Today we got a new water softener, which you would have thought would have been a fairly simple piece of plumbing, especially given that we already had a very similar water softener in place (albeit a broken one).

Predictably though, it became more complicated than it should have… the controller on the water softener doesn’t have have the thread for the appliance connectors—instead, you are supposed to screw-in a 3/4" joiner, which is all well and good, apart from the fact that it seemed to be impossible to get it to seal properly, even with PTFE tape. Eventually, after several extremely frustrating hours of repeatedly attempting to get a decent seal with just PTFE tape, I got fed-up and added a couple of rubber O-rings, which have sealed the system nicely.

Anyway, all in all, a very frustrating day spent plumbing rather than doing what I wanted to be doing, and just to cap it all, the people who were going to buy our house have pulled-out at the last minute, leaving us £500 out of pocket because we'd just put a deposit down on a new house.

Posted by alastair at 7:46 PM Digg It | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well that disrupted my day. This morning, we turned-on the taps in our house to discover that the water was full of small, spherical, amber-coloured particles. Well, some of the taps, anyway… after a bit of experimentation, I managed to isolate the problem to those taps that draw water directly through our water softener, which gave me a big clue. The fact that the particles were so uniform, both in colour and in approximate size and shape, was another clue that they were man-made rather than natural in origin, and I finally realised that they were, in fact, the resin from the ion exchange column in the water softener. Which means our water softener is kaput.

Anyway, thankfully the water softener is easy to isolate, so the problem is fixed, for now—although we are, of course, now stuck with hard water, which means we use more soap and also that we need salt for the dishwasher (which we didn't have, so I had to go and get some). Plus we'll have to descale the kettle more often.

Not the most auspicious start to a Sunday, I think you'll agree. Still, as unexpected adventures in plumbing go, it could have been a lot worse.

Posted by alastair at 5:21 PM Digg It | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Anyone viewing this site from Internet Explorer on Windows will have noticed that the logo in the top left seemed to have a grey background rather than being the same colour as the rest of the page. This didn't happen on other browsers, because Internet Explorer is the only modern, graphical, browser that doesn't support transparency in PNGs.

Those of you that develop your own web pages may say, at this point, well, that's not hard to fix, however the solutions that are out there at the moment deal with <img> tags, whereas the logo on this site is done using a background-image: setting on the CSS body style.

If only Microsoft would fix its broken browser. Their Mac team did it, because transparent PNGs work fine on the Mac version of Internet Explorer, but, sadly, the PC version still isn't fixed.

Posted by alastair at 1:03 PM Digg It | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

…I've added an e-mail link to the sidebar on the right hand side.

If you use a browser that doesn't support Javascript, or the Javascript support is disabled, you'll find that the e-mail link is replaced by a request for you to post a comment. The Javascript is there to make it harder for spammers to harvest my address; but don't despair, comments posted on my weblog reach me just as quickly as e-mails.

Also, comments don't put your e-mail address on the Internet, so posting a comment on this site shouldn't cause you to receive any additional spam that you weren't already getting.

Posted by alastair at 1:05 AM Digg It | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm currently fiddling with my site a bit (actually, I'm rearranging the directory structure), so there's a possibility that my site could go down at some point. If it does, then please accept my apologies for the outage.

Update: I'm done fiddling now.

Posted by alastair at 5:19 PM Digg It | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is one of those things that seemed a bit daunting at first, although the more I found out about it, the less awkward it seemed to be.

Anyway, I have incorporated a company (in fact, it was incorporated yesterday) through which I can sell my products. The next few things to do are:

• Transfer the 1 share that was subscribed to by the company formation agent into my name.
• Decide on the accounting reference date (currently this is 31^st March, which means, coincidentally, that the company's accounting year runs in step with the tax year… I am undecided as to whether or not this is a benefit).
• Decide how to invest money in the company (e.g., whether all of my investment should be in the form of share capital, or whether I take another route).
• Open a bank account for the company.

I should also be getting a form from the Inland Revenue, which I will need to complete and return to them, although if I don't receive it within a sensible amount of time I'll need to contact them.

And on top of all that, I'll want to register for VAT.

Once all of that's done, I'll be pretty much up and running!

Posted by alastair at 5:17 PM Digg It | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)