Ciaran’s Random Writings

According to Google nobody has ever seen fit to utter the phrase “trains and grapes” on the internet before, so it’s lucky I’m here to put that right. In my defence, the real purpose is a bit of testing of video encoding and embedding. Firstly, Saturday morning fun with Duplo trains:

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Secondly, a more serious use (it’s all relative) of the same setup, namely providing a guided tour of the grapevine:

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The camera shoots the video in MPEG format, so I used Riva FLV Encoder to convert them to the more web-friendly FLV format, and also to reduce the resolution and bitrate a bit. This Wordpress plugin made it easy to embed the videos into the post. Although it was a bit more effort, I much prefer this approach to relying on an external service to encode and host the video as I did here.

Can you guess what it is from the picture? It’s a driveshaft. Not very exciting to most people I suppose, but if you’d been waiting six weeks for the bloody thing to turn up, you might see it my way.

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A bonnet. Or a hood, if you speak the U.S. dialect. Interestingly, both are things you might put on your head. I wonder if the French open up the beret to check the oil. They don’t, I’m only joking, they open le capot, which isn’t anything you’d put on your head in any language I don’t think. On the other hand, a capote is a cloak with a hood, and I definitely remember seeing the capote anglaise worn as headgear during my schooldays.

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Wind is probably my least favourite kind of weather, and moreso when we’ve had what seems to be weeks of it. What’s normally an easy journey up and down the A1 on Friday was made a lot less pleasant by various obstacles in the way, ranging from lorries lying on their sides to bits of signage that had become detached and blown into the road.

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So I tried to break up my ranting with cute animal pictures, but then following landed in my inbox, courtesy of the BBC:

“Police say a number of people are seriously hurt in a crash involving 30 cars which was caused by fog.”

I can’t think for the life of me how a crash can POSSIBLY be caused by fog. Did the fog wrap its icy claws around everybody’s accelerator pedals? Jam the brakes? Topple a bridge? Fuddle their brains? No. Driving ‘faster than they could see’. Stupid bastards. Of course, as is usually the case, the casualties will probably not be restricted to the stupid ones.

I want to know who said the so-called accident was “believed to have been caused by dense fog and rain”. Hopefully just some webmonkey working late at the BBC, and not the Chief Constable quoted later in the article.

One thing that invariably gets on my nerves is speed camera whingers. Apparently, these folks are such good drivers they’re capable of deciding for themselves what speed it’s safe for them to drive. On the other hand, they’re incapable of noticing great big bright yellow highly visible cameras by the side of the road. What chance does a child on a bike stand against these idiots I wonder?

Fine? Penalty points? Revoke their licenses permanently I say.

I’m totally bored of this subject now, but I’ve been told that if I want my story made into a Hollywood blockbuster I can’t omit the happy ending so here we are:

Nationwide Autocentres, Harrogate

Summary: Hurrah

I know I shouldn’t have gone anywhere near one of these places after the experience at their Manchester branch, and the price quoted at the Leeds one. However, we’ve taken our various cars here many times and they’ve never put a foot wrong. At a cost of £69, I drove in, the wheel bearing got fitted in no time, and I drove away happily listening to the engine purring rather than the hub grinding away. The end.

(I really wasn’t taking any chances this time mind you - I went with a shiny new set of bearings in the glove compartment in case of any shennanigans, but they weren’t required.)

This ought to be the last mention of wheel bearings for a long time, but unfortunately the same wheel bearing on Nibby’s car is making an unpleasant noise now. With any luck though, there will be nothing worth writing about that.

I just want a wheel bearing replaced. This should be simple but it’s turned out to be a nightmare, more like a round-up of the decades’s best clips from Garages from Hell. If, and it seems unlikely, such a TV programme doesn’t exist, I’ve got enough material for the first few episodes already.

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For those who didn’t realise it, my starting to write about the car is bound to mean a stream of tales of woe and stupidity. They might have even thought that changing the instrument panel would have been the end of the story. It isn’t, of course.

When I started it up yesterday, I noticed it was idling at nearly 1500rpm instead of the more sensible 900. I wasn’t particularly concerned, but then on the motorway, cruising at an apparent 5550rpm, it dawned on me that the tachometer must be counting ignition pulses and the six cylinder engine is sending more than the tachometer I took out of the 4-cylinder version is expecting. I drove on, smugly dividing the reading by 1.5 and thinking about fixing it later.

In the meantime, I’ve opened all the windows due to the overpowering smell of oil, and they stay that way until I remember that I didn’t reconnect the oil pipe to the back of the instrument cluster properly. As a consequence, oil is leaking from the connection and following a complex path leading to a point directly above my left foot. Nothing in these cars happens by accident, and I’m sure the German engineers rigged this on purpose - since it’s an automatic they know exactly where my foot is going to be. Their plan worked anyway, and I’ve reconnected the pipe as they intended it.

On the plus side, my trainers came out of the washing machine cleaner than before. They stink of oil still, but that’s an improvement on the previous odour.

In the absence of anything else to write about, I thought I’d chart the progress of my latest in a long series of Mercedes W123’s. This one is a 280CE, which is my first coupe - previously they’ve all been saloons. I think by anyone’s standards she’s a real beauty, especially for a 22-year old banger:

As of now the mileage reads 130565, but before lunch it said 124544. This isn’t the result of a long journey, but of me replacing the instrument cluster with the one out of my spares car. The original featured two classic W123 faults, a stuck odometer and a bouncing speedo needle. Normally, the needle bounces at low speeds only, and this indicates a worn cable. This one bounced at all speeds though, and it turned out to be the unit itself, which I’ll now (i.e. ’someday’) repair with the help of this.

I can only guess how long it’s read 124544, but it isn’t really important with a car of this age anyway. What matters is that any major faults have so far managed to keep themselves hidden, although I haven’t really had time to look very hard yet.

I estimate I’ve done about 200 miles in it so far. Hopefully the car will do the counting from now on.