Right then, so this tyre/pothole situation.
To summarise what I've posted - Monday on the way home from work I hit a pothole REALLY hard. Continued home, but failed to check the tyre that evening, because I'm stupid. Tuesday I drove in, I now realise with the tyre deflating. By the time I got to work the tyre was totally dead.
My plan was to hope for the best - assume it was just a knackered tyre, get it off at lunchtime, go down kwik-fit and start the ball rolling on getting new one.
The first problem was that I could not get the tyre off. There are four nuts that you need to unscrew and I could do three of them, but the fourth was one of these locking wheel nuts. The idea seems to be that there's a kind of "key" that fits onto the nut and clips into your wrench, but for the life of me I just could not get any purchase to turn it.
Luckily, I'm a member of the RAC, so I called them up. I called them at about 1:30pm and they said it would probably not be until 4pm that someone would get to me. Fine - I was at work, I wasn't going anywhere any way.
However, because I knew my tyres are rather rare, I thought I'd call kwik fit and try to get the ball rolling. So I did that, explain the tyre size and stuff and that all 4 of my current tyres are continentals. The guy said they'd need to check the stocks and get back to me.
So, 4pm rolled around and no sign of the RAC. I phoned them up, chasing, and they said it was going to be 6pm before someone could get to me! I appreciate I'm not pregnant and stuck by the side of the motorway, but come on - that's just taking the piss. 4 and a half hours to get to me!
Next thing, I hadn't heard anything from kwik fit, so I called them up. Well, it turns out that there are no Continental tyres in my size in the entire country! Not even Continental themselves have got any in stock!
Well, I know that you're not supposed to mix tread patterns on your driving wheels, which are the ones with power going to them. In my case that's the fronts and it was the front left that was knackered. However, the guy said we could order another brand - Pirelli in this case - and swap one from the back to the front.
The RAC guy eventually turned up at 5:45pm and of course he had the tyre off and changed in less than 5 minutes!
Unfortunately, I've got one of these shitty space saver tyres. That means I can't go above 50, and in reality I've been driving everywhere at 40, because it's far too easy to go above and if I was at 50 and did that, Christ knows what would happen.
Anyway, got home and decided I'd tidy up so that my tyre was in easy reach for the next day and I'd put all the bits and pieces for changing the tyre away too.
Well, while I was doing that, I noticed that the inside of the wheel - the inner rim - looked a bit funny. Using a tape measure, I was able to determine that the wheel is actually bent! There's a part of it that isn't as round as it should be! I'm guessing that's actually why the tyre deflated - I certainly couldn't see any holes in it.
But that also means I can't just put a new tyre on it - it needs properly fixing. I therefore investigated this on the internet that night and a guy I e-mailed called me right back.
He said it was going to be about £75 to repair, which isn't cheap, but is a lot cheaper than a new wheel. He also said it was going to take a couple of days (there are loads and loads of people hitting potholes and bending alloys because the roads have been fucked up by the recent bad weather)and he'd pick it up on Thursday.
So I've been driving on this crappy space saver in the meant time and it's not fun I can tell you.
And guess what? Thursday rolls around and there's not a peep from this guy at all. I phoned him up towards the end of the day and it just went straight to voicemail. So I e-mailed him late last night and I've not had a reply yet - to be honest, that's kind of fair enough, because it was late, but it also means he's still not answered my phone message.
It's getting silly - he also said it would take about 48 hours to repair, because of the backlog, so that means it'll be ages before it's done. I therefore phoned the Nissan garage this morning and asked how much a new alloy would be. It's more expensive - £180 - but he said I could have it tomorrow if I ordered by 11am (not sure this would actually be the case, but even if it was Monday, that'd be quicker).
The way I'm currently feeling about the situation I'll probably actually do both. That way I might be able to have an actual proper spare tyre, rather than this space saver shit.
Friday 22 January 2010
Thursday 21 January 2010
babylon5: the lost tales
Y'know what? I can't be arsed to do a proper blog entry today, so instead I'm going to post the last of the mini-reviews of stuff I watched over Christmas. This weekend I can finally resume watching new stuff as my latest rental DVD finally turned up on Tuesday. The post has really been knackered after the snow - more so than when they were on strike!
