#100DaysToOffload – Day 36
Another book from my “to-read” shelf enjoyed.
A pleasant and quick read, at only 128 pages long, hopefully quite like this post! Enjoyed this book a lot. Here's the wiki page for it if you're curious.
I am taking in the 100 Days to Offload blogging challenge set by Kev Quirk. Whilst lockdown is on do 100 blog posts to help you offload and to read what everyone else is up to.
#100DaysToOffload – Day 35
For the last few weeks we've had all sorts of problems with our internet connection. At first we just put it down to 2 of us working from home plus 2 kids home schooling whilst various combinations of us are listening to music streams or watching video streams. Then it just kept getting worse and more sporadic. In an effort to help my daughter out a new wifi extender was purchased (the old one was rather basic and rather slow so could do with being replaced anyway). Still it was problematic. Then occasionally there will be a shout of “please stop steaming, I'm on a Zoom” but it will turn out no one is streaming so we were unsure what would be causing it. Mrs Luke called Virgin, as the account is in her name, and they claimed it was due to the number devices connected at once. Thing is we've had this number of devices connected for at least 6 months and it was fine up until last month.
Then whilst I was trying to work but failing due to DNS not resolving for my desktop machine I hotspotted on my phone for a while. When I turned the hotspot off it autojoined the wifi extender network and was working fine. Then when I changed it back to the main network it stopped resolving DNS again. Hang on that's not right as the extender just gets access through the main network! Some more poking about and trying different devices and I found several tablets and computers had exactly the same problem. If they joined the main network no DNS would resolve but if they joined the extender network it worked fine. What's that all about??
So I spent some time looking at Virgin forums and looking in router logs to try and work out how to fix it. Checking various configs to check all was OK etc etc. Seems various people had had similar problems to us starting about a similar time and it could only be fixed by Virgin. Poor old Mrs Luke called them again and explained fully what was going on. In the end she was on the phone to them for about an hour but they did a remote wipe & reinstall on the router and presto! All the devices that couldn't resolve DNS before now can. Having it working properly is such a relief. It is one of those background stresses you don't realise is there until it has gone.
As an aside one thing that struck me while searching for the solution to this problem is the number of people that can't differentiate between their wifi connection and their internet connection. I do feel sorry for those Virgin call centre folks.
I am taking in the 100 Days to Offload blogging challenge set by Kev Quirk. Whilst lockdown is on do 100 blog posts to help you offload and to read what everyone else is up to.
#100DaysToOffload – Day 34
Not much to say today. My home broadband connection has been up and down like a yo-yo and a group chat, made up of usually a close-knit group of friends, has descended into all-out war. Lots of frayed tempers and lack of patience due to lockdown and crap working work I think. Not even over anything worth mentioning.
Oh well. Early tomorrow morning I'm off out for a medium to long bike ride with a couple of buddies so let's hope the endorphins do the trick. When I say early this will be the earliest I've set my alarm for since the end of March!
#100DaysToOffload – Day 33
Since lockdown started and I've been working from home I've probably watched less TV than I would normally. Mrs Luke and I did binge watch Giri/Haji at way back at the start of April (which feels like a lifetime ago) as it was getting pulled from iPlayer so needed to watch it all before it got taken down. That had us gripped. Also I watched The Beauty of Maps but that was only 4 episodes. There's no real reason why that I can think of but I've just not sat down and watched Tiger King like everyone else so far. The one thing I have been enjoying watching though, and this is watching on the tv when it gets screened instead of binge watching, is The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross. It's just so calm and soothing and he has his funny little sayings. 100% recommend settling down with a cuppa and relaxing while he waffles away.
#100DaysToOffload – Day 32
Finished this book a few days ago. It's the first David Sedaris book I've read though I knew his name from NPR's This American Life which I used to listen to while walking the dog. Sadly the dog is much older now so the walks are far too short for an episode of This American Life these days.
Wasn't sure what to expect of this book as I didn't even know if it was fiction or non-fiction or whatever. Ended up being a series of anecdotes of his childhood and family life and moved on to stories from when he was a young man. It's entertaining and funny but side-splittingly funny. More amusing than anything else. It was a pleasant read and not disappointed I read it but definitely won't be getting a place on my shelf for favourite books. Apropos of nothing I saw David Sedaris now lives in the English county of West Sussex so can't be that far from me (as I'm right by the East/West Sussex border).
Haircut
#100DaysToOffload – Day 31
The long suffering Mrs Luke is very brave. This is evident in that she is happy to undertake giving me haircuts (and beard trims) during lockdown.
