'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe

What with the glorious sunny weather, I wondered how hot my flat actually gets. It's certainly felt far too warm recently.

Now, the sensible way to find out is to go and buy a thermometer. But Robert Days are closed for the evening. So instead I dug out an Arduino kit I was given for my birthday (Elegoo's "The Most Complete Starter Kit for the Mega 2560") and set to work...



The answer: 27°C!

( Code! )

Side-effect of electric heating: you can tell when autumn has arrived by the smell of burnt dust from the heaters being used for the first time in 6 months.

So there are nominally 6 spaces for cars behind my flat. There's two spaces in front of the other set of flats (explicitly reserved for those flats), three under the viaduct, and a final space to one side.

There's also four flats in the building I'm in, and two in the other building, so in theory that all adds up and everyone gets one space. With me so far?


Well, I just looked out the window and there are now 7 cars and a motorbike (occupying one of the reserved spaces) in that area. While you can theoretically get one extra car in without completely blocking someone else, two doesn't work.

Perhaps I should suggest to my landlord that he should put up reservation signs for the un-reserved spaces, to match those that the other landlord has put up...

Winding back in time a little...

For quite some time now Network Rail have been working on the viaduct behind the flats. I'm not entirely sure what they're doing - it seems to involve hacking out chunks of brickwork from the arches, which somehow hasn't resulted in the whole thing collapsing, though then again it's Victorian engineering and so'll be massively overengineered for the load it carries - but anyway, as part of this they rather need to be able to get at the roof of the arches. So on Tuesday when I returned home I discovered this in front of me...



That made parking a little interesting on Tuesday when I entered to discover all this. Since reversing out of the leftmost archway space (being the only space remaining) is awkward, I decided to reverse into it. That was rather tricky - Alfa's are not designed for small-space manoeuvring - though not as bad as it might have been, as the hatchback design means the rear of the MiTo doesn't stick out at all (which shows how pointless kerb-to-kerb turning circles are - on paper I have about the same turning circle as The Gnu does in his 159, but in practice I can fit in a smaller area as the MiTo is quite a bit shorter!). It still took me a couple of goes to get lined up enough to slide in to the space.

One of the other tenants must have bent the ear of the site foreman over this, as on Wednesday when I left for work one of the workers came up and said rather apologetically "We do try to leave it tidy here". I suggested they also tuck the cherry picker in better so that Trevail House can fit one of their cars in next to it, which they've done (and also lifted the bucket out of the way) and today the scissor lift underneath the arches has disappeared as well so overall we're only down one space.

And today's moment of randomness in the life of boggyb is discovering that the bedroom window won't fully close, which is not the sort of thing one wants to find at this hour of the night. I've no idea who'd I'd phone if it was completely stuck - is there such a thing as a 24-hour glazier?

Or rather, it was stuck. Carefully directed force, some thought as to how to apply the force without throwing myself out the window (which is generally considered a Bad Idea), and vast amounts of WD-40 freed up the mechanism and it now closes fully. My guess is that the weight of the window while open had shifted it slightly on the hinges - the fixed portion of the PVC hinge mechanism is merely clipped in to the runner rather than actually being screwed down, and so can move slightly.

Come to think of it, why isn't it screwed down?

*googles*

Hmm... the internets suggest that there is such a thing as a "fire escape" hinge (which opens 90° to let you use it as an emergency exit), and also that there is such a thing as a "fire escape easy clean" hinge. And in the latter, the fixed portion can be unclipped to let you slide the opened window along the rail so that you can clean it. That looks like what I've got.

Well, you learn something every day.

...and today's discovery is that while I was away over the weekend, the breaker for the immersion heater tripped. That's new.

Of course, I discovered this by wanting to do some washing up and finding that a) the pump wasn't working (it's on the same circuit), and b) what little water was coming out of the tap was cold.

The heater has been a bit temperamental and more than once I've had to reset the over-temperature cut-out on it so I wonder if something has finally failed. In any case, it can wait until tomorrow when it's still light outside and so it's less of an inconvenience if my usual troubleshooting approach (reset breaker, see if it trips again - if it does then it's definitely failed) takes out the lights as well. Though it may well just be one of those things rather than an actual failure - MCBs do have a tendency to trip on very short faults, like the momentary short-circuit from a failing halogen light.

Today was supposed to be phone line day, but unfortuantly that failed to happen. And I can't even rant at the person who's fault it is (and I was very nice and didn't rant at the engineer - it's not his fault), so I shall instead rant at the Internets!

It turns out that I'm not only the first person in this flat to want a landline, but the first person in the whole block - the other tennants all use mobile phones. But that shouldn't be a problem, the block itself should be wired up.

Ha. Ha. Ha.

Turns out that the builders fitted a DP and wired all the flats up to that, but then left the cable out of the DP in a heap on the floor. And they ran a couple of ducts in the cupboard, but a) they aren't the same colour as the ones underneath the BT manhole cover right outside which leads to b) the engineer has no idea where they go! The landlady doesn't know how the phones should be run, and the person who would know is on holiday. So the phone sockets in the flat are all wired up, but the cable between the flat and the exchange isn't connected and no-one knows where it should run!

With any luck BT'll send another engineer soon to sort out the ductwork (the one today didn't have the necessary equipment), and hopefully that one will manage to get it wired up.

At least at the end of this I should get an excellent broadband connection as the new flat is much closer to the exchange!