Random Writings

I am in Ottawa! I’m spending four weeks here at the Communications Research Centre, picking the brains of the radio communications experts to help me with my PhD. I arrived yesterday afternoon – after a very early start, a National Express coach to Heathrow and a direct Air Canada flight – all of which went swimmingly well despite snow in the UK and talk of travel chaos.

In my mind, I somehow think of Canadians as being hardworking and friendly with a good sense of humour. So far, reality is confirming the stereotype. Small things to start with: the immigration queue at the airport is very democratic, everyone stands in one line, fills in the same form and speaks to the immigration officer, whether citizen or visitor. There’s none of the Daily Mail-inspired “Fortress UK” stuff you see at British airports.

I’m staying with a family – Vicky works at CRC and her husband Kouassi is a civil servant. They have two children, a daughter of about 6 and a son of 2. Their house has a “basement apartment” – like a granny annexe – which I’m staying in while I’m here. It is generous by British standards, and positively palatial compared with living on the boat. I have a bedroom, a living room with a dining table for six and a TV the size of Luxembourg, and a kitchen with the customary ginormous American-style fridge-freezer. Oh, and a bathroom with a corner bath I could virtually swim in. Beats staying in a hotel, and I can cook for myself. Vicky can give me a lift to and from the office, which is great. They’re a French-speaking household, so I can see that my French will gain some polish. At the moment it’s slightly worrying to find that my language isn’t even as good as a two-year-old’s…

Today I went into CRC with Vicky. She works early hours – 0730 until 1530 – so that she can take little Mathys to his daycare centre and get back before it closes. But it seems that most Ottawans get to work early – being in work by 8 is pretty common. Kouassi explains that in winter people like to finish work before it’s dark!

CRC shares a site with several other government agencies, including the Canadian Space Agency and part of the Department of National Defense. As a result, security is a little more formal than most places that I’ve worked. When I arrived, I went to the guardhouse to collect my pass, and had the security briefing and signed various forms bearing threats of imprisonment should I leak any information that’s of value to the Canadian government. You’ll excuse me, therefore, if I skate around the exact details of what some of my CRC colleagues work on!

I was shown around by Chris, an enthusiastic engineer. The site has the slightly tatty feel of many research centres, a ramshackle group of buildings linked by underground corridors so that you don’t have to brave the biting wind and snow to go to the library or canteen. As is the Canadian way, lots of coffee was consumed, and I was introduced to the breakfast ritual – on Friday, the terrestrial wireless guys all have fried breakfast in the canteen, which is excellent and very cheap.

By just after breakfast, I had an office, a desk, a computer, access to the internet and a temporary security pass, with the promise of a proper one next week. I also managed to log in to my experiments in Antarctica, so I’m all nicely set up to get down to work. All the CRC guys have been very friendly and lots of people have expressed an interest in my work, which has been great. We’ll see what Monday brings.

Back in November I switched to Macintosh, after many years of PC-ownership, and even more years of being a die-hard Acorn Computers fan in my youth. Now, I am very fond of my uber-shiny Mac, but there has been one small gripe up until now. The Mac laptops all have this very nice MagSafe power adaptor which attaches magnetically – the idea being that if someone trips over your power cable, the adaptor just unplugs, rather than dragging the whole machine crashing to the floor.

Apple, in their infinite wisdom, have not marketed an in-car power adaptor to work with these laptops. Nor have they licenced anyone else to make one. There is an “airline” power adaptor, but it’s a) expensive and b) doesn’t actually charge the laptop’s battery – it just powers the machine when it’s running.

Fortunately, there is a workaround. This site explains how it’s a simple matter to cut the MagSafe power cable off an Apple mains adaptor and solder it to a normal DC power socket. It also explains that you can safely and easily power a Mac from any 16V DC supply. I already had a 12v adaptor for my old Windows laptop (bought from Maplin, cost £20, IIRC), so it seemed like an easy job. However, I was mildly reluctant to just cut the cable on my existing power supply – so I went to eBay. Fortunately, I found a firm – Relchron – who had a job lot of dead Magsafe power supplies. A quick phone call later and the guy there agreed to cut the magsafe connector and cable off a PSU and send it to me in the post for the princely sum of £2.50. This afternoon I’ve soldered it to a normal DC socket (again from Maplin) and hooked it up to the PSU. Hey presto, twelve volt Mac!

The upshot of all this is that I won’t need to run the inverter so often, and should reduce my power consumption quite considerably. Here’s hoping. And please, Apple, if you’re out there – sell this as an official product, rather than leaving it for us to hack up!

Today was Open Boat Day, a kind of vaguely annual event organised by the Camboaters’ Association. About a dozen boats moored up together at Jesus Green and opened our homes to the curious general public. Including mine. I reckon that over a hundred people tramped through Innocenti and asked questions… and now I’m surprisingly tired! Read the rest of this entry »

One of Innocenti’s drawbacks (which, to be fair, is part of the reason she was cheap for her size) is that her fit-out has been done by a succession of enthusiastic amateur owners, of which I am merely the third or fourth. As she was originally built in 1991 and fitted out fairly cheaply, her insulation leaves a lot to be desired – which results in being too hot in summer and too cold and damp in winter. Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday morning, it was tipping it down with rain. I got back to the boat to find Emma from Kestrel next door waiting for me in her waterproofs – could she borrow my generator? Hers is onboard and cooled with river water, and the inlet pipe had become blocked with weed. Kestrel and Innocenti are now moored a bit further apart so that I get some sun on my new solar panel (of which more later) and so we ran a long cable to connect my genny to Kestrel’s inlet socket. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite reach. So I moved the generator away from Innocenti (it’s attached to my boat by a security cable, which is a condition of my insurance) to make it reach. Fifteen minutes later, a widebeam boat goes by and I hear an ominous splosh and no more generator noise…

