Stormsail

Snowboarding in Les Arcs

andy — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 14:00:00 +0000

Just got back from a week in the French Alps in Les Arcs which was excellent and probably my last boarding trip for a while as Pheebs and I are on an extended honeymoon next year. Kudos to Jenny for her excellent organization skills again and choosing a good chatlet. Highlights for me this year was the powder and there was a lot of it as we only had 2 sunny days all week. Whilst boarding in flat light is still fun it makes it a little more tricky in noticing the lumps and bumps of the slope. Next time I go I think I’d like to get a head cam to film the interesting reds and blacks that are about and to show folks who’ve not got there yet what they’re missing! Until next time……

It’s snow use……again!

andy — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 13:50:00 +0000

Happy new year to all and it’s that time again for more snow fun except this time it’s bigger and better (sounds like a film sequel doesn’t it). Yes another large snow dump as coated Basingstoke in the white stuff again just as we were recovering from the last bout before Christmas. I think I need to spend some quality time fixing my car as it’s not liking the cold too much. It turns over well enough but won’t fire. I suspect the glow plugs are all broken now and that will be my first port of call when I get a chance. Didn’t really have time over the Christmas break due to working and being ill . Still hopefully I’ll take a day off next week and get it sorted. I’m looking forward to what this year brings in many respect with Pheebs and I getting married, massive changes at work and hopefully a decent honeymoon to look forward to.

It’s Snow Use!

andy — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 23:50:00 +0000

A little bit of snow and the country grinds to a halt… It was a shame I had to be in the office for the late shift otherwise I would have worked from home and missed all the fun but hey it wasn’t to be. It had been snowing all afternoon as predicted by the weathermen and some folks had been lucky enough to be let off home early and hence avoid the majority of traffic delays. For the ones that didn’t seemed to get caught in the madness. One poor sod had to drive back to the office due to no traction once they got off the motorway, hills seem to have that effect with cars and snow. It took Craig 4 odd hours to drive back to Alton, which didn’t give me hope for me once I finished work at 9pm for returning to Basingstoke. To make matters worse the Basingstoke junction was closed which meant the A30. So the time came and I set off up the minley road very very slowly. This driving (car in snow mode) continued pretty much all the way to Basingstoke and hence why it took me 2 1/2 hours to get home. It was tiring due to having to concentrate on the car in front making sure I had enough stopping distance in case I skidded. which actually happened quite a few times. In a sadistic sort of way I actually enjoyed the time driving back as it made driving a little more challenging. What was particularly eery was coming off the A30 into Basingstoke and noticing the vast number of abandoned cars sitting on verges, roundabouts and anywhere essentially off the main carriageway. I’ve certainly not seen it this bad in my life time. Strangely enough countries that do have a lot of snow do seem to cope unlike us. I mean you only have to get a couple of leaves on line for the trains to stop. Getting up the hill to my road was really fun as I kept loosing traction on the back wheels (rear wheel drive car) but lucky enough I managed to make it and get home… phew.

Snow is fantastic in that it transforms any drab place into a place of beauty as you can see from the picture of my road above. Right….it’s time for bed.

The shed that looks more like a shed

andy — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 22:00:00 +0000

So after actually building the shed door using tongue & groove floor board with cross batons on the back and then painting a couple of times it was ready to be finally hung on the shed. Using some hinges I managed to fit it on but only to find that it didn’t quite fit as expected due to me adding additional width to the door frame. However that wasn’t too much hassle to use Dad’s jigsaw and plane to remove the excess which then allowed the door to work. Once on, I then fitted a lock and then moved onto fitting a couple of shelves to make use of the upper space in the shed.

It’s amazing what you can do with space if you have a little think. We’re going to have to make all the use of the space in the entire house once Pheeb’s moves in. Right, onto the next job….

More Rugby at the Stoop

andy — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 21:00:00 +0000

Pheebs and I paid a visit to the Stoop in Twickenham to watch the Harlequins versus Gloucester match which was very entertaining as there were 7 tries rather than a ping-pong kicking game. Glad we didn’t pay to see any of the England matches this Autumn (although I’d like to go next year!). It was also nice to see the Quins beat Gloucester 35-29 as last time I came they lost to Saracens! It was shame Ed couldn’t make it due but it was good to catch up with Ryan and Liz who I’ve not seen for a long time.

