My Motley Meanderings

I pre-ordered the American hardback edition of a book specifically for the cover art. This is a cover that has been much discussed and often reviled in parts of my friendslist. The author has publicly disclaimed responsibility for the design. I think it is brilliant.

The story (which I'm greatly looking forward to reading) is a homage to a novel by one of science fiction's grand masters that has itself been the subject of a great deal of criticism and controversy over the years. Its cover art is a homage to the cover Michael Whelan designed for possibly the best-known edition of the original book.

Can you guess what it is yet? Here is a big clue. (I dare you to follow that link even if you've already guessed the answer!) ( Answer behind the cut... )

( Here, have a sunset... )

This was the sunset as seen from the back window of our house here in Burnley a couple of weeks ago. The picture hasn't been photoshopped other than to crop and scale it down for the web. It looked even more spectacular in real life. Pendle Hill is just to the right of the picture.

PS. It's interesting that my spellchecker accepts 'photoshopped' but not 'Pendle.'

Remember this?

For a while it looked like ( this... )

This is Pippin, our young Yorkshire Terrier dog, who is currently being whiny and attention-seeking because I'm the only one awake at this time on a Sunday morning and I'm not playing with him enough (ie. constantly). I think it's a good name but I didn't choose it; he came with it. Apparently his mother was called Rosie.

This past weekend I visited Edinburgh. ( Read more... )

( I've been working on Lintilla today... )

Here is a sneak preview of my entry for The Great Crystal Cyberdrome Exhibition that will be held at Orbital 2008 next week. ( Read more... )

A bird fell down the chimney at the office today. The fireplace is bricked up but there's an air vent behind my desk where it used to be. I pulled out the table that was in front of the vent and knocked a hole in the steel grill (it was permanently bricked in place). ( Read more... )

Fenchurch is back on the road again, having replaced the gearbox with a rebuilt one. It was getting late when I finished so I just had a quick run up and down the road outside. It felt OK in all gears, first and reverse are now virtually silent, and the new clutch seems to have a smoother action than the old one.

The job took me rather longer than morris1000's impressive 5 hours. I've no idea how he managed to get the box back in without removing either the engine or the gearbox crossmember. Getting the top of the bell housing past the steering rack was very awkward even with the rear of the engine lowered as far as it would go and with a pit below the car so I could can stand up rather than lying flat on my back.

The rebuilt gearbox had one slight fault - the spring-loaded detent that stops you accidentally changing into reverse instead of fourth was jammed. Upon closer inspection it appeared that some water had got into the the back of the remote control unit (there was no gearstick fitted, so it had an open hole on the top) and it had rusted slightly inside. The simplest solution was to just swap the remote control unit from my old box (which was still in excellent condition) onto the new one.

I did have to cut a corner to get the car back on the road this weekend. The clutch pedal doesn't return fully while the brake is pressed (the brake pedal hinges on the clutch shaft). I was hoping I would be able to get away with just replacing the brake pedal bushes, but upon taking the assembly apart (rather an awkward task in itself as the spacer tube had rusted onto the shaft) I discovered the clutch shaft to be quite badly worn and pitted from rusting. Several other parts of the clutch linkage are badly worn too. If I'd waited until I could get hold of the parts to rebuild it all properly it would have meant several more days off the road, so I decided to just clean and grease the old parts and reassemble them.

( A photo of the new box installed in the car )

( Pictures behind the cut )

Satellite 1 was a small one-day convention at the Campanile hotel in Glasgow, a stone's throw from the SECC, site of the 2005 Worldcon and the 2006 Eastercon. Its theme was the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik 1, the first man-made satellite. I vacillated for some time over whether to go or not - the distance (250 miles) made it impractical to travel there and back in one day. I eventually decided to drive up very early on the day of the con and stay one night, then drive back the next day after doing a bit of sightseeing.
( Read more... )

I finally bit the bullet and bought myself a nice DSLR camera and lens. Not that there's anything wrong with my tiny Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX8 compact digicam, I just wanted something more capable and versatile.

The body is a used Fuji Finepix S2 Pro - five year old technology, but it received good reviews when it was new. The lens is a virtually unused Nikon AF-S DX 18-55mm f3.5-5.6, which is roughly equivalent to the focal length range you would get with a 27-82mm lens on a 35mm SLR. The only flaw I've found so far with it is that the previous owner has somehow managed to scratch the focussing screen (the piece of glass with a grid etched onto it that you see through the viewfinder). I particularly like its virtually instantaneous switch-on and shutter response - it's almost as good as my old film SLR, unlike any compact digicam I've ever used.

If you're going camping in a 44 year old vehicle, what better to take with you than...

A classic Optimus 8R Hunter petrol camping stove. ( Read more... )

Fenchurch is back on the road!


