½ Owen Cliffe

Moir Lockhead, occasional labour party donor friend and employer of people who choose to make spontaneous donations to the labour party and CEO of the public transport company that bought you the £125 saver return to London and the £1.50 a mile bus ticket in Bath got a knighthood for.. services to public transport... sigh.

We went to maplin this afternoon, mostly to spend the maplin vouchers that my former co-works gave me when I left (thanks).


Among a miscelleny of toys, I bought a readers digest guide to home electrical installation (on the same shelf as the dummies guide but thinner and with bigger pictures) and some light switches to replace the broken one in our hall and the stupid dimmer in our bedroom.

Having judiciously read and re-read the section on the correct wiring of one-way and two-way light sockets (and the paragraph about how it's mostly illegal to re-wire your house nowadays) I turned off the electricity at the mains, and unscrewed the broken switch frontpiece in our hallway.

The hallway switch has one two-way switch for the upstairs landing (because you often want to turn the lights off upstairs before you spend a night sleeping on the sofa..^*) and a one-way switch for the downstairs light, according to the wiring guide I, I should find a single two-core and earth (for the downstairs light) and a single three-core and earth for the upstairs light (the upstairs and downstairs lights are on seperate circuits). Instead I find two two-core and earths with the live wired together from the first two core to the common of the second swtich with a bit of old-looking wire and both earths hanging around inside the switch box with no sheilding,^*, neither of the two-way wires have red tape (which, according to my book should indicate the spare live for the two-way). This means that if the downstairs light is on the downstairs circuit, they have bridged the two circuits inside the switch box ^* I don't know for sure if this is a bad thing but my limited spidey-sense about electronics seems to suggest that it might be, at the very least because the fuse blowing on one side will still leave at least one part of the circuit live.

I suppose that I should be greatful that they didn' try to use the earth wire as the spare (which is connected to the earth pad in the box upstairs, but not actually to the earth...).

After a bit of fiddling I set everything up exactly as it was, and after some finger crossing and praying it seems to work again.

Will try to find out which circuit the hall light is on and wire it properly if it is seperate, either way I suspect its fair to say that "having the electrics looked at properly" will probably have to go onto the big list of things to do for the house....

^* I mean, why would they do that!?!?!

We have a new shower curtain, now the whole house smells of inflatable beach toys. The new shower curtain has a map of the world on it which doesn't include Belize.

I went to a logic seminar this afternoon, It included Linear Logic in the title; I'm interested in Linear Logic but I didn't understand much of the talk/discussion, It seemed to revolve around an argument about game semantics for proof and Category Theory which I also don't understand.

Good things about being on conference

• Free food
• Interesting conversation

Bad things about being on conference

• Complete exhaustion
• No wife
• Too much free food
• Bad coffee

The conference hotel appears to be in the process of being re-built; complete with booming noises and the building shaking when they drive piles in next door. This morning the electrickeriy cut out for about 20 minutes leaving somebody trying to explain the curve of their graph to people by hand waving. The wireless here keeps breaking, you can tell it has down again when everybody starts fidgeting having realised that they might have to at least pretend to pay attention to the speakers.

Was something of a relief to discover that I was not  the last person in the group who went to my first conference in 2002 in Lyon to graduate.

Thanks to everybody who helped us move on Saturday/Sunday much appreciated! We will endeavor to re-buy your friendship with dinner/booze at some point.

Some things we have learned from our new house so far:

• How to re-felt a shed roof
• That everything is much warmer when you live above ground.
• How to re-plumb a leaking kitchen sink mixer tap.
• How not to solder pipe joints when re-plumbing a kitchen sink mixer tap.
• How to clean up a lot of water from your kitchen floor.
  
• That trimming hedges is a lot more fun when they belong to you and you have an electric hedge trimmer.
  
• That hedge clippings take up a lot of space.
  
• Where to buy garden bags.
  
• That Twerton does not get freeview!