I'm not going to spend much time explaining the show - go check out Wikipedia - but I was a huge fan of Babylon 5 back in the day.
For some reason, Babylon 5 never really broke through into the popular imagination in quite the same way as Star Trek and Star Wars have.
Now you could put this down to the fact that B5 is definitely hard sci-fi, but then Star Trek is actually surprisingly hard sci-fi. Star Wars is not really - it's set in space, but it fantasy more than it is SF, truth be told. And I think the difference with Star Trek is that it had a sufficiently large nerdy fan-base it managed to whether the storms.
Also, Star Trek was kind of a benchmark and let's be frank - occasionally things just manage to breakthrough. Be it timing or sheer quality or just random good luck, occasionally some niche things just manage to make that leap into the general consciousness.
Anyway, the point is I really enjoyed the B5 TV series, so when I saw heard about The Lost Tales I thought I'd rent it and see if it lived up to the original series.
B5's strength was always its storytelling. The budget was always more in the cardboard set realm, and it was a pioneer of CG when, to be frank, CG was in its infancy, but the point is that stuff didn't matter, because the writing was so good.
Well, I say that stuff didn't matter.
The Lost Tales kinda proves that actually, it does matter a bit. Because although the writing is okay, the severely limited budget kinda shows. I mean, there must only have been a dozen actors across both of the stories.
To be fair, they're cleverly set up so that you wouldn't expect big crowd scenes, but it gives the whole thing a stage-play feel, rather than living up to the standards of even the TV show.
I mean, the idea is both tales are set before a big ceremony on B5 to mark an anniversary. But we never get to see that ceremony, because that would need a big crowd.
More obviously there are quite a few bits of "Oh, do you remember Garibaldi? Will he be there?" "Oh no, he sent a message saying he couldn't make it." Which just ends up smelling of "we couldn't afford to get all the actors."
And unfortunately it's really noticeable.
Plus, to be frank, the two stories are actually inconsequential.
Given the huge, Space Opera scope of the original series, if these had appeared as actual episodes, they'd have been in the "filler" bracket, rather than really adding to the grand storylines.
And that makes them a little disappointing, to be frank.
Plus the first one is kinda on a religious theme and to me wasn't very satisfying as it kinda came across as "oh, btw, actually, God exists in the B5 universe" when religion wasn't really a big issue in the series. Not to mention it conflicting wit my personal views... and common sense.
I'm not going to spend much time explaining the show - go check out Wikipedia - but I was a huge fan of Babylon 5 back in the day.
For some reason, Babylon 5 never really broke through into the popular imagination in quite the same way as Star Trek and Star Wars have.
Now you could put this down to the fact that B5 is definitely hard sci-fi, but then Star Trek is actually surprisingly hard sci-fi. Star Wars is not really - it's set in space, but it fantasy more than it is SF, truth be told. And I think the difference with Star Trek is that it had a sufficiently large nerdy fan-base it managed to whether the storms.
Also, Star Trek was kind of a benchmark and let's be frank - occasionally things just manage to breakthrough. Be it timing or sheer quality or just random good luck, occasionally some niche things just manage to make that leap into the general consciousness.
Anyway, the point is I really enjoyed the B5 TV series, so when I saw heard about The Lost Tales I thought I'd rent it and see if it lived up to the original series.
B5's strength was always its storytelling. The budget was always more in the cardboard set realm, and it was a pioneer of CG when, to be frank, CG was in its infancy, but the point is that stuff didn't matter, because the writing was so good.
Well, I say that stuff didn't matter.
The Lost Tales kinda proves that actually, it does matter a bit. Because although the writing is okay, the severely limited budget kinda shows. I mean, there must only have been a dozen actors across both of the stories.
To be fair, they're cleverly set up so that you wouldn't expect big crowd scenes, but it gives the whole thing a stage-play feel, rather than living up to the standards of even the TV show.
I mean, the idea is both tales are set before a big ceremony on B5 to mark an anniversary. But we never get to see that ceremony, because that would need a big crowd.
More obviously there are quite a few bits of "Oh, do you remember Garibaldi? Will he be there?" "Oh no, he sent a message saying he couldn't make it." Which just ends up smelling of "we couldn't afford to get all the actors."
And unfortunately it's really noticeable.