In the past few days, we've:

• Fitted the sliding rear windows. This turned out to be rather a pig of a job that took two of us six hours to do.
• Fitted the rear doors.
• Fitted replacement closing panels (the bit that goes between the foot rail and the floor pan). I was a bit annoyed at how the manufacturer has managed to get such a simple panel so wrong that there's a small gap at the front of the rear wheel arch that will allow water to get to the back of the foot rails. If I hadn't been so pressed for time I'd have welded an extra bit on the end.
• Reattached all the various bits and pieces to the front doors. The second one went a bit easier than the first because I'd figured out the best order to assemble it in: regulator, glass, latch, escutcheon, door top, touch seals, inner door handle. The spacer thingy can go on either before or after the door top - it's just as awkward either way round. Bizarrely the top passenger-side door hinge appears to have become about 2mm too thick since I dismantled the car, and that door doesn't shut too nicely as a result. Also, I guessed wrongly where to drill the holes for the passenger door mirror (I found a photo online showing where somebody else had fitted their driver's door mirror and copied it - Fenchurch's driver's mirror is in the right place but the passenger one is much too far forward).
• Sprayed Dinitrol rustproofing wax in all the cavities and the underside. I've only applied a coat of the thin stuff so far - I've also got some thicker stuff to go on the underside that's supposed to be less likely to wash off under sustained road spray. I used about 3 litres, which is a couple of litres less than I was expecting to use, and I wasn't stingy with the application either.
• Put the wheels back on.
• Drove home.

I didn't flog her at all, but I was again pleasantly surprised by how much power her little 1098cc engine has. On the motorway she cruised comfortably at 65MPH with barely any throttle. The indicator relay box acted up a bit again at first but it seemed to fix itself after indicating on a couple of roundabouts. Probably just disused contacts cleaning themselves up. The engine was making a quiet tapping sound for a while that I thought might be a badly adjusted tappet, but it stopped doing it while going around another roundabout.

After working late every night for weeks on this I just want to rest for a week now, but I have about a day to prepare for the programme items I'm doing at Year of the Teledu, then less than three weeks to prepare for the Land's End to Orkney rally. After that, if I'm still in one piece, I'll probably collapse and sleep for about a month.

For those of you who only read the public face of this journal: there is a reason why I haven't posted an update on Fenchurch's restoration for several weeks, but I don't want to write about it just yet. For those who know what I'm talking about: the situation is still not resolved but it's delayed the restoration for so long already that I've decided to carry on with the work.

As such, I sprayed the topcoats on the body shell yesterday:

It doesn't look quite so good up close - lots of orange peel ripples to polish out, a couple of small runs, and the edges where the wood meets the metal are a bit rough. It does feel good to have made some visible progress again.

Now that I've finally got the masking paper off, I decided to try starting the engine again. The needle valve in the carb had stuck closed due to lack of use thus preventing any fuel from getting to the engine, but it was an easy fault to find and she fired up straight away when that was sorted.

Here are the photos I took at ConFounding Tales! Unfortunately for reasons that seemed to make more sense at the time than they do now, I took nearly all of them using my crappy phonecam instead of my good camera.

I made a lolgeek: ( Read more... )

At Contemplation (Eastercon 2007), I made my acting debut as Dayna in Moloch, an episode of Blake's 7 Wobblevision. We thought we might have to call it off when only three cast members turned up, but steverogerson recruited some more fans from the bar, deleted a few minor roles from the script, and made it all work somehow. I had a lot of fun doing it and I'm already looking forward to the next one.


In this scene my character is being rescued by Doran, played by quasi_hayley's mum.

Here's the original script (in case you would like to see how badly we butchered it).

The rip-off Swisscom Eurospot WiFi was broken throughout the hotel on Monday, so I didn't get a full 24 hours out of the "1 in 24" I bought on Sunday, and I wasn't able to post this until I got home on Tuesday afternoon. Monday's report has yet to be written but I think it'll be a short one because I didn't do a whole lot on the last day.

( What I did on Sunday at Contemplation )

I've spent most of my spare time this past week spray-painting high-build cellulose primer and a guide coat onto various parts of Fenchurch. I had a bit of a setback when the zinc primer on the bonnet cracked in several places after spraying the cellulose primer on top - I suspect I'd put the zinc coat on too thick, and the thinners in the cellulose primer reactivated it, then it redried and shrunk after the celly primer had already hardened over it. To fix that I stripped all the paint off the outside of the bonnet, sanded it clean, then etch-primed it (no zinc-primer coat this time). Another problem I've run into is big flakes of dirt falling off the ceiling of the garage and landing in any wet paint every time I walk across the floor of the office above. It's not too bad at the primer stage because I can sand out the dirt when I flat down the guide coat, but I'll have to be more careful when I do the topcoats. I may try to fasten a big polythene sheet to the ceiling. I've also noticed that paint has seeped under the edges of the masking tape in places onto the wood, so I'm going to have to figure out some way to clean that off without damaging the newly painted metal next to it in the process (current plan is to try carefully rubbing it off with a cloth dipped in thinners).

( A photo of me at work this afternoon... )

This is what Fenchurch looks like after I spent most of the day spraying grey primer on her. I had hoped on Friday to have finished spraying the body shell by now, but that was unrealistic. I need to put a guide coat on next to show up any faults (scratches and things that show through the primer), flat it down to eliminate the faults, touch the primer up if I rub through to the metal anywhere, then put a final coat of primer on before I can start on the top (colour) coats.

