Reply to: test please delete

[NickFitz]

Kaboodle, the people who can apparently install Miele things properly rather than just standing around pursing their lips and shaking their heads, finally got in touch. First available slot is next Wednesday

Ah well, I'm already getting used to sidling around this sodding great machine that's standing in front of the sink

I noticed that the lino (well, vinyl flooring) in the recess where it needs to go has been a bit damaged and torn up by the dragging out of the old machine. So I've got some kind of magic Gorilla Glue coming from Amazon and will have to crawl in there and stick it back down, so the new machine has a level surface to rest on - it'll be impossible to use a spirit level to check once it's in there, and there'll be no way of adjusting the feet without dragging it out again and making things worse. At least I now have plenty of time to deal with that, rather than having to squeeze it in between Teams meetings

And I've disabled my old team's Google Calendar in my Gmail sidebar. For whatever inscrutable reason, Google had elected to make entries from this appear in a dark grey verging on black. With it turned off and only the bright blue of my own calendar in there, the sidebar suddenly looks a lot less gloomy and menacing

[DoctorStrangelove]

Morning.

Wednesday <checks clock>

Damply dry.

Grey.

Dark.

Sunless.

Cool in here at 21.2 deg, 22 in the kitchen, 20 in the leanto.

996 mBar, 29.4 in Hg, 747 Torr, 14.44 psi, (down from 1000 last night), 66% RH (Lidl electric).

Meanwhile on the 11th of February 2020 BR14 and DaveB popped in, WTFH was still in Memphis but there was no work so he was coming home on Thursday but they were still paying him for Thursday & Friday, there was discussion of socks & mismatching, whereas I found an enormous hole in one of the pair I was wearing, after changing which I was off to a mother's meeting of s in Swansea, and NF was watching Wallender in Swedish, followed by something in Icelandic.

Raining.

[WTFH]

Morning all
We had rain overnight, finally!
OK, it rained for about 5 minutes, but that's more than the last 3 months.

Dog walk today also included a brief shower when we were about an hour in, and in a valley the far side of another village. The same precipitation did not make it to our house.

[NickFitz]

^^^"Reassuringly expensive".

Next stop: Stella Artois. .

The hose on my Miele WM is that braided kind.

Fancy, but I doubt it's any more special than the Wilko one on the el cheapo WM.

Thankfully the waste water pipe was long enough to do the needful doings without the expenditure of more money.

They took the old water hose away with them at my request but forgot the drain hose. I've just measured that and it appears the hose itself was 1.5m which had then had an additional 30cm or so attached on the end via a bit of a bodge job - the bit of the extension near the join is wrapped in yellow-and-green striped tape, clearly intended for earth wiring

So assuming the drain hose came out of the same corner of the old one, which I think was the case, I'm having to get an extra metre of hose for the sake of it being a foot too short

The water and drain hoses come out at the same corner on the new machine whereas the old one had them on different sides, so the water one needed to allow for the additional distance - say 50cm versus ten or fifteen on the new one. That was a 2m hose, so this one probably only needs to be around 1.7 or 1.8m, but instead it's going to be 3

[NickFitz]

Morning denizens

I swear autocorrect is now changing things I typed perfectly well the first time. For the record: pork in cider, plot is thickening

It's a sunny start, though that is not to be confused with a warm day. It is, in fact, 15°C with an expected high of a mere 19°

Looking ahead, it's predicted to be this time next week before we get back to 20°, and that looks like it's just a blip. I'll be getting the autumnal duvet out soon

[ladymuck]

Some seventh century ones in Monday Links last week too

Ah, that must be where the memory came from but I didn't twig that I'd read about it in your post!

[NickFitz]

Back to 1972 in The Rewind Files, where the already dense plot is sickening even more

Wednesday tomorrow! I wonder if the new team will just leave me to read stuff again? Not that I got much reading done with all the delivery shenanigans today. Anyway, it's a bit dull just doing that; I'll see if the other developer (who had to leave for a couple of hours in the middle of the day as one of her rabbits was poorly and she rushed it to the vet, though it then recovered) will show me more about how it all works

Goodnight all

[NickFitz]

Some delightful racists in the Torygraph comments section are complaining that the BBC put black people in King & Conqueror because apparently there were no black people in Britain in 1066 and therefore the BBC are being woke.

