Ebay

I like Ebay.  It's a chance for little people to have a go, amongst other things.  You can buy some stuff from somewhere (or steal it, I suppose) and put it up for sale, and see if anyone goes for it.  I buy quite a lot of things on Ebay, especially nowadays.  But sometimes it is a bit baffling.

Now that I've repositioned the trampoline onto specially-positioned concrete blocks (yes, I did that without telling you, sorry), I need to attach the thing to the concrete blocks to avoid any more unintended wanderings in high winds.  It's already a bit bent from its unintended wanderings during the last set of gales, but not too badly.  Also, I have a plan to attach some fencing which was removed during the building of the terrace (and has been littering the lawn ever since) round the base of the trampoline. Anyway, I needed some pipe clips, so off I went to Ebay.  Fortunately the trampoline legs are about 38mm diameter, which is near enough to 40mm, which is a standard waste pipe size, so there are lots to choose from.

Here's a typical example: 2 x New Pushfit Waste Pipe Clip plumbing pipe fiitings(sic), size:40mm Black for £2.39.  Ebay helpfully points out that that works out at £2.39 per unit.  Er, no it doesn't, but never mind.  Even £1.20 each seems like rather a lot to me for a small bit of plastic.  No matter, there are always more to find on Ebay.

And so to these: Ah, that's a bit better. 40mm Push-Fit Pipe Clip pack of 10 - Black, for £4.80.  Ebay somehow isn't up to attempting a calculation on that one, but I can divide by ten (in my head!) and get 48p each.

But I need more than ten, so I'm still looking.  Ahah! These look like my sort of deal. FloPlast Push Fit Pipe Clips white 40mm Qty 50 for £5.  Ebay is, once again, flummoxed, but even including £3.10 for postage (from Cowbridge, United Kingdom) that still only works out at 16.2p each.  I'd prefer black or grey really, but not enough to pay three (or even seven) times as much for them.

I should have stopped there, but you know what it's like when you're on a roll. And so I discovered these: Merriway BH06824 Push/Compression Fit Waste Pipe Clips 40mm Black - and the price? £15.99 sir.  Is that a box of 100, or something?  There are no clues in the description, but I scrolled all the way down to a section called "Specifics" to discover...

Included Components: 4 x PIPE CLIP BLACK 40mm

Batteries Required?: No

Shipping Weight: 18.1 g

So, just the four clips then, at a modest £4 each?  For plastic pipe clips?  That's very nearly 25 times the price of the cheapest FloPlast ones.  At least they don't need any batteries.  Incidentally, they also work out at 88p/gram, which is more than twice the going rate for silver bullion.

Ah, but these are no ordinary plastic pipe clips sir.  They are made by Merriway, and "Merriway is a brand of bulk hardware Limited, a family-owned company established more than 45 years ago And based in the south West of England. Bulk hardware designs, manufactures, sources, packages and sells high quality products covering areas as diverse as DIY, hardware, gardening, security, ironmongery, electrical, domestic, fastener, plumbing, fixings, draught exclusion, child safety, packaging, soft furnishings, shop fitting, flooring and automotive."  Capitalisation obviously isn't one of their specialisations, and I do have to wonder whether they actually sell many of their pipe clips at £4 each.  But maybe they do, and that's the wonder of Ebay.  Just not to me.

a pipe clip

Trampoline Dream

A long, long time ago, when people walked the earth even when they weren't exercising, and everybody thought that would always be normal, I was staying at home and jumping up and down on a trampoline.  It's jolly good fun, and surprisingly effective exercise, especially if you do a quick knees-to-chest at the top of each bounce.  This is particularly relevant as training for the fabled front flip - of which more later.  Anyway, one day I thought it would be amusing to fall forwards from standing and see how high I could rebound towards standing again.  Apparently there are people who can do this on hard ground, and (a) take the hit with their arms without breaking their wrists, and (b) do such a powerful pushup that they get back to standing again.  Wow...