Plus, to be frank, the two stories are actually inconsequential.
Given the huge, Space Opera scope of the original series, if these had appeared as actual episodes, they'd have been in the "filler" bracket, rather than really adding to the grand storylines.
And that makes them a little disappointing, to be frank.
Plus the first one is kinda on a religious theme and to me wasn't very satisfying as it kinda came across as "oh, btw, actually, God exists in the B5 universe" when religion wasn't really a big issue in the series. Not to mention it conflicting wit my personal views... and common sense.
Wednesday 20 January 2010
public enemies
I'll stick with the traditional Wednesday mini-review today and leave updates on the tyre/wheel situation for later (it's not working out well).
Interestingly, I watched this at my Dad's while I was visiting him down in Devon.
He recently got broadband, as I've discussed on the blog before, and as part of the package he got BT Vision, which is an on-demand thing from BT. The box actually also gives him access to Freeview, which is digital television via your aerial, but we watched Public Enemies via a streaming service.
You actually pay for the films a bit like you would if you were downloading them from iPlayer or something like that; however, they appear not be downloaded, but streamed.
I was rather curious (and a little dubious) that this would work. He only has the most basic package, so his internet speed is not the greatest and I was puzzled what system it would use and how it would work.
As I've discussed before on the blog I know of two streaming types - YouTube style, where it caches the video and iPlayer style where you watch live. Unfortunately, BT Vision appears to use the latter method and presumably because his speed is not great, it didn't work very well.
If you've ever watched the iPlayer on a low bandwidth connection you'll know what I mean - it kept stuttering, which really affected the experience.
The odd thing, though was that picture quality was surprisingly good. I mean, I know TV is deceptive in that it's actually at quite a low resolution compared to most computer monitors, but it actually looked quite good. I'm guessing this was part of the problem - if the video was compressed a bit more, maybe it would have streamed better?
Anyway, the film itself seemed okay, although I guess that opinion could be affected by the poor viewing experience.
I think my biggest criticism about the film was that if felt like you needed to know about the period. It's basically about John Dillinger, who was a bank robber during the early 1930s.
Now the film looked like it was set during that period and the performances were quite good, but I dunno - it sort of lacked context. I mean, the 1930s was when the great depression happened and the early 1930s was also when America had prohibition.
Now while Dillinger wasn't a bootlegger, so I guess you could argue prohibition wasn't of quite a great importance, the Great Depression was. I mean, the whole mythos and rose-tinted view of gangsters, bootleggers and bank robbers was virtually caused by the depression.
The whole "Robin Hood" feel to them was erroneous, but it was what people felt about them and yet there's nothing that really conveys that in the film. I mean, unless you knew it was the depression, you really wouldn't have a clue from the film.
It lacked context in that sense.
I have to admit it also felt both too long and not long enough. In other words, it felt like they were trying to cram too much in, so you get an odd sense of jumping huge chunks of time in order to show little snippets, and yet because there were so many snippets it kinda went on a long time.
I've a feeling that was the aspect that was most affected by it stuttering, though.
I think generally if you watch the film I'd say do a bit of reading about who Dillinger was before hand and you may enjoy it a bit more.
Interestingly, I watched this at my Dad's while I was visiting him down in Devon.
He recently got broadband, as I've discussed on the blog before, and as part of the package he got BT Vision, which is an on-demand thing from BT. The box actually also gives him access to Freeview, which is digital television via your aerial, but we watched Public Enemies via a streaming service.
You actually pay for the films a bit like you would if you were downloading them from iPlayer or something like that; however, they appear not be downloaded, but streamed.
I was rather curious (and a little dubious) that this would work. He only has the most basic package, so his internet speed is not the greatest and I was puzzled what system it would use and how it would work.
As I've discussed before on the blog I know of two streaming types - YouTube style, where it caches the video and iPlayer style where you watch live. Unfortunately, BT Vision appears to use the latter method and presumably because his speed is not great, it didn't work very well.
If you've ever watched the iPlayer on a low bandwidth connection you'll know what I mean - it kept stuttering, which really affected the experience.
The odd thing, though was that picture quality was surprisingly good. I mean, I know TV is deceptive in that it's actually at quite a low resolution compared to most computer monitors, but it actually looked quite good. I'm guessing this was part of the problem - if the video was compressed a bit more, maybe it would have streamed better?
