Car tyres and problems

by Ian Posted on October 26, 2007

volvo logoA couple of weeks ago I posted about buying tyres online and how it didn’t go quite to plan. BestBuyTyres contacted me on the Monday and were very honest and appologetic about the mistake with the opening hours on their website. The installation was re-arranged for last Saturday and now I have the tyres that I wanted fitted at the price that suited me.

Last Thursday while driving home from work, a warning light came on. It was the emissions warning light. So Friday, I arranged for the car to go into the dealer yesterday when I went back to work. The check strap on the driver’s door was very noisy so I asked them to replace it while they had the car.

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Digital TV

by Ian Posted on October 26, 2007

aerialLast Christmas we got a DVD recorder which had a built in Freeview tuner. Unfortunately we didn’t have an aerial suitable for digital TV, so fitting one was added to my ‘to do’ list. A couple of months later, when our TV packed up, the replacement also had a built in Freeview tuner. So now we had two unused Freeview tuners. I wanted to install an aerial in the loft and run it down through the house, but the route wasn’t going to be easy.

The kids went to stay at their grandparents on Tuesday until today. So on Wednesday, I took the opportunity to fit an aerial in the loft for digital TV. I ended up lifting some of the floorboards on the landing to route the cable, not something, I’d really want to be doing with the kids under foot. It took a while but eventually, after drilling through the wall from the kitchen, I had the cable in the living room by the television.

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Complete blog makeover

by Ian Posted on October 22, 2007

hammerI have been working over the last few weeks to migrate my blog from Thingamablog to WordPress. This is something that I had been considering for a while and then after Randa’s review of my blog, I started looking into it seriously.

I created a test install of WordPress at home to play around with and then started to look at the options for exporting my Thingamablog data. On the face of it, the data could be exported in XML format. However, the structure of the data wasn’t compatible with any of the import options. In the end, I imported the data into Excel, reformated it and created a new file in WordPress export format. This enabled me to import my posts into the test WordPress install.

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Posted in Blog-design | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

How we learn

by Ian Posted on October 18, 2007

brain
We went to a talk at the school earlier tonight about Individual Learning Profiles. Simon Olding from MovementInMind came into the school to talk to parents and staff about the software that the school has been trialling. He had already been working with the school with great results with the BrainGym over the past few years.

He explained that we all favour a dominant hand, eye, ear, foot and brain hemisphere. The combinations of these dominances affects the ways in which we are best able to learn. For example some people may visualise, others may be more hands on and others may need to take notes for information to be absorbed.

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Posted in Watling Lower School | Tagged , | 6 Comments

Buying tyres online

by Ian Posted on October 13, 2007

flat tyre
I had hoped today to be able to talk about my experiances of buying car tyres online. I can, but the story’s not over yet.

Last Sunday evening, my neighbour knocked to let me know that I had a flat tyre. I went out to change it quickly before the light went, but I should have known it wouldn’t be as easy as that. Although I could undo the wheel bolts, the alloy had stuck to the hub. I didn’t have anthing suitable for hitting it with, so I called out the AA. They estimated that they would be with me within 2 hours and actually arrived after about 35 minutes. It only took him a minute or so to tap off the alloy with a hide hammer (I must get one for the car). He fitted the spare while he was here and that was it.

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Posted in Car | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Cre8Buzz going public

by Ian Posted on October 6, 2007

cre8buzz
Tomorrow, Cre8Buzz changes to Public Beta which means that it is visible to non-members. You still need to be a member to post or comment and have to be invited by a member to join.

I was invited at the beginning of August and have found it a really great, vibrant community. Unlike some other social networks, where everyone is out to build their own little (or big) empire, everyone at Cre8Buzz is helpful and are growing and adding to the whole community. You can customise your profile page and this works really well, clean and not too gaudy.

There are somewhere around 700 members at the moment, some are friends from other social networks, like Carol who invited me, some are new like Pari, Finland_in_Eaton and Novembrance.

Some of the members have shared their experiances on the Cre8Buzz blog. It’s difficult to put my finger on exactly why it works, but it just does.

So, please take to time tomorrow to pop over and have a look. My Cre8Buzz profile is here. If you want an invite, you can let me know through my contact me page and I’ll send one over.

Posted in Blogging | Tagged , | 4 Comments