So the trampoline version seemed like a reasonable idea, just as an experiment.  To be cautious, I tried it from kneeling first.  That proved to be so easy as to be a bit trivial. So then I went for standing - which looks about twice as high, and about eight times as scary, for some strange reason.  Insufficiently daunted by this perspective, I went for it. What happened was, I fell forward and the trampoline took all the impact out of landing on my hands, as expected; but it did that by making a big dent for each of my outstretched hands to to live in, with my fingers facing up a very steep hill.  Slightly more uphill than my left wrist was prepared accommodate, in fact, causing it to hurt a little bit.  At this point I stopped trampolining for the day, and waited to see whether I'd done a bad thing.

Not really.  It did ache a little bit for a while, but it seemed to be getting better on its own, so I carried on pretty much as normal (except for giving up trampolining, just to be on the safe side, and generally trying to protect it).

After about six weeks of this, I thought it was time to start training it to be strong again, so I tried giving it a bit more work to do.  No dice - that just made it hurt again.  After a month or two of on-off, on-off slightly annoying not-much-happening-ness, I sought medical advice; and got myself an appointment with a physio.  I also started trying to convince the Exeter gymnastics club that they should sell me a bit of one-to-one training on trampoline safety and front flip technique, although I think that for some reason, they prefer training young people who might actually become gymnasts, rather than doddery old twits with a bizarre bucket list item. 

Then came Covid-19, and all these sensible courses of action just vapourised.  So I felt that the only course of action open to me was to get back to the trampoline on my own.

So far so good.  No new injuries - but also precious little progress with the front flip.  I can't seem to get both height and rotation, so I end up landing on my bum most of the time.  I actually did a better one before the wrist incident. It's frustrating, but I'm still determined.

Meanwhile, my oh-so-slightly strained wrist is still somewhat buggered, after nearly six months!  Which is actually the point of this dreary history (for anyone still reading it).  When you're old, things take a bloody long time to mend.  Which means you don't get as much done as you thought you might, and it hurts more.  So the moral of the story is: don't wait until you retire, at 67 or 70 or whatever someone else says is the right age.  It might very well be too late.  Do it now instead.  Carpe diem, and all that.  Really.

Well! Since this post has all been a bit serious so far, here's some lighter entertainment.

First, for lovers of blog titles which are reminiscent of pioneering transcendental synth music bands, here's a bit of Tangerine Dream (I never liked them much in 1974 to be honest, but they were undoubtedly pioneers, and it's a good name for a band).

And then, for lovers of slapstick, here's a bit a video of me doing a bit of rotation, but not much height, on the trampoline, and generally flopping around like a limp thingy, Russian style.
https://youtu.be/0n7lDDwFiMA  

In other news, I'm about to embark on a garden watering project, very possibly using bits of old washing machine and a newly-redundant 32-bit computer.  So that's something to look forward to!

Oh, and I've started a new blog for things that are nothing to do with retirement.  It's hosted at my own site using Wordpress, and I'm told by my first visitor that it doesn't work on Safari, so I'd be interested if anyone else can confirm whether that's true for all Safari users.  I'm hoping it might just be a cacheing issue (or otherwise fix itself!).  Any other comments welcome, of course.  Check it out at http://interestingthings.aprendo.co.uk (if you dare).

I always put at least one picture in each post on this blog, so here's today's, brazenly stolen from the internet:

Doesn't the fool know we're copyrighted?

Computers

Some people buy new computers from time to time, but I'm not one of them.  It's true that I have bought new computers for the lovely Jackie from time to time (because she's worth it), but for many, many years I've managed to get by on hand-me-downs from work.  Work computers used to get "written down" and often replaced after a couple of years of service, leaving them with a book value of nothing, but a lot of usable life remaining.  And being friendly with the people who replaced them, and disposed of the old ones, has proved very fruitful, over the years.  You don't get an operating system (the licences get recycled) but that's fine with me, I prefer Linux anyway.  Much more "make-do-and-mend".

