wish I didn’t feel this way. I wish mine were only a passing interest, but its not and in 3 months time it will all start again with more highs and lows.

When was the last time you checked your brake lights were working? This week? This month? Never?

I can’t believe the number of cars driving around with one, two or even all three lights not working. Many of these I see daily, dropping of their children at school in a morning. You’d think that the cost of a replacement bulb would be worth the added safety this small item provides to the occupants.
I’ve a feeling this is indicative of the way that people view their cars these days – more of a domestic white good than a complex machine that needs regular checking. I’m guessing many of these non-illuminated drivers probably don’t bother checking their tyre tread levels probably only changing them when the MOT mechanic dictates.

The tax disc is now in so from Tuesday the Mini will be un-sorned. I’ve had it out of the garage to check tyre pressures, oil, water and brake fluid levels. Fortunately the weather is looking good for the week ahead so hopefully I’ll be driving it to and from work.

Driving home from work this evening I witnessed the worse piece of driving I’ve seen for as long as I can remember.
I was sat about 6 cars back in queue of traffic on a single carriageway road waiting to turn at a crossroads (where the road running across mine has right of way) having just moved over the crest of a brow. Then speeding past me on my right was a big new black Range Rover.
I presume he just didn’t want to wait his turn so drover over the crest on the wrong side of the road without being able to see if there was anything coming towards him – which there was. Suddenly, in front of him was a Corsa with nowhere to do. So what did the RR driver do? Simply drove round the Corsa by going up onto the pavement before coming back down and then just blocking the entrance to this road and stopping half of the main road so someone had no choice but to let him though and off he went.

It is actions like these that make me wish that there was a more balanced approach to traffic policing. I’ve got nothing against installing speed safety cameras and ANPR cameras but it does seem that so much reliance is placed upon these technological methods as way to control drivers that the old style method of actually having police cars on the road to spot those driving dangerously has disappeared.

Twenty-five years ago yesterday the Sinclair ZX Spectrum was born. With its 15 colours, 16k (or 48k) of memory and rubber keys, it was the height of home technology.
Being only four at the time I was presumably too young to have one of these. However two years later my parents bought me the new ZX Spectrum + with its plastic moulded keys & dedicated reset button, along with it came a QuickShot 2 joystick and an a programmable interface to enable any of the keyboards keys to be mapped to any joystick function.
My favourite game at the time was a Formula 1 racing game called Chequered Flag where you picked a car from a choice of three and then raced round a selection of tracks with the aim of setting the fastest lap. That was it, no other cars to race against. The only way to record you times to see if you could better it the next time you loaded the game was to note them down on a piece of paper.
Back then there was no installing games to hard drives. You had to connect you a cassette recorder, get the volume right and type J followed by “” to input the BASIC command of LOAD “” You than sat back for several minutes watching alternating coloured bars of blue and red followed by yellow and back, where hopefully on completion the game would have loaded successfully otherwise you saw the message R Tape loading error.
And like the post about the classic Mini below, there is something about the old games like Chequered Flag and Manic Minor that the newer games with their 3D life-like graphics and 5.1 surround sound just can’t match for pure simple game-playing fun.

The Spectrum also introduced me to programming. With its inbuilt BASIC language, in no time at all was I able to fill the screen with the likes of Hello World or James is cool:
10 PRINT “James is Cool”
20 GOTO 10
RUN

But it did more that that, it introduced my to structured programming with the use of FOR_NEXT loops and the IF_THEN_GOTO

I probably owe it to my long departed Speccy for my IT career.

Happy birthday Speccy where ever you are!

MOT – check
Insurance – check
Tax disc – almost

Next Tuesday (as long as the weather is nice) my Classic will be back on the road after its winter hibernation.
There is something about driving the Classic Mini that the newer MINI just can’t match. It could be only getting 200 miles out of a tank of fuel, but its not. It could be the noise generated by the sports exhaust, air filter and the 1275CC A-series that makes the radio impossible to listen to, but its not. It could be the ineffective heater, the bumpy ride on anything other than a perfectly flat road, the lack of room for any luggage or passengers or many, many other things, but its not. It’s none of these, yet it’s all of them at the same time. It’s just got that something extra…

Thats it, work finished for the week. Having had a bank holiday on Monday followed by tomorrow (Friday)  its hardly been worth working this week.

This weekend I’m off to Edinburgh for a stag weekend involving clay-pigeon shooting and whiskey tasting.

Then I’ve got the Monday off to recover leaving another short week.

At the moment I’m really liking the new singles (are they still called singles these days or just tunes?) by Manic Street Preachers and Travis. The Manics single just works with the added vocals from Nina Persson of The Cardigans and Acamp.
The Travis song shows they’re probably one of the best bands around for proper pop music.
Fortunately I can watch them as often as I want thanks to YouTube, which means not having to sit through endless hours of the pap that’s shown on the music TV channels for a three minute high.

Later this month the insurance policy for my 2000 Mini Classic Cooper Sport is due for renewal. I’ve received my renewal quotation from my current insurers and they want to charge me £430 for 1000 miles. This is roughly the same amount as last year. One reason the price is high is that in August 2005 I was involved in an accident that wrote of my previous Classic. It went head on with a combine harvester and lost.  Now having shopped around for an alternative, the only quote cheaper than the current insurer is the one that wrote off the previous one, they’re quoting £280 which is quite a saving. The only drawback of this is it took them six months to payout after the last claim. Is the saving worth the hassle if I have another claim? Probably.

On top of this it has been day of cars. This morning started off watching the Grand Prix from Malaysia. I’ve then washed and polished my MINI. This evening I’ll be trying to watch the opening round of the Champ Car World Series where hopefully Justin Wilson can get going with a victory.