Jury rigged, jerry built, cowboy punk

My Girl^TM has bought me a shiny brand new 19" flat screen monitor for my PC. I now have an oddly-named LG Flatron L194WS. It is both flat and wide screen and is fantastic - though my wallpaper sits forlornly in the middle of the new screen. At a width of 1024 it no longer cuts the mustard, but where to find another? Tis no matter, though. The screen is fantastic.

My old heavy weight 15" monitor hogged so much space that my desk was placed a good 6" from the wall to allow me to get the monitor and keyboard on it and most of my desktop space was lost. I have it all back and the room seems so much bigger now, too. Despite moving the desk to the right a few inches because of the plug sockets, the ability to push it almost directly against the wall has given us quite a lot more usable floor space up here in the Tower. Pity then, that in two or three months time we shall probably have to move. Still, them's the breaks.

There is a rule that says any work you do to improve a computer takes three to four times longer than you estimate. In this case, while the plug and pray facility worked perfectly first time, the effort we went to shifting printers, spare furniture and boxes to make the room to shift the desk four or five inches to the right had to be seen to be believed and involved much grunting, grumbling and general annoyance. Still, it was worth it.

Wide, flat screen! My office desktop is going to feel very cramped when I go back to work on Tuesday.

The TV aerial has been fixed and we celebrated by brazenly watching the entertainingly shallow Primeval last night, before reverting to DVDs for our entertainment.

Having dragged myself out of bed before 8.30 on a Saturday, which is almost a mythical time, because we had been informed that the engineer would arrive any time between 8.30 and 13.00, he of course arriver at about 12.35. It is a rule that had I stayed in bed he would have arrived at 8.30 prompt and gone away again before I could have dressed and dashed down four flights of stairs.

Like everything else that I have fixed myself or had fixed in the Athenaeum Club the question seems to be less 'why did it go wrong?' as 'how in God's name did it ever work?' The first example being when I mended the inherited broadband connection that up and died one day. I opened up the connection box expecting to see a loose connection and found three bare wires sticking into a blob of blu-tak. I don't know who did that in the first place, but there is a strong probability that it was some one on my friends list, or known to us. I have never and shall not enquire further. It's fixed properly and that is that.

The engineer belied his appearance and scrambled fearlessly and with a certain fat cat grace through the bedroom window and up onto the roof about forty-five feet above the High Road and cheerfully scrambled around making pleasantly artisan noises for a few minutes before coming back to report the scale of the problem.

Whoever jury-rigged the broadband, however, was a rank amateur compared to the cowboy who set up the TV aerial. This special piece of work strays into the grey area between 'jury rigged' and 'jerry built' (look them up, folks; we did). It seems that the aerial had been bracketed to the most crumbly bits of ancient chimney and had, over a period of time, worn away the mortar before falling back to leave the aerial itself at a drunken angle whereby twice a day for thirty seconds it was perfectly aligned with Arcturus and we were able to pick up static in colour. In addition, the coaxial cable that fed into the bedroom, and which, by dint of a cable splitter in the house and about forty feet of coaxial extension had been supplying a signal to both the bedroom and the living room was not attached to anything. Outside the bedroom window there was about a yard of cable, which ended in bare corroded wires that showed every evidence of having been in that state for many years. There was further evidence that the main cable from the aerial had been spliced with a knife and a split made and held using sticky tape.

Back in the living room, quite unrelated to all that, it seems that the cable extension from the window to the TV had corroded together and then fallen apart. Any one of those should have stopped any form of signal ever reaching the TV years ago. It all stopped working a fortnight ago.

I wonder what other inventively bizarre secrets the Athenaeum Club holds and which will remain undiscovered when we eventually move out?

Jury rigged, jerry built, cowboy punk

My Girl^TM has bought me a shiny brand new 19" flat screen monitor for my PC. I now have an oddly-named LG Flatron L194WS. It is both flat and wide screen and is fantastic - though my wallpaper sits forlornly in the middle of the new screen. At a width of 1024 it no longer cuts the mustard, but where to find another? Tis no matter, though. The screen is fantastic.

My old heavy weight 15" monitor hogged so much space that my desk was placed a good 6" from the wall to allow me to get the monitor and keyboard on it and most of my desktop space was lost. I have it all back and the room seems so much bigger now, too. Despite moving the desk to the right a few inches because of the plug sockets, the ability to push it almost directly against the wall has given us quite a lot more usable floor space up here in the Tower. Pity then, that in two or three months time we shall probably have to move. Still, them's the breaks.

There is a rule that says any work you do to improve a computer takes three to four times longer than you estimate. In this case, while the plug and pray facility worked perfectly first time, the effort we went to shifting printers, spare furniture and boxes to make the room to shift the desk four or five inches to the right had to be seen to be believed and involved much grunting, grumbling and general annoyance. Still, it was worth it.

Wide, flat screen! My office desktop is going to feel very cramped when I go back to work on Tuesday.

The TV aerial has been fixed and we celebrated by brazenly watching the entertainingly shallow Primeval last night, before reverting to DVDs for our entertainment.

Having dragged myself out of bed before 8.30 on a Saturday, which is almost a mythical time, because we had been informed that the engineer would arrive any time between 8.30 and 13.00, he of course arriver at about 12.35. It is a rule that had I stayed in bed he would have arrived at 8.30 prompt and gone away again before I could have dressed and dashed down four flights of stairs.

Like everything else that I have fixed myself or had fixed in the Athenaeum Club the question seems to be less 'why did it go wrong?' as 'how in God's name did it ever work?' The first example being when I mended the inherited broadband connection that up and died one day. I opened up the connection box expecting to see a loose connection and found three bare wires sticking into a blob of blu-tak. I don't know who did that in the first place, but there is a strong probability that it was some one on my friends list, or known to us. I have never and shall not enquire further. It's fixed properly and that is that.

The engineer belied his appearance and scrambled fearlessly and with a certain fat cat grace through the bedroom window and up onto the roof about forty-five feet above the High Road and cheerfully scrambled around making pleasantly artisan noises for a few minutes before coming back to report the scale of the problem.

Whoever jury-rigged the broadband, however, was a rank amateur compared to the cowboy who set up the TV aerial. This special piece of work strays into the grey area between 'jury rigged' and 'jerry built' (look them up, folks; we did). It seems that the aerial had been bracketed to the most crumbly bits of ancient chimney and had, over a period of time, worn away the mortar before falling back to leave the aerial itself at a drunken angle whereby twice a day for thirty seconds it was perfectly aligned with Arcturus and we were able to pick up static in colour. In addition, the coaxial cable that fed into the bedroom, and which, by dint of a cable splitter in the house and about forty feet of coaxial extension had been supplying a signal to both the bedroom and the living room was not attached to anything. Outside the bedroom window there was about a yard of cable, which ended in bare corroded wires that showed every evidence of having been in that state for many years. There was further evidence that the main cable from the aerial had been spliced with a knife and a split made and held using sticky tape.

Back in the living room, quite unrelated to all that, it seems that the cable extension from the window to the TV had corroded together and then fallen apart. Any one of those should have stopped any form of signal ever reaching the TV years ago. It all stopped working a fortnight ago.

I wonder what other inventively bizarre secrets the Athenaeum Club holds and which will remain undiscovered when we eventually move out?