My current general-purpose laptop is an HP EliteBook 8440p.  I think they came out in 2010, although mine might possibly be a bit younger.  This particular one also features a Spanish keyboard, which wouldn't suit everyone. It's great for accents - Olé! - but it doesn't have a £ sign.  Fortunately there are plenty of those free on the internet.  They keyboard is basically QWERTY, but all the symbols are in funny places (if at all).  That did take a bit of getting used to, it's true, but now I almost like it. QWERTY, but a bit QUIRKY too.  A couple of years ago I upgraded it with an SSD drive for about £40, so it's faster than it was when it was new.

A little while ago it did start to suffer occasional collapses, where it would just switch off unexpectedly, which is obviously very annoying behaviour.  Then one day it simply wouldn't boot at all, and I thought, oh well, its time has finally come.  I wasn't looking forward to setting up a new machine from scratch though.  All that tedious software installation... But soft! - I found that I could buy a seemingly identical 8440p, reconditioned, for just £60 on Ebay!  So, I reasoned, I could just swap my SSD into that, and it would just boot up and everything would be perfect - with a UK keyboard thrown in for free!

So I bought it, and installed the SSD, and - guess what? It didn't work.  Hmmm.  Just for fun, I put the new laptop's hard disk drive into my old laptop and pressed the button.  To my complete amazement, Windows 7 appeared!  Then I put the SSD back in, and it just booted up normally. Hmmm... again.  I swapped them lots of times but the results were just the same, so I just left everything how it had been originally (even the Spanish keyboard) and had a think.  Eventually I realised that I'd never, ever, cleaned out the fan ducting on this particular laptop, and the poor thing's occasional lapses had probably just been caused by heatstroke.  So I took the back off and removed the great wodge of accumulated felt which was blocking up the vent, and lo! Cool, quiet, reliable loveliness ensued.  Olé! indeed.  I don't really understand the cause of the boot failures, but it's been perfect ever since I cleaned out its cooling system.

But the real problem is that it's a 32-bit computer.  It still does everything I need to do, perfectly well, but since the computing industry feels impelled by the mythical Moore's law, all new computers switched to 64-bit busses a few years ago.  Not that it's made any noticeable difference to most people, except that you need twice as much RAM.  But now software people have joined in too.  I use SpiderOak One for end-to-end encrypted, "no knowledge" cloud backup, and it stopped working today.  It can't connect to the SpiderOak server, because they changed some certificate or something, and the fix is to upgrade the client software to version 7.5.  But the most recent version available for 32-bit Linux is 7.2!

So now I have to get a new computer, just to be able to back the stupid thing up.  Bah!  And now that I'm retired, (for three years next month, amazingly) I will actually have to buy it myself.  Shocking.

Obviously when I say new computer, I mean old computer.  I don't need a new computer (even though the lovely Jackie has tried to encourage me to get what I want.  She seems to think that by merely spending more money on hardware, my computing life could become more peaceful.  I'm pretty sure that's not true, but it's nice of her to be so generous).

And so, in a fit of almost impulse buying, I've ordered my next machine.  It's a Dell Latitude E7450, with an Intel Core i5 5300U 64-bit processor and 8GB of RAM.  They came out in 2015, so quite up-to-date really.  It joins the server, Jackie's laptop and my music computer in the 64-bit fleet - the kitchen laptop and the one in the garage are still 32-bit machines, but that's OK because they don't need to be backed up.  But I have had to front up actual money for it - in this case, a  whopping £210 (plus £14.75p shipping).  Ouch!

Still, if I get another three years out of it, that works out at about 20p per day.  All things considered, I think it's worth it.

A 32-bit computer

A 64-bit computer

A dinosaur guarding my memory sticks, while the wooden parrot who oversees the pens looks the other way, framed between computers