50+ and proud of it.

Having visited Mont St Michel on the Friday we attempted to get back to the hotel. This involved sitting in the queue on the causeway as everyone else desperately tried to not get drowned too. By the time we actually made it onto the mainland, high tide had "been and went". We spent a timed 27 minutes to go about 3km - 2 minutes doing the last 1km. When we finally made it to the hotel 1 my mate in the top-down MGF behind had had enough, his clutch foot still trembling and his wife nicely cooked, announced rather firmly "I think we'll eat in the Hotel tonight." The €23 menu looked rather good, my French was good enough to understand everything on it apart from one of the starters " Araign é e Mayonaise ". My electronic translator came up with " spider ". "Shit, the French'll eat anything" I thought. We called over the waitress. " Err, bon soir, ce qui ne signifie araignée? " " Eet means speeder " "What a...

Over the Bank Holiday weekend we took the smart Roadster and my friend's MGF over to France. First stop Le Mont St Michel . Nice place, trop cher at €5 per half pint of 1664 but certainly has entertainment value. It's like this. MSM is perched on an island in the sea and you can't drive onto the hill. So, you park at the end of the causeway, on the beach in various parking areas - P0, P1 -> P6. These areas are just below high tide level depending indeed upon the height of the tide. The nice people put up a sign indicating when the next tide is and which areas are going to get flooded. Last Friday it was "P0" at 17:30. They also provide a service to prevent people from drowning. The tide can come in at the speed of a galloping horse and as such, if you're on the beach at 'high tide - 5 minutes' then there's strong possibility that you're fish-food. This service is in the form of a man standing on the ramparts with a whistle, blowing it madl...

Not a particularly staggering piece of news but here we go... I was counting the engines 1 in the smart roadster on Saturday in a pretence to spray some protective grease over the rear chassis when I noticed a missing bolt in the lower exhaust bracket. Not a huge problem, get another bolt, shove it in and job done. However, when the holes failed to line up it occurred to me that it may have been AWOL for sometime. This was borne out by the fact that both mating surfaces were highly polished and worn. A "friend of mine" 2 has access to the Merc. Workshop Manual. It said "before tightening everything up, make sure that all the bolts are in place". That's easy for you to say Mr Benz - when you're lying on your back and require arms and hands like a demented octopus it ain't that simple. It also required loosening the turbo outlet-to-silencer clamp. And then it dawned on me - the exhaust was hanging on by virtue of the strength of the turbo and the top sil...

No, not the lens... (see previous post), but a programming problem I've had for, well, months. I'm only posting this here 'cos if anyone else is going bonkers about how to connect to a Websphere (MQ) remote server queue when you've got both client and server 5.3 installed on your PC and you're using Visual Studio 2005 and you're using VB.NET and you keep getting ReasonCode = 2058, ReasonName = MQRC_Q_MGR_NAME_ERROR and you can connect to the remote queue OK using the Websphere explorer and you're using Windows XP (phew). Go to this link for a code snippet that demonstrates how to open a queue, check for content, read the message and finally close the queue. How you process the message is obviously up to you. The code only shows how to read ASCII messages. I converted the original code from C# code to VB.NET. The short answer is to use the MQEnvironment object and not the MQSession object. It's found by Import ing IBM.WMQ and using AMQMDNET.DLL ...

I'm fairly meticulous about planning trips. Dunno why, I just hate rushing and end up being late for ferries, aircraft etc etc. I also like to know where I'm spending the night - hence pre -booking hotels, locating them on the map and entering the coordinates (twice) into the Garmin . We're doing a tripette to France with our friends at the end of May, they're going in their MGF -180 and we're going in the smart Roadster. Should be fun... However, the French seem very keen to keep the English out (no change there then), because the first hotel directions are "turn right at the D976" but fail to specify which particular right turn. The booking website gives one location and the one from the hotel chain website lists another, neither of which are in the Garmin database. I have two manual Garmin entries "Hotel1a" & "Hotel1b" just in case. You never know, I may even get an answer to my email before we go. The second directions ar...

We went to Scotney Castle today, very nice too. The house has "recently opened to the public" and has "been preserved for our National Heritage". However, w hat was real scary was that we walked around going "we had one of them in our house" and "my Mom had one of those too" and "I can date that Radio Rentals Telly for you if you like". There was that defining moment somewhere in the master bathroom when we looked at the Dimplex Electric Fire on the wall and realised that our lives overlapped those of whom we had paid good money to see. It gave me an idea. Shall I donate Mom's house to the National Trust? I'm glad this wasn't me. Whilst waiting for entry to the house, my dear wife dropped the spare camera lens down the steps. Did you know that Nikon 55-200mm AF-S VR DX lens can bounce down three granite steps and survive? Neither did I until today. I tested it when I got home. Now bear in mind that a D40 is an SLR and there...