The air in the garage doesn't seem dusty, but there's always some little bits of muck stuck to the paint after I've sprayed a coat. At least one advantage of spraying at this time of year is that I haven't had any kamikaze flies yet.

I received a small cardboard box today. In theory it contains a Morris Minor fuel pump diaphragm.

It's sealed with brown paper parcel tape, and a faded label says it was packed in August 1976. That's several years before I was born. Somebody in a factory in Dudley built a little time machine to transport a small rubber disc three decades into the future. I can't bring myself to open it and find out if the part is really in there or not. It's a potential petrol pump part package and I'm going to allow it to remain that way for the time being.

( Another con, another con report... )

I now understand why people say that 90% of the work of respraying a car to a decent standard is in the preparation. This past week I've spent many hours working on Fenchurch's driver's door, sanding out the rust-spots, rust-killing, zinc-priming, filling, sanding (repeat the last two steps over and over until it's perfect), fine-surface-filling, more sanding with several grades of paper to get it really smooth, another coat of zinc-primer, and finally flatting it down. Apart from drilling the door-mirror mounting holes and doing a little bit more fine-surface-filling (annoyingly some of the pinholes in the filler only become visible when you paint over them), it's finally ready for me to spray the grey high-build primer and topcoat on it. The filler has hid the seam very well - I think you'd have to open the door and examine the back edges to tell that the bottom has been replaced - but I'm really glad it's the only panel that needs a lot of filling. Hopefully preparing the rest of the panels and the body shell itself is going to be easy in comparison to the front wings and driver's door.

( See if you can spot the seam... )

I haven't quite finished bleaching Fenchurch's wood yet, but to demonstrate the effect it's had, here is a photo I took this morning alongside one of the untreated back doors for comparison:( Read more... )

After deciding I'm going to catch the train to Redemption, I can relax a bit and stop trying to get everything done in less than two weeks. I think I'll take a short break from wood-bleaching and spend today sanding out rust spots on the various external body panels I have up in the workshop. One of the rear wings is probably going to need stripping back to bare metal because it's been replaced at some point and the paint hasn't stuck very well to it.

I got fed up of tripping over boxes of Morris Minor parts and never being able to find any clear bench space, and having a floor so dirty that I trailed footprints behind me when I went outside (only a slight exaggeration). Yesterday I resolved to do something about it. 16 hours of tidying and cleaning later, and I can see (some of) the floor and the worktops again. I also gave my big lathe and my mill a long overdue clean and oil (one of the mill slides had dried up and started to rust slightly). Then I got really carried away and vacuumed the toilet server room carpet and bleached the sink. The water that came out of the mop bucket after cleaning the floor was an interesting shade of brown-black.

( Photos of the end result... )

Last Monday I applied filler over the welded areas of Fenchurch's front outer wings and sanded it down smooth. The result looks pretty good so far, but I won't know for sure how good a job I've done until I spray the primer on, flat it down, and apply a guide coat.

I didn't manage to get anything done on Fenchurch in the evenings last week as I was working on something for Orbital instead.

This weekend I've been working on repairing the bottom of her driver's door using a couple of commercial repair panels and various home-made sections. It's very tricky to get everything to line up properly, and neither of the commercial panels quite match perfectly up to the original door. I'm going to have to weld a 4mm folded extension onto one end of the outer skin panel and do a bit of creative folding on the other end to shorten it a bit. It has a joggled overlap to help line it up, but the joggle isn't as deep as the original metal so it leaves a slight step. Hopefully filler will be enough to hide that because I don't really want to try to deepen the joggle.

In the past week, on the passenger-side outer wing I've: cut out and replaced some rotten bits, welded up the wing-mirror hole, bolted it back on to check it still fits (it does :), and cut a funny-shaped hole for the new radio antenna. On both wings I've: modified the sidelight hole to fit the later combined sidelight/indicator unit (I'm upgrading to amber flashing indicators as I think flashing sidelights and brakelights are likely to confuse other drivers), finished sanding all the rust-spots down to bare metal, applied rust-killer to all the bare metal, flatted down the old green paint, and sprayed a coat of zinc primer over the exposed parts.



The wings are getting close to the stage now where I'll be able to spray them with the cellulose primer and topcoat.

I'm hoping Fenchurch's other body parts aren't going to be as time-consuming to prepare for painting as her wings were. I know I've got to weld a new bottom plate on the driver's door (it's always the driver's side that's suffered the most from rust on this car), and there's one little hole on the driver's side B post that could do with patching, but after that I don't think I'll need to do any more weld repairs. There are very few places that need filling either; the whole car is remarkably dent-free considering her age.

The BBC are reporting that the government are trying out a new scheme for keeping civil servants' desks tidy. It involves marking out an area of their desk with black tape and telling them they have to keep their pens and things inside that space. People who have read Dave Langford's book The Leaky Establishment are unlikely to be surprised by this scheme.

I thought I'd give it a try at the office to see if it would fit in with my neat, well-organised, and highly efficient workflow:
( Read more... )
I think it may need a little fine-tuning. Perhaps if I put the gaffer tape around the entire building instead?