Sunday, September 20, 2009 at 07:02PM More painting today. But I had BBC Radio 7 on, which made it much more fun. A fantastic mix of comedy and drama which is the perfect accompaniment to this kind of job. Wonderful stuff.
Life Saturday, September 19, 2009 at 07:48PM This weekend I had a lot of wall and ceiling to paint. And the local DIY chain had an offer on the Dulux PaintPod. So, of course, I bought one. It has buttons and lights, and motors. How could I resist? The idea is that a little pump in the paint reservoir pushes the paint through a pipe to the handle, where it is transferred onto the paint roller. Then, when you have finished painting, you add some cleaning water, the process goes into reverse and the machine cleans itself and the roller.
And it mostly works. The best bit was when it was pumping the first bit of paint through the clear pipe up to the roller, I loved watching the paint travel down the clear plastic tube. I think this is where the BBC 3 people got the idea for their new logo. Once the paint gets to the handle it is then supposed to be magically transferred onto the roller and then you can paint with it. This is where it gets a bit sticky. Put too much paint on the roller and you end up wearing it. Put too little on and you are just pushing a roller up and down a wall for no reason. If you are painting onto the same colour (as I was for the ceiling) it seemed to work fine, mainly because there wasn’t much to do. The cleaning process mostly worked too, with the bulk of the paint being removed automatically.
Life got harder when I was painting a different colour. Getting enough paint onto the wall was really tricky, and although I could paint a lot faster without having to pause and refill the roller and tray, I think it took me one more coat than I would have needed by hand. In fact, for the final coat I went back to a hand roller.
I don’t think I’d recommend one if you are planning changing the colour of your room. If you have a lot of one colour you want to refresh it might be a good idea, but I must admit I think I got on better with the old familiar roller and tray.
Gadgets Friday, September 18, 2009 at 08:19PM Sunday: Go out and look at chairs and sofas. Find exactly what we want at a good price. Buy it.
Monday: Decide that since we are changing the furniture we should really change the decor.
Tuesday: Someone wants our old sofas.
Wednesday: Old sofas now collected, downstairs looks strangely empty (as well it might).
Thursday: Decide since downstairs is clear we can paint the walls and ceiling.
Friday: Buy new fangled painting machine and 15 litres of paint.
I’m really looking forward to the weekend…
Life Thursday, September 17, 2009 at 07:59PM There are a number of great mysteries out there which may never be solved. The Riddle of the Sphinx, The Mystery of Life, The Appeal of Chris Evans. There are also others which are a bit closer to home, one of which is Why SatNav software is so universally appalling?
I’ve used quite a few different solutions and, with one exception, they have been the programs that have come closest to making me hurl the device across the room. One program had the habit of crashing every time you added a favourite location. Another was so hard to use that I never actually figured out what it was I had done to enter a destination address. A third failed to make reliable Bluetooth contact with the GPS device (made by the same company as the software), meaning that you had to indulge in a bout of “Serial Port Roulette” each time you turned it on. That was also the software that would forget all its useful settings and addresses if the battery in the device ever dared to go flat.
Once they got going these programs usually managed to do the navigation part quite well, but it has always annoyed me that they were so badly written, with such poorly thought out user interfaces. I was reminded of this today when I got my wife a satnav program for her iPhone. I thought it would be a useful thing to have, and allow her to navigate even when out of range of cell towers. I even dared to hope that by now the developers would have fixed all the things I hate about such programs.
Not so. The program had an arcane and tricky installation process and followed that up with a user experience that goes completely against the lovely iPhone interface (even managing to implement a stupid alphabetic keyboard with an annoying click you can’t turn off). It ran slowly and lumpily for no good reason and then crashed without warning. As a final parting shot it managed to put our house in the wrong town. I wonder if I can get my money back.
Please someone, anyone, one of the proper software companies, bring out a satnav program that just works properly and is easy to use. It is not impossible, I do have one satnav system that is wonderful in just about every respect. Unfortunately it comes attached to a rather large dongle in the form of my car, but it does serve as a reminder that it can be done…
Life Wednesday, September 16, 2009 at 09:52PM We took a day off today to celebrate a birthday in Whitby, in the best possible fashion with a meal at the Magpie cafe. The cafe even got a mention in one of the push food reviews recently, and it seemed they liked the food there as much as we do. Which is nice.
The weather was a bit grey, and tide was definitely in. The boat trips around the bay were specially discounted, and seeing just how much the boats were going up and down, it is not actually an experience I’d pay for.
Hardy Souls only
