Pyoor's excuse for not working

So, today is a day with occasional frustrations, and attempts to maintain optimism. I’m waiting for feedback from Cardiff U on my dissertation. The question of how to develop it into something that’ll pass hovers in my brain, especially since I realised that thanks to moving deadlines I’m now running one month short at the end, since we’ll be on holiday.

In the mean time I set up the database on my laptop to allow me to capture data for the audit, and then spent about an hour trying to work out how to get Excel to talk to mySQL. The answer? Not easily. There are a few hacks, but basically Excel 2011 won’t work properly with the mySQL ODBC stuff on Mac OS, which is ‘a pig’. In the end I found an application that will extract the data in the form of a nicely formatted spreadsheet, which should allow me to then dink with the data. Thus, data collection should be easy, and data analysis easy. All I need is data location and abstraction. I’ll be writing my audit proposal and submitting it to work today, at least, that’s the plan.

Having had a shuffle of my days off, meaning that I couldn’t collect the bike wheel when I’d arranged to, yesterday I rang them and asked if it was ready. They’d said it would probably be ready today, but I was meant to be at work today. When I rang, he said it was ‘already finished’. So I trundled through Bristol’s hideous traffic in the car, arrived to a very confused looking person who informed me that no, it wasn’t ready.

The person behind the counter admitted it was his fault and that he’d got mixed up… no offer of anything to recompense me for the hour wasted in the middle of a nice (and very warm) day though. I know they’re a co-op and I know they’re lovely, but at this moment, on top of the fiasco of not mentioning that spokes would more than double the cost of doing the wheels? I am feeling rather less fond of them at the moment.

However, I had one of those nice realisations – the Sturmey Archer hub is not merely easy to get spares for, but also, apparently you can just switch internals from a later AW hub into an early AW hub. So, a quick e-bay gandering later, and I’ve got a 5 quid bid on a working AW hub from 1987. That would give me a bike with working gears, for double plus awesome, and at some point later I can strip down the BSA hub and fix it :)

On the slightly frustrating side, I finally got around to checking the Minor and the battery was flat. Not a weeny teeny bit flat, but properly flat. Or at least, I thought it was. Having put it on charge, I’m surprised to find my charger thinks otherwise, which is perhaps even more concerning. Still, I’ll leave it on charge for a bit, check the voltage and then maybe pop it back into the minor. She’s in need of moving though, her paint’s starting to go matt on the bonnet, which is going to be a bollocks to fix because it’s two-pack. I think. I also finally got over myself and rang the engineering firm. I feel like I should be more certain about what I want, but frankly, I want to talk to someone who’s an engineer and say ‘will this work, am I insane (in a bad way)’.

Sadly, the bloke who I need to talk to is not there at the moment. And I’m at work tomorrow, so I’ll have to leave it ’til Monday. Having measured the engine, the motor is about 3cm longer than the distance from the backplate to the mount, which means that it may have to be a sort of U-shaped mount. Ideally I’d like to sketch it for them, and say “if that makes sense, please make a nice engineering diagram of it, and then if I’m happy please make it”. However, and slightly upsettingly, I’ve realised I don’t have any vector drawing packages installed on the Mac. The RiscPC, which has the most delightful of all vector drawing packages (well, when combined with the !DrawPlus enhancements) needs its battery checking before I dare plug it in. I may have to resort to the draw-photograph-send, which is pretty…cumbersome. But perhaps better than trying to explain what I’m after on the phone. I shall see what he says when I ring…

Originally published at Kates Journal. You can comment here or there.

So, at some point I’ll probably set up a site devoted to the EV Minor project, egged on to success in this field by Jonny’s Flux Capacitor which is awesome, but also faintly sad, because I really wanted to use that EV myself. Money, as always, being a pig that gets in the way of things.

Anyhow, so I have some questions to put to my engineering shop, and I’m putting them down here, where I can find them again.

Originally published at Kates Journal. You can comment here or there.

