Well, I’ve been very quiet on here for a few days… Just had a lotta stuff going on. Amanda’s mum and sister were away in Edinburgh for a few days, so I had been leaving her down to work in Larne, and then heading back to Belfast for uni, and then going back down to pick her up in the afternoons, basically because the trains don’t all go to Larne Harbour, and it’s too far/too dangerous to walk from the train station in the town… And there aren’t many buses between Larne and Carrick/Ballycarry… And there are no buses from the train station to the depot she works in… So basically I’ve been kinda knackered, and then not working or anything in the evenings I’ve just been lying around, sleeping mainly… Working tonight though so that should make a difference.
We had our BB display on Friday past. It wasn’t as good as previous years, not too sure why. There is a slight lack of older boys, which I think is affecting the quality of potential items for the display… Also the Company Section don’t do much drill, which I think is a pretty important part of the BB. Even the Junior Section didn’t dedicate a complete item to figure marching, they had to have a wee dance at the end. Nothing wrong with that, but the quality of the marching was awful. The Anchor Boys and ‘Puppies’ were quite good, although I am biased, but their items had a certain finesse, although they were a bit long winded, mainly due to the lack of space for the games, meaning only half the boys could actually participate at a time… And obviously they all had to have a go!
This morning has been quite boring, just the usual 9am lecture on Nuclear & Atomic Physics, which is a bit dry, but nonetheless essential… It wasn’t without it’s usual drama… Some eejit had broken the VGA lead into the projector, and worst of all, didn’t bother reporting it, meaning the lecture didn’t start until 9.15am, but hey, what can you do…
I was reading an interesting article in April’s edition of ‘RadCom’, published by the RSGB. It was in the EMC (ElectroMagnetic Compatibility) section, and was talking about a radio amateur in England who had been having severe trouble with man made interference. He built himself a small detector, on the end of a fishing rod, to try and find the telephone line that the interference was coming from, and tracked down the offending house. When checking with the owner of the house he found that the guy had a number of switch mode power supplies, the ‘bricks’ that are plugged into the wall, to power USB drives… It was found that these were causing the interference, and the telephone lines were picking up the interference, ‘transmitting’ it all over the place… Unplugging the power supplies when they weren’t needed fixed the interference problem… An added side effect was that the guys DSL connection greatly increased in speed… So if you’re experiencing slow DSL connection problems, perhaps try unplugging some of the power supplies you have around the house, things like phone chargers, ipod chargers, laptop power supplies and digital photo frames, to name but a few, and you might find you get a great increase in speed… Of course you might need some of these things, but switching them off when not in use could save you a pile of energy, and also increase your broadband speed…
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