They Just Don’t Make Things Like They Used To

Posted on Thursday, 23rd February, 2006 by ianmacd

What a fiasco.

I drove down to the Audi dealer today to pick up our brand spanking new A6 Avant.

At first, all appeared well. The car was gleaming away in the showroom with just 29 km on the clock. The colour and the upholstery looked great. A quick glance around the cabin seemed to indicate that all of the obvious features I had ordered had been built in. In summary, everything looked ship-shape and Bristol fashion.

Then we took it outside, the dealer and I, and got inside to run through some of the less obvious features. And then it started.

First of all, I found I couldn’t adjust the left wing mirror properly. It didn’t seem to be seated properly and manually tampering with it didn’t seem to help, either. The salesman offered to let the annexed garage have a look at it.

Picking another feature at random, I thought I’d adjust the steering column for my driving position. I pushed the switch towards me and out slid the steering column. Then I pushed the switch downwards to lower the column and… nothing happened. Was it already lowered all the way? I pushed the switch up to raise the column. Still nothing. Bollocks!

Who knows whether the car has other problems, because at this point, the salesman took the car around to the garage to have them look at it. With 2 out of 2 features demonstrating faults and it already being the middle of the afternoon, there was no time to waste.

The mirror issue was corrected very quickly. It just needed some manual adjustment. The uncooperative steering column, however, pissed on everyone’s fireworks.

After hooking the car up to the computer diagnostic apparatus, the car was given the once-over. Nothing obvious leapt out and even the switch that controls the steering column passed its individual test, so the thought now is that the motor that moves the column through the vertical plane is buggered.

It being late in the day, all hopes of driving the car away today were dashed. The car will be more heavily investigated tomorrow. Hopefully, it will turn out to be a very minor fault and they will be able to correct it on the spot.

Electronic problems like this are the main reason I went for an Audi over a Mercedes or a BMW. Humph. This is not an auspicious start.

Meanwhile, the registration paperwork is now in my name and the car is insured. That means I’ll get a road tax bill before very long, so the sooner the car actually gets on the road, the better.

Hopefully, this will just take a day or two to sort out and then I’ll be the proud owner of a brand new car for the first time ever. What a disappointment. Even with something this expensive, quality still isn’t guaranteed.

They just don’t make things like they used to.

Posted in Cars | 1 Comment

Wake Up And Smell The Coffee

Posted on Thursday, 23rd February, 2006 by ianmacd

My Jura Impressa Z5 is working out very well.

It’s amazing how something as simple as high quality coffee can improve one’s experience of life. The several cups per day of great coffee that this machine has been churning out have increased my level of happiness considerably. If you don’t love good coffee, such a statement probably seems ridiculous to you.

I’ve been working my way through 100 g of each of the types of bean that my local shop, Brandmeester’s sells. So far, I’ve tried the beans from Cuba, Guatemala & Antigua, Ethiopia and Sumatra. I topped up on bags of Papua New Guinea and Kenya today, which I should get to in the next few days.

So far, I probably like the Cuban coffee the most. It’s not too strong, so it’s a great one to have around for guests. I like all that I’ve tried so far. however; there hasn’t been a dud amongst them. I have many left to go before I’ve tried them all, though, Ordering 100 g at a time is just the right amount to allow the bean to make an impression on you before moving onto the next.

Yes, it’s only coffee, but it’s the little things that count. There’s nothing quite like sitting at your dining table, sipping a cup of your favourite coffee whilst reading the paper. Hmm; I’ve said that before, haven’t I? Well, it’s true.

Incidentally, there are no branches of Starbucks in Amsterdam. I do hope that doesn’t change.

Posted in House | 1 Comment

MythTV Stuff Ordered

Posted on Wednesday, 22nd February, 2006 by ianmacd

After much dithering, I have finally ordered nearly all of the hardware needed to build our MythTV box, an open source equivalent of the TiVo, with which we had so much fun in the US.

I’d been enamoured with the idea of building my own intelligent DVR ever since Peter, my office mate back in Mountain View, unpacked his MythTV hardware in front of me and explained that he was going to build one. That was last July or so, right after having a baby and right before leaving the country. Needless to say, I had no time back then to be building new computers.

