Wakey wakey rise and shine

Said my body at 4:45am. I'm not quite sure why, I think I was woken by my throat, and then my brain started listing all the things I need to do today. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) Kathryn said I wasn't to do anything that might upset my throat further - so my cunning plan to strip the paint on the door frames, and uh, paint them is off*.

I've still got a fair bit to get on with. When the frost's melted a bit I need to take jejy round to the tyre place, having found that the 'slow' puncture's got quicker, and that it's leaking from the valve. Now I can point and go "look, it's leaking from the valve; that's definately your fault, please fix it". I also am debating getting an external enclosure for my now spare SATA hard drive (what? why?!)...

Let me explain. I want to sell the G5 Mac. The G5 Mac currently sports 2 largish harddrives, a lot of memory, a 20" monitor, a 14" LCD monitor and so on. To sell it, I have two options:

1) Dump all my data onto and remove the second HDD.
2) Copy all my data onto the 500Gb ex-entertainment-Hackintosh drive in an external drive case and then nuke the two drives.

I think the latter is probably the better solution. Whilst it will cost 20 quid, it will probably add more than 20 quid to the value of the Mac, selling it with two big hard drives in. Mind you, if one of them is bigger than 500Gig it'll be being swapped around.

At any rate, I've been travelling in the DAF a lot recently, and it's come to my attention that the Radiomobile radio doesn't work...



It did work when we got the car, it stopped working a while ago, and has not spontaneously reanimated itself. But I rather like the look of it. Ratty and tatty though it is, it's part of the car's 1970s charm. The plasti-chrome is peeling and the volume knob turns on it's spindle. But I have a solution. Rip out its guts and throw them away.

I've finally found a cheapie company making (almost certainly lousy quality) automotive amplifiers (but you're in a car with no soundproofing to speak of). In fact, the one I've bid 75p for (but £9.99 shipping) also sports 2 inputs (but no means of switching between them, switches, presumably, are extra). But since I intend to gut the poor wee beastie, that's fine. I'm also hopefully going to get my grubby little hands on one of the Matsui DAB tuners. Back before I planned to move to Canada I debated buying one of these for the Minor. But they were 30 quid at the time.

Now, at a few quid second hand, they're tempting to again be the subject of my soldering iron. The plan is simple; gut the DAB tuner, gut the amplifier, make Radiomobile into DAB tuner. Leave socket for MP3/CD player. And lo, we'll have the perfect modern stereo in a 70s box.

Mind you, that's how it is in my head. How it'll work in practice is another question. The other thing I quite fancy, having driven the car a while now, is a small amount of illumination around the air vent controls and the hot/cold air selector sliders.

I usually end up waving my arms around under the dashboard to find them (when driving in the dark) so a little glowy white LED illuminating the up/down arrows seems quite tempting to me. And a little red/blue illumination on the hot air and cold air sliders also seems like quite a nice idea (potentially mounting them in a small piece of sanded perspex to diffuse the light). I'm slightly concerned she might look a little boy-racer though with the blue/red glow eminating from the dash, but at least I'd be able to control the temperature while driving without too much concentration. I'm also slightly concerned that I might get overly attached to Jejy. But hey.

This all comes about because I need to prepare Jejy to be Rebecca's temporary replacement while I fit the diff (when it arrives), the gearbox (when it's ready), the new swivel pins (when they're manufactured; if ever), trunions, poly-bush the front suspension, and repaint the damaged paint areas of the engine bay. Oh, and strip out the dash, find all the things that are rattling, stop them from doing so, clean out the heater, fit a new inline heater control valve (from a golf, apparently), and potentially convert her to Left Hand Drive (which involves moving the brake master cylinder and associated plumbing, remanufacturing the dash I made (otherwise the worry gauges will all be in front of the passenger), fitting the other gearbox front plate and somehow working out how to lock and unlock the passenger door from the outside), oh and ideally fitting a heated rear window that works, and in a perfect world sending off the speedo to be recalibrated, the revcounter to be reinternalised and the clock to be made to work (a car with a working clock! that'd be a novelty).

Just a short list of jobs...

So Jejy may have to do service for the minor for a while. Which is why I fancy a radio and a CD input.

Anyway, today I need to get my act together and sell the Mac, and possibly the Dell (although I doubt the dell is going to sell). And in aid of getting started, I shall now have my breakfast.

* Yes, yes, I know she's right, but it seemed like a good idea in my head :)

Arse

So, I'm not renown for my ability to manage money well. In fact, those who know me would probably be able to pitch my financial skills as something around the level of 'hopeless'. It's not really living beyond my means, it's that I just don't take enough care of my finances.

I should care more, but watching my parents struggle and save all their lives, only to have my dad die before he retired, it seems a bit difficult to care that much.

But I don't want to drag Kathryn into my money pit, so I've been trying to sort them out a bit. Part of which was transferring some of the vast balance from the main credit card to a succession of low or no interest rate cards. These cards then lurk in the house and don't get used. At least that was the theory.

To give you an idea of how bad I am at managing money, I didn't notice that one of the balance transfers didn't go through. In fact, I think that both of them haven't gone through. I need to look back at my statements but I think I've been paying interest on money twice. Cunning, eh.

Thankfully, AmEx noticed that my other card never cashed the cheque. The good side of this is that I get to, somewhat suddenly, pay off a big chunk of the debt. I've got the interest payments back from AmEx too, so I've only paid the one huge amount of interest. But it's somewhat frustrating.

Still, it means I'm in a better financial position than I thought...

70 working days

Worrying: We're going to Ireland for Kathryn's birthday (and as an anniversary present). The passports aren't back from the Home Office yet. Having rung them, and listened to their message, and checked the website, they won't give you any further information about a query until 70 working days ('we aim to process 90% of applications in 70 working days').

We're at just over 50.

Those of you who know when my birthday is, and when Kathryn's is, will know that there's not a *huge* amount of time 'til we go on holiday. Reports from a forum on immigration suggest that at 70 working days they're unlikely to be able to tell you a great deal more about your application than it's "in progress".

Asking for your passports back is, apparently == I'd like to withdraw our application. I'm not deeply concerned, yet. Hopefully we'll fall within the 90%. Neither of us are interesting in an immigration sense, I would have thought. I'm gainfully employed as is Kathryn. We don't claim any benefits, we pay our bills and taxes...

But still. One can't help but be a little nervous. Can you still travel to Ireland on a Driving Licence?