Thursday, June 07, 2007

Long time, no blog.


Hi sports fans, I’ve been soooooo busy lately that I haven’t even had time to read other people’s blogs, let alone compose my own. I have been busy in the bathroom, renovating and various other things as well.



Amongst them I have started swimming lessons and recently finished a term at Yoga. Yes my children, I have achieved a higher consciousness… Ummm.... Well not really...
Some things that have been happening have not been so positive, or at least seem to be tainted with a bittersweet taste. In fact I think even Budah himself would have his patients severely tested. Now I won’t bore you with details, but everyone knows that some people can be very difficult to get along with, particularly the insufferable ‘neighbourly’ type. Now, I am not one to hold grudges or speak ill of any persons, so I would definitely not call him a mongrel of a neighbour or wish him any misfortune or anything like that. – (I do wish however, that his dog would shut the hell up). -Perhaps a complaint to the council may be in order here. Or perhaps I should have asked him when I saw him at 'mediation' on Tuesday. -Anyway, enough of that.



Computers and Printers are temperamental things at times, and parts can fail in sometimes quite spectacular ways. Sometimes they literally blow up with a sound and light show or melt in a slow and smoky mess. But mostly they just stop working without provocation or any indication at all (to the layperson) that anything is in fact wrong. There is a popular theory in Murphyism (You know Murphy’s Law) that predicts the failure of a thing even if that thing has only a small chance of failing. Printers however, are very complex in their design and are not Murphy-proofed. They are however subject to a fairly predictable failure rate by design.
This is not to say that they have built in or planned obsolescence- rather that there are certain parts that are expected to fail… and are intended to be replaced in planned, routine maintenance of the product during specific times that are relevant to the work load of that particular machine. Some machines actually refuse to work at all once that time arrives, perhaps due to the recognition of possible damage to other more expensive (and difficult to replace) parts. Failure happens for a variety of reasons. The most common are human intervention resulting in damage to components, defective workmanship and or manufacture and overuse or the usage of machines for purposes other than that for which they are intended.



Permanent Fatal errors are possibly worse than regular fatal errors, but with little hope of a comeback from either condition, there is little difference between the two in a real world sense.
In the case illustrated above, the part had died a horrible death, resulting in the fatal errors that were not recoverable. From the image, you can tell that the belt has sustained a somewhat permanent injury, resulting in incorrect rotation of the image transfer belt (the black bit). Murphy would understand that this has occurred for one of two reasons. a) Mechanical failure due to defect and or wear. b) incorrect installation. c) the introduction of foreign matter resulting in internal damage. -This particular case seems to be a combination of both incorrect installation and the human doofus factor.


Speaking of human Doofus… I had to put on my special John Citizen/Good Samaritan shirt the other night to come to the rescue of an elderly citizen. There was a story in Monday’s express detailing the particulars of the incident which I won’t go into now, suffice to say that some idiots never learn and dumb criminals are everywhere.

Here is what we can achieve with a little elbow grease.

Thanks to lots of help from good old Uncle John, the bathroom came up really nice...
Oh well, I smell Cryptonite (or is it a meth lab? Whats up with crystal meth anyway?) Bizarre how people put that stuff into their system. Oh and Lois is waiting for me too... Gotta go for now. Cya next time.