I did wonder if I should purchase the hardware for such a box before leaving the US, given the cheaper prices over there, but I decided not to. After all, I might never get around to actually building the box at all, which would be rather a waste. And, even if I did get around to it, better hardware would likely have hit the market in the interim.

So, within a few days, I should have the hardware in house and can start assembling the system. I hate building computers, so I’m looking forward to having that part done and then getting onto the software configuration part, which is much more my thing. I’ll detail the hardware once I have it all assembled, as I’ll then be able to report on any oddities that I experienced while putting the system together.

DVR DIY is much more expensive than simply purchasing a TiVo, but then again, that isn’t an option in The Netherlands. TiVo doesn’t sell their system over here. One or two people offer a Windows Media Center Edition computer in the form of a household appliance, and that can do more or less the same thing, but those are expensive for what they are and, whilst it would be easy to set up, I can’t quite bring myself to run Windows on a box that will be central to our TV viewing. Within a very short span of time, I would inevitably run into annoyances or shortcomings in the software and I’d be stuck. With MythTV, since it’s open source, I can just fix the problems.

Besides which, I can make the MythTV box do so much more. Since it’s just a Linux box at its core, it can do anything Linux can. For example, how about a webcam on top of the box, so that we can call up the family in the US and watch them on TV while we chat to them? How about streaming music to the TV from our file server in the cellar? Anything is possible, really.

One problem that will be a little tricky to solve is getting the MythTV box to change the channel of the UPC Mediabox, the set-top box that decodes the encrypted digital TV signal. I’m going to need some form of IR blaster for that part. I have one in mind, but it will mean having it shipped from the US.

Anyway, this should be a lot of fun to set up (as well as a black hole for my time), but by the end, we should have a box that will do pretty much anything we want, when it comes to finding programmes to watch and record. It’ll be very cool to have essentially assembled the system from scratch, having picked out the hardware by hand and then installed the software over the top.

Watch this space.

Posted in House, System Administration | Leave a comment

Gallery As Good As New

Posted on Wednesday, 22nd February, 2006 by ianmacd

The upgrade from Gallery 1.x to 2.x was quite involved. As has happened before (and to my great chagrin), albums and photos whose titles, summaries and descriptions contained foreign letters like ‘ð’, ‘þ’ and ‘œ’, as well as accented letters like ‘é’ and ‘ö’ suffered GBH in the transition.

Fixing this meant writing a pile of Ruby DBI code and testing it very well before letting it lose on the MySQL database in which everything is now stored by Gallery 2.x. The end result, happily, is that things should now be more or less back to normal.

There may still be a few sporadic instances of spurious characters appearing, which seems to have been caused by some titles, summaries and descriptions accidentally undergoing double-encoding to UTF-8, so that the previously encoded multibyte UTF-8 form of a few foreign and accented characters was re-encoded, producing strings of gibberish. If you find any of these, please let me know which photos are affected and I’ll correct them by hand.

You’ll find all of our photos in our gallery. If some albums seem slow, that’s because thumbnail generation is delayed until the first viewer enters that album. Once an album has been viewed by someone, the thumbnails are stored for future use, so subsequent page renderings will be much quicker.

Posted in System Administration | Leave a comment

Family Doctor

Posted on Wednesday, 22nd February, 2006 by ianmacd

We reached an important milestone yesterday, namely finding a general practitioner with whom we’re happy.

Our choice was complicated by the fact that neither Sarah nor I feel much affinity for allopathic medicine, instead prefering the homeopathic approach, which is much more holistic in nature. There are plenty of homeopaths in The Netherlands, but very few of them are GPs.

Happily, we managed to find someone close by, who studied and is qualified in western medicine, whilst also being a qualified homeopath. At an acquaintance-making appointment, he explained to us that he uses a mix of both approaches, first attempting a homeopathic solution to a complaint, then resorting to things like antibiotics only if strictly necessary.

The three of us have now signed up with him, which was an important item to tick off the list. We hadn’t been registered with a doctor since returning to The Netherlands last August.

Posted in Life | Leave a comment