Boarding the loft

andy — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 18:52:43 +0000

On Monday I got round to doing some work in the loft as I had a day off in lieu from my day job. The aim for the loft project was to board the entire loft and insulate the tunnel which provides light into the bathroom via the Velux window in the roof. The Velux got fitted on the 10th November by G & N roofing who did a good job despite the weather outside. Still, a good supply of tea helps to keep spirits high…….anyway back to the loft. Once the roof light tunnel was insulated I moved into some re-wiring which involved moving the light switch from the old loft access hatch to the new one + fitting an additional florescent tube light. That actually took me an entire two days during a previous weekend but at least I can see a little better up there. With that complete, I was then able to get some loft boards from Wickes and spend some time slotting them together over the rafters to form a decent platform. The idea is to provide some additional insulation, some storage space and a platform to finish the firewall ( I didn’t fancy balancing on the rafters whilst bricklaying…). So, a day later and 200 odd screws (to secure the boards) I finished. I just need to complete the other half and do some bricklaying to completely finish the job. Let’s hope I find some time……

Andy and the Slate Roof

andy — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 22:00:00 +0000

Having spent the week off work, I managed to finish the shed roof in slate which was a remarkable improvement from the corrigated iron roof before. I essentially built a wooden frame on top of the brickwork and then put on some roofing felt. Once that was tacked onto the frame, I then put some battons before laying the slate tiles on top. I managed to cut the tiles using an angle grinder with a brick/tile disk as I couldn’t complete a row with whole tiles. Once the last layer was on it was only a matter of finishing it off with the flashing. For this I cheated and got some cheaper flashing as lead was about £50 for a very small amount. Now, it’s just a question of finding time to build the door…..

The wall gets rebuilt

andy — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:25:15 +0000

Yes, after a week of time and effort, Rick has finished rebuilding the top part of the back wall. Unfortunately, as Ricks getting on a bit and is no longer a spring chicken it came down to me to make lots of tea, mix up cement and run around collecting bricks so he could complete within a week. This meant collecting 320 total odd bricks from various reclamation yards during my lunch hours and then moving them out the back so Rick could use them on the wall. Unfortunately we couldn’t save that many when the wall was demolished. I’m glad it’s finished because I’m knackered but it was worth it in the end from looking at the finished job. Next on the hit list is to re-point the bottom half of the wall (both sides) and to rebuild the shed with a slate roof….

The wall comes crashing down

andy — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 21:00:00 +0000

Well, not crashing down but with some brute force machine assistance. Now the back wall as been in a sorry state for a while ever since I moved in and I’ve finally got round to doing something about it with my neighbors cooperation. So using a demolition hammer we’ve removed the cracked top section and saved as many bricks as we can so Rick (our friendly builder) can rebuild it. Matt and I had a go of repairing the section of wall over the soon to be rebuilt shed and made quite a good job of it (according to Rick) but due to time constraints Rick’s going to complete it. Once the wall has been re-done, Pheeb’s and I can dig up the concrete and finish our back yard garden plan…..hopefully before the winter sets in! Stay tuned for the finished photo……

ZFS fun and games

andy — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 20:00:00 +0000

In changing anything you run the risk of running into unseen problems and that’s just what happened when I attempted to upgrade the power supply in my main system. I was upgrading to a higher capacity PSU in order to cope with the 7 disk drives, a tape device, a DVD writer, a quad core AMD processor and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 260 graphics card. This was because every time I tried to kick off a backup the old PSU would reset the system due to the unrated power supply and obviously I wanted to back up as much of the system as I could in case of issues. So, the initial PSU replacement to an unbranded 800 Watt PSU from Ebuyer only took 15 minutes to replace once I’d sorted out all the cables,plugs etc but the noted strangeness when OpenSolaris booted. It complained about OHCI usb errors (and stopped the keyboard/mouse from working) and ATA disk errors (which happened to be my mirrored ZFS boot device). Just in case it was a configuration error I tried booting the live OpenSolaris cdrom and got the same thing….strange. So thinking something was really wrong, I replaced the original power supply and after which I didn’t see the errors any more booting from live cdrom but had managed to corrupt my ZFS rpool….bugger. So searching on the net I noticed that lots of other folks have run into similar corruption issues and they’ve managed (by some assistance from some ZFS gurus) to get the pool back to read only mode and recover the data. There is also some mention of CR 6667683 – “need a way to rollback to an uberblock from a previous txg” which when implemented will allow the admin to rollback to a previous transaction….but not implemented until build 125 and I’m on build 111b…..bummer. After some shared shell access and some jiggery pokery by Victor and Jason they managed to get my rpool back to read only (Thanks Chaps!)….whew. Once I’d copied the data to my working pools, I re-installed OpenSolaris and then copied my root rpool data back, created a new beadm boot environment and managed to get back to where I was prior to the corruption….yay. Having spoken to another colleague at work, I’m going to try a well known PSU and see what happens…but not first without detaching a mirror or first boot from cdrom to confirm that all is well…..