I responded mentioning that black people weren't invented in the 1940's and had been around for quite some time.

They then directly asked if I believed that black people lived in Britain in 1066. This triggered a memory of some archaeological research which revealed black history in Britain being much older than people think. I found a link to an easy-to-read summary of the findings and kindly shared it with them for their education. I have no doubt they will find a reason to debunk this information as fake news or some such but it brought me great joy to share it.

Some seventh century ones in Monday Links last week too

[ladymuck]

Some delightful racists in the Torygraph comments section are complaining that the BBC put black people in King & Conqueror because apparently there were no black people in Britain in 1066 and therefore the BBC are being woke.

I responded mentioning that black people weren't invented in the 1940's and had been around for quite some time.

They then directly asked if I believed that black people lived in Britain in 1066. This triggered a memory of some archaeological research which revealed black history in Britain being much older than people think. I found a link to an easy-to-read summary of the findings and kindly shared it with them for their education. I have no doubt they will find a reason to debunk this information as fake news or some such but it brought me great joy to share it.

[NickFitz]

Tea has been the braised belly pork in coder thing, with chips

And I've watched the third and final part of Disaster at Sea: The Piper Alpha Story. It's very good; I might dig out my copy of Fire in the Night for a reread

[DoctorStrangelove]

^^^"Reassuringly expensive".

Next stop: Stella Artois. .

The hose on my Miele WM is that braided kind.

Fancy, but I doubt it's any more special than the Wilko one on the el cheapo WM.

Thankfully the waste water pipe was long enough to do the needful doings without the expenditure of more money.

[NickFitz]

I bet the hoses aren't anything special, other than having the brand name printed on them.

I remember trying to get a sofa delivered to the first flat I rented in Kensington. It came in a huge box. I had measured doors etc based on a sofa shape, and not sofa-in-a-box shape and therefore expected it to fit through the various corners that needed to be navigated. Turns out, they were not allowed to remove the sofa from the box in order to get it into the flat so I had to reject delivery. What a load of nonsense that was.

The drain hose doesn't seem like anything you couldn't get from SparesRUs for half the price (though with the discount, I am getting it for half the price). But the expensive one is the water hose, as that's got an impressive stainless steel braided sheath; very fancy

She mentioned that I was lucky I hadn't got one of their models with the advanced Water Protection System™, as the hose is built into said system so a longer one costs more than twice as much as it includes the whole unit, and you also need to get a plumber to install it

[ladymuck]

I bet the hoses aren't anything special, other than having the brand name printed on them.

I remember trying to get a sofa delivered to the first flat I rented in Kensington. It came in a huge box. I had measured doors etc based on a sofa shape, and not sofa-in-a-box shape and therefore expected it to fit through the various corners that needed to be navigated. Turns out, they were not allowed to remove the sofa from the box in order to get it into the flat so I had to reject delivery. What a load of nonsense that was.

[NickFitz]

After listening to hold music for an eternity, I finally got through to the relevant Miele customer service person to see about getting hoses and also a visit from a "technician" - I felt that it might be safer to have a professional deal with things like swapping hoses around. They turned out to be very helpful, and the hoses turned out to be very expensive. But they went off and spoke to their manager, and knocked 50% off!

So new, longer, official, warranty-preserving hoses are on their way, and I'll be contacted shortly by their approved installation company. She explicitly stated that this one was different to the one from earlier today, in that this one "does everything"

Might have clean clothes by the weekend!

[NickFitz]

^^^ Smartarse.

They were repeatedly telling me things they couldn't do! Eventually one of them explained that in days of old, people would ask the delivery teams to do something extra, and then claim stuff had been damaged and so on and demand compensation. So now the company literally won't let them do anything more complicated than turn up, put the thing in, connect it (when possible), and leave

When I suggested taking the cupboard door off to give them an extra bit of space, they started moaning that they didn't have time as they had forty drops to do. I pointed out that it was four screws and I had the required screwdriver right there as I'd thought it might be needed, so they reluctantly stood there for the thirty seconds or so it took to do it