So. I’ve got 1500 words to write through this next week (in which I’m on nights). Those 1500 words? They are on a subject that I know about in loose, nursey, I know how to treat it and roughly what the guidelines say* way, but not in a deep ‘I know what the papers say and where they are strong / weak’, so…uh, yeah, I need to read them. Now. Fast. Also, I need to know about audit. I know approximately >< that much about audit processes. I mean, I know what it is and roughly how to carry one out, but I don’t know how to pick one audit method over another. And the book I need? In the post. Maybe. *WAIL*

On top of which, I start a new job in 11 days time****, to get to which I need to ride my bike (to get it out of the garage, I need to go through a gate that currently has no handle). So it would be useful if (a) My bike had a reflector on it (being as it’s legally required ‘n all) and (b) the gate had a handle on it, so as I can open the gate in the morning to get to work.

Also, I need to proof read and improve (it definitely needs some improvement) the 3000 word literature review that I’ve written (on a different topic to the 1500 word one, obviously).

And…our illustrious Volvo has, having destroyed its radiator and been fitted with a new one, decided that at 100,000 miles he’d rather like a new water pump. So the expensive nice coolant I bought to fill the brand new radiator is now slowly gracing the road surface outside our house as it drip-drip-drips its way out of the car. The new pump was only 12 quid (including delivery) – and wasn’t difficult to source – but is, I suspect, going to be an arse to fit and will, I suspect, require a chunk of time that I don’t currently feel I really have available to install.

On top of all that…my beloved minor’s rebuilt differential, which has always been a little whiney, has decided (I suspect) to shred at least one of its bearings. She’s very, very whiney now and I changed the oil a few days ago wondering if I’d cooked it or it’d leaked out or somesuch. Normally diff oil is pretty much the same colour as it went in, but more runny**. It’s normally yellow (and smells pretty foul, EP90 does). It came out opaque grey. Opaque grey is not a suitable colour for oil coming out of a diff. Nor is the noise it’s making. All that grey used to be ball bearings.

I’m waiting to find out if it’s still under warranty or if I’m going to have the fun and excitement of getting it re-rebuilt locally (we won’t think about that).

Oh, and I *was* planning to have my GT550 up and running so that I could use that to get to work in a pinch. Have I done that…? No.

As the final little set of stressors, I still have no desk, my laptop’s screen is getting flakier and flakier (once I’ve done these two essays I’m going to bite the bullet and take it down to Apple), and the house is no further along than it was a month ago. I am, as it were, ready for the world to chill out a bit.

Right at this moment I’m feeling a teeeeensy tiny bit stressed.

* Although, having just read the most recent Cochrane review I’ve just discovered, as with so many things in medicine, we’ve been doing it wrong. See, we (as in the medical profession) largely seem to have assumed that when people are sick sick (Looky here) we should throw all the antibiotics in the universe at them to make them not be sick. New research says, uh, don’t. It says yay to antibiotics but boo to the kitchen sink approach. I need to read it more thoroughly, but my glance at it says giving people multi-antibiotic therapy (which is what, I think, all the protocols I’ve ever seen say) is worse than just giving them one specific kind of broad-spectrum antibug. Basically, you roger their kidneys***. Like with oxygen, and so many other things that seem sensible, when you actually test it turns out you’re wrong, wrong, wrong. Arse. Also, the Number Needed to Harm is 4-5 patients. So of the many, many people I’ve given that to over the years….oh lord. This is the problem with doing research, it’s depressing.

** This is because the long-long-long chains that make up the thick goopy stuff that goes into a 1960s differential slowly gets chopped into teeny, tiny, shorter chains. But there’s no soot (which is what turns the oil black in an engine).

*** As in screw them, permanently. This is bad.

**** While it’s the same job, at the same pay, in the same kind of department I now get ‘Senior’ in my job title. Wahey!

Originally published at Kates Journal. You can comment here or there.