Oh heck. The passing boat has pulled the cables tight and the genny is now on the river bed. I fish it out and pull it over gently. Water emerges from the exhaust pipe. I wring out the air filter, drain the carburettor (nope, no water in there) and squirt WD40 into the air intake. Still nothing. I remove the spark plug and find I’m getting no spark. Ah, an electrical problem. My favourite.

Fortunately, I’ve had experience of this before. All the high voltage electrics (both the mains outlet and the feed to thes park plug) on the EU10i are in sealed units and were unlikely to be affected by a quick dunking. But the low voltage electrics are not. I dismantled the genny and unplugged all the connectors. River water dribbled from them all.

I left it for several days on the bank under a box. This morning it has restarted, and I’ve reassembled it. I’ve been very lucky, and will be more careful next time. Isn’t Japanese engineering brilliant?

So, we went out on Friday night for our final attempt at the bumps – and once again we weren’t fast enough off the start. We got bumped about 300m into the race, and rowed home for a beer to celebrate our wooden spoons…

But it was all good fun, and with something of a scratch crew (the crew was different every night, and some of our substitutes hadn’t rowed for years) it was always unlikely that we’d be as together as some of the crews that had been training for months. I’ve enjoyed it, and will definitely be doing more rowing over the coming year.

After Emma’s instructions that we needed to “give it everything on the start” we shot off at some considerable speed – in fact, I very nearly came off my sliding seat because I was pushing too hard. We got within a length (60′ – the boats start 90′ apart) of the boat in front when suddenly someone caught a crab and it was soon all over. But maybe tonight we can redeem ourselves and avoid getting wooden spoons (the traditional prize for getting bumped every night).

We had an earlier start because of rowing in the fourth division, and were all psyched up to row the full course. Despite feeling a lot more together than on Tuesday, we were obliterated by an X-Press boat within about 20 strokes of the start! Oh well, at least we’re no longer sandwich boat. And we got to the pub earlier!

I took up rowing back at Easter with Chesterton RC. Last night was the first night of the Town Bumps, a chance for all the “town” (i.e. non University) clubs to take part in this very traditional Cambridge race.
Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re a regular passenger on the railways, you’ll probably have seen adverts for PlusBus, which is a scheme that allows you to purchase discounted bus tickets if you need to continue your rail journey by bus. It’s a great idea but has suffered somewhat from implementation issues. PlusBus is run by a consortium of bus companies (most of whom also own train companies) but as a consequence the railway staff aren’t always very clued up about it.

The biggest problem with it is actually buying the ticket in the first place. Most self-service ticket machines can’t currently sell a PlusBus ticket, which isn’t much help if you travel from an unmanned station. When I lived out at Waterbeach I would buy an ordinary return ticket to Cambridge and then upgrade to PlusBus at Cambridge station, but if there was a huge queue at the booking office it wasn’t worth it. My worst PlusBus experience was one time I tried to go to Leicester. I wanted to buy a ticket in advance, with both Cambridge and Leicester Plusbus upgrades, so that when the tickets arrived in the post I could get the bus to Cambridge station, train to Leicester and the bus to the university. At that stage no online ticketing company would sell you a PlusBus. I had to ring about five different people at different train companies before I finally found someone who could sell me a ticket.

Today, PlusBus has come back into my attention. I had a hire car to drop off this morning at Hertz, which is by the railway station, and then needed to get to work on the bus. Because I have to take two buses to do this, I’d need a Stagecoach Dayrider ticket, which now costs £3.30. However, since I’m going to London this evening, I went into the station and asked the booking clerk for a return to London with a Cambridge PlusBus. He said I could only have a PlusBus for arriving in Cambridge, and not for departing from it. I told him this wasn’t true, and I’d done it before. He went off and referred to a colleague, before returning to sell me the ticket. After I’d paid, I realised that he’d forgotten to give me a railcard discount on my PlusBus, so I’d paid £2.70 for it instead of £1.80. Oh well, but still better than £3.30! Interestingly, the PlusBus ticket covers a much bigger area than the Dayrider (more or less equivalent to the £5.00 Dayrider Plus ticket) so if you have a railcard, it’s actually cheaper to buy a single ticket to Shelford (the next station south of Cambridge) and a PlusBus (total cost £3.30) than it is to get a Dayrider Plus.

One other thing – each PlusBus ticket is only valid for 24 hours, so if you buy a period return and want to use the buses on both days you travel you need to buy two PlusBus tickets, one for each day.

However, all this prompted me to look at PlusBus’s website again, and to discover that the tickets can finally be bought online. Unfortunately, only two providers can do it. One is Qjump who charge a booking fee depending on how you pay and how you collect your tickets, details here. The other is First Transpennine Express, who operate trains in northern England, but whose website is powered by Qjump. Happily, Transpennine’s website will sell you a ticket for any part of the country and doesn’t charge a booking fee. I shall be using them a lot more in the future! Nothing like making it easy, is there?