As a little boy my hair was white blond and it's gotten darker as I've gotten older. It's some sort of dirty brown now but my mental picture of my hair is still of it being blond. So whenever I have a haircut and see the hair on the floor it gives me a surprise. And that's without even starting to mention the white hairs that my beard is full of and are creeping over my head.
Still a fresh trim feels good, especially when it's hot.
Pallet buster
#100DaysToOffload – Day 30
Today's purchase is a Roughneck Pallet Buster. This is probably the most manly thing I've ever bought.
(Excuse the stolen stock image)
Its purpose, if you can't tell from the name, is for breaking down wooden pallets. We've talked about having an extra bit of fencing above the 2 metre back wall for a while, as the neighbour over that side is a little odd to say the least. As we've been in the garden so much recently we decided to look into in properly but the costs of the wood to do it are out of our budget at the moment. So the plan is to collect pallets, break them down and make the fencing using the wood. Fingers crossed! I'm not that bad at DIY but my wife always moans at the cost of tools (as she rightly thinks I'm just buying boys toys) so we are always trying to do things on the cheap which makes it tricky. For this we'll borrow a neighbour's mitre saw to cut it all to length and a friend's cordless power screwdriver to put it all together. Fence on the cheap!
Hearing
#100DaysToOffload – Day 29
One of the thing that seems to be sensible in this coronavirus days is wearing a face mask. It stops the spread of the disease especially as there's research to show the virus enters the body through the lungs into the blood stream. My wife made us all lovely face masks pretty early into lockdown as she's handy with a sewing machine and had a load of material knocking about. However for me masks a nightmare. I'm not on some weird Donald Trump tip worrying about my image or my freedom to choose. Instead I have bad hearing and having people's mouths covered up makes me really hard for me to work out what they're saying. Back when I was about 5 I had a really bad bout of measles. It's not that my folks were anti-vax but this was over 40 years ago and there just weren't vaccinations for it offered then. After this bad case of measles it was noticed I had bad hearing so was sent for tests. It seems the measles damaged my nerves from my ears to my brain. So it's not degenerative, it doesn't get worse at all. It's just bad hearing. The odd part is only certain nerves are damaged which means, in layman's terms, I have a bass ear and a treble ear. Usual bad hearing is a general loss of volume but for me it is just certain frequencies I can't hear. As a schoolboy I pretty much carried on and pretended I didn't have bad hearing (as being at school the last thing you wanted to be was “different”). Though as an adult I came round to it and am much more open about it. Then technology caught up and meant hearing aids were available that boosted just the frequencies I needed instead of being just a general volume boost. I even can control them using bluetooth from my phone to turn the volume up or down. I'm not really sure where I'm going with this or how to finish it other than if you're wearing a mask and someone is looking baffled at you it could be me. Also people that choose not to vaccinate their kids against measles are utterly despicable.
Movie Night
#100DaysToOffload – Day 28
Yesterday while trying to think of fun things to do for the kids I decided to put on a movie night in our backyard.
We watched My Spy which turned to be a harmless family blockbuster type film. Normally getting the family to agree on a film is a nightmare and we give up after 30 minutes but this time we jut let the kids choose and my daughter bullied her brother into watching that!
I printed off some “tickets” and used a trusty popcorn recipe I got from the New York Times a while ago: ½ cup of oil to 1/3 cup of popcorn. It's a lot of oil but makes great popcorn every time. Then while hot toss it with some sugar/salt/whatever.
Then set up an old projector in the garden and arranged the chairs with a load of blankets on to keep the chill away.
Worked an absolute treat. The family loved it and have already asked to do it again next week!
I am taking part in the 100 Days to Offload blogging challenge set by Kev Quirk.
Lyndon Loaf
#100DaysToOffload – Day 27
If you've been paying attention you'll have noticed I like making bread. Generally I like easy and fuss free bread. When chatting with my step-dad he mentioned a method of making a loaf his nephew sent him so I tried it. The nephew's name is Lyndon so I call it the Lyndon Loaf though he didn't invent it.
Follow a standard white loaf recipe like this one. Mix it and knead it then after the first rise give it a 5 minute knead and put it in a lidded metal casserole dish (what Americans call a Dutch oven I believe). Put it in a cold oven with the lid on then turn the oven to 240c. After 35 minutes remove the lid and leave in for a further 10 minutes. Viola! An amazing loaf. Here's the one I made:
I am taking in the 100 Days to Offload blogging challenge set by Kev Quirk.