Anyway, the film itself seemed okay, although I guess that opinion could be affected by the poor viewing experience.
I think my biggest criticism about the film was that if felt like you needed to know about the period. It's basically about John Dillinger, who was a bank robber during the early 1930s.
Now the film looked like it was set during that period and the performances were quite good, but I dunno - it sort of lacked context. I mean, the 1930s was when the great depression happened and the early 1930s was also when America had prohibition.
Now while Dillinger wasn't a bootlegger, so I guess you could argue prohibition wasn't of quite a great importance, the Great Depression was. I mean, the whole mythos and rose-tinted view of gangsters, bootleggers and bank robbers was virtually caused by the depression.
The whole "Robin Hood" feel to them was erroneous, but it was what people felt about them and yet there's nothing that really conveys that in the film. I mean, unless you knew it was the depression, you really wouldn't have a clue from the film.
It lacked context in that sense.
I have to admit it also felt both too long and not long enough. In other words, it felt like they were trying to cram too much in, so you get an odd sense of jumping huge chunks of time in order to show little snippets, and yet because there were so many snippets it kinda went on a long time.
I've a feeling that was the aspect that was most affected by it stuttering, though.
I think generally if you watch the film I'd say do a bit of reading about who Dillinger was before hand and you may enjoy it a bit more.
Tuesday 19 January 2010
fucking potholes
Last night I hit a pothole.
And when I say hit, I mean mother fucking hit (I should warn that this blog entry may be a little more sweary than usual as I'm a rather pissed off). It felt like I was mounting the curb. And since I was on the A31 doing the best part of 60 miles an hour it was not a fun experience. It was a massive jolt and a there was a huge bang as I guess the shocks slammed up to take the impact.
Unfortunately, however, when I got home I was not sensible.
When I got home I should have checked out the tyre. I can't really check out the suspension, but the tyre is easily checkable and I now appreciate I should have had a look.
The reason I should have had a look is because the tyre has punctured. I don't think it could have burst as I didn't detect anything odd on the rest of the drive home. However, the drive in this morning got increasingly worse as I went.
I realise now that this was the tyre deflating. It's currently sat in the office car park awaiting me putting the skinny space-saver tyre on.
And that'll be a fucking nightmare. I've never changed the tyres before and it's got one of those locking wheel nuts, which I bet will be a pig to do. That's assuming the garage hasn't done the usual trick of tightening the tyres to such a degree that even bloody Hercules couldn't get them off.
So now I have a catalogue of potential problems.
First off the obvious - I'll need a new tyre. My tyres are a special size that are both quite rare and fucking expensive. We're talking at least £100. That's a lot of money. This means that even getting it sorted now will mean it will be tomorrow before a new one arrives. That means I'll have to drive on the skinny tyre, which is not the safest thing to be doing.
Next up the alignment/tracking could have been put out, which is not a big fix, but obviously represents more money.
Then it gets horrible - the shocks could have been damaged, the springs could have been damaged, the wheel bearing could have been damaged or the damn steering rack could even have been damaged. Those are all fucking expensive.
This is all assuming I've not caused even more damage by running on a flat tyre like a stupid idiot. Which, knowing my luck, I'm sure I have.
And when I say hit, I mean mother fucking hit (I should warn that this blog entry may be a little more sweary than usual as I'm a rather pissed off). It felt like I was mounting the curb. And since I was on the A31 doing the best part of 60 miles an hour it was not a fun experience. It was a massive jolt and a there was a huge bang as I guess the shocks slammed up to take the impact.
Unfortunately, however, when I got home I was not sensible.
When I got home I should have checked out the tyre. I can't really check out the suspension, but the tyre is easily checkable and I now appreciate I should have had a look.
The reason I should have had a look is because the tyre has punctured. I don't think it could have burst as I didn't detect anything odd on the rest of the drive home. However, the drive in this morning got increasingly worse as I went.
I realise now that this was the tyre deflating. It's currently sat in the office car park awaiting me putting the skinny space-saver tyre on.
And that'll be a fucking nightmare. I've never changed the tyres before and it's got one of those locking wheel nuts, which I bet will be a pig to do. That's assuming the garage hasn't done the usual trick of tightening the tyres to such a degree that even bloody Hercules couldn't get them off.
So now I have a catalogue of potential problems.
First off the obvious - I'll need a new tyre. My tyres are a special size that are both quite rare and fucking expensive. We're talking at least £100. That's a lot of money. This means that even getting it sorted now will mean it will be tomorrow before a new one arrives. That means I'll have to drive on the skinny tyre, which is not the safest thing to be doing.
Next up the alignment/tracking could have been put out, which is not a big fix, but obviously represents more money.
Then it gets horrible - the shocks could have been damaged, the springs could have been damaged, the wheel bearing could have been damaged or the damn steering rack could even have been damaged. Those are all fucking expensive.
This is all assuming I've not caused even more damage by running on a flat tyre like a stupid idiot. Which, knowing my luck, I'm sure I have.
Monday 18 January 2010
sleep patterns
My sleep patterns are all over the place it seems.
Normally they get a bit messed up when I take a long holiday, but the other thing that's buggered them up has been the getting up early during the last week because of the snow.
Sunday's a good example - my fritzed body clock woke me up about 5:30AM. I tried to go back to sleep, but it was no use as I was totally wide awake. So instead, I just watched some stuff I'd recorded.
Then, by about 8:00PM I was utterly shattered. However, I knew that if I went to sleep I'd end up waking up early again, so I forced myself to stay awake and read some manga. Eventually I turned in at about 9:30PM, which was still a bit early, but I just couldn't keep my eyes open.
I must have fallen asleep instantly, as next thing I know I'm lying in bed totally awake again. I checked the clock and it was only 1:30AM, but again I was really awake. What didn't help here was that I think I've pulled a muscle in my back and it was aching.
I took some pain killers and read for about half an hour or so until they kicked in and was then able to get back to sleep. But then I was woken up by my alarm at 6:45AM, which never normally happens. I was really tired when I got up, because of the messed up sleep pattern, but I'm okay now.
Hopefully with the return to normality my body-clock will get back on track this week. I say hopefully, because I saw a forecast over the weekend that predicted snow on Wednesday.
The snow has basically cleared here to the extent that it's not a problem. There are still a few patches, mainly where it was piled up.
The weekend was suitably dull and quite relaxing. I did a big shop and restocked a lot of stuff and cleaned the flat, which got some of the domestics out of the way. I also received about a dozen parcels, which was all the mail that had built up that they hadn't been able to deliver.
They were all parcels though - letters must still be backlogged, as I seem to be lacking a few things I would normally have expected to come through.
Normally they get a bit messed up when I take a long holiday, but the other thing that's buggered them up has been the getting up early during the last week because of the snow.
Sunday's a good example - my fritzed body clock woke me up about 5:30AM. I tried to go back to sleep, but it was no use as I was totally wide awake. So instead, I just watched some stuff I'd recorded.
Then, by about 8:00PM I was utterly shattered. However, I knew that if I went to sleep I'd end up waking up early again, so I forced myself to stay awake and read some manga. Eventually I turned in at about 9:30PM, which was still a bit early, but I just couldn't keep my eyes open.
I must have fallen asleep instantly, as next thing I know I'm lying in bed totally awake again. I checked the clock and it was only 1:30AM, but again I was really awake. What didn't help here was that I think I've pulled a muscle in my back and it was aching.
I took some pain killers and read for about half an hour or so until they kicked in and was then able to get back to sleep. But then I was woken up by my alarm at 6:45AM, which never normally happens. I was really tired when I got up, because of the messed up sleep pattern, but I'm okay now.
Hopefully with the return to normality my body-clock will get back on track this week. I say hopefully, because I saw a forecast over the weekend that predicted snow on Wednesday.
The snow has basically cleared here to the extent that it's not a problem. There are still a few patches, mainly where it was piled up.
The weekend was suitably dull and quite relaxing. I did a big shop and restocked a lot of stuff and cleaned the flat, which got some of the domestics out of the way. I also received about a dozen parcels, which was all the mail that had built up that they hadn't been able to deliver.
They were all parcels though - letters must still be backlogged, as I seem to be lacking a few things I would normally have expected to come through.
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