• Planes: 11,952 miles (LHR-ORD; ORD-IND; IND-ORD; ORD-SFO; SFO-ORD; ORD-LHR)
• Trains: 75 miles (Woodstock, IL to Chicago; LHR to Paddington)
• Automobiles: 1127 miles (Wales-Hackney (and return journey); Hackney-LHR; Indianapolis-Chicago (bus, return); Chicago-Woodstock; SFO airport connections; San Francisco-Carmel (return), San Francisco-Yountville (return))

This is disregarding some short cab and bus rides, so the “automobile” figure is an underestimate.

Damn, I thought to myself, and went searching for someone who’d do me a free estimate before I throw it out and buy a new one. I came across RepairCare. I entered my type of appliance (dishwasher), my make (Siemens), and my postcode and voila — I have a fixed-price any-repair quotation of £104 and a form asking for my contact and credit card details. Now apart from my friend Matt’s suggestion that I remove everything but the cutlery basket and say to the engineer “there it is, please supply all the parts you need”, I thought this sounded too good to be true. A quote I’d had earlier for the element being changed (which I understand is a fairly routine job) was a little under £100, so I had almost nothing to lose by using RepairCare for even a routine repair — and they had almost nothing to gain and a lot to lose for a complex repair. Suspicious, I checked the Terms & Conditions:

11. We reserve the right to cancel a repair if on inspection or during the repair of the product it is deemed beyond economical repair, or when parts are ordered from a supplier and they are unable to fulfil the order. In such instances we will refund (to your credit card) any monies you have paid less a callout charge of £40.00 (inc VAT).

I emailed them to clarify how they decide what constitutes “beyond economical repair” on a nearly five-year-old dishwasher but they did not reply.

I think this borders on false advertising and an excuse to charge a lot of people a £40 callout charge when they have been sold, according to their FAQ:

Q. What’s included in the quote?

A. We use fixed pricing; this means that the amount you are quoted for the repair includes all of the following:

• Call out
• Evaluation by a qualified engineer
• Labour
• All required parts
• Professional safety check
• 3 month guarantee on all work

The FAQ page makes no notice of this beyond economical repair clause. I feel this is deceitful and would advise others to deal with this company cautiously. I understand that RepairCare need this clause to protect themselves from (potentially) completely rebuilding appliances, but I feel it should be much more prominent on the site.

1. pain and fever reducer of your choice — ibuprofen is generally well-tolerated, while aspirin is more likely to cause stomach upset
2. decongestant (pseudoephedrine-based)
3. antihistamine (like Bendadryl — in case you get some whacked-out allergic reaction while your immune system is in a tizzy)
4. cough suppressant
5. cough expectorant
6. long-keeping juices, clear soups/consommes – easily-digestible, easily-prepared, long-keeping staple foods (you’d be surprised how good Cream of Rice can taste)
7. bottled water
8. a basic clean-up kit for infectious spills/vomit, etc.: bleach, a few sponges, some small plastic bin liners, a roll or two of paper towels, and a small bucket (in fact, everything may fit inside the bucket, how convenient!)
9. table salt (to mix with water to help keep your electrolytes up) and table sugar (ditto). Mix 5cc of salt and 40cc of sugar into 1 litre of water.
10. vitamin C in some readily-available form — a jar of chewable vitamins is fine (see above)
11. some extra boxes of tissues
12. some extra rolls of toilet paper / loo paper / bog roll
13. a thermometer that you know how to use and read — one that you can’t is not going to be so useful to you. (Wee digital thermometers are easy to find, btw., and no mercury and glass waiting to break and so on.)
14. a ballpoint pen and a small notebook, for keeping track of vital signs and symptoms in case you need the reference
15. backup/reserve supplies of any medications you take on a regular basis, on the theory that you may be too ill to get to a pharmacy to get a refill when you need one; a great many disaster preparedness folks generally recommend that people keep a one-month backup supply of meds around anyway Just In Case
16. stomach-settlers of your choice: if you like Rolaids or Pepto-Bismol, great, but you might also think about things like dried peppermint (peppermint tea), candied or dried ginger, and dried catnip (catnip tea)
17. rubbing alcohol and gauze pads or cotton balls/cotton wool — can be useful in reducing fevers
18. a copy of the Merck Manual of Medical Information (Home Edition) — one of the single most useful books any household can own, can help you know the difference between, say, “just a cough” and pneumonia
19. a copy of Where There Is No Doctor: A Village Health Care Handbook — an unbelievably useful basic diagnosis, treatment, and prevention handbook for common health care issues

Also worth reading is How To Wash Your Hands. Spoiler: antibacterial soap does more harm than good.

(photo taken in Asda Cwmbran)

"Sure, I can drink all these drinks!"

"So, this calculation shows that if Pete drinks all those drinks, his head will really hurt tomorrow"

"I'm tellingsh you guysh, I'm not pished" (that's Pete's accusing finger)

Matt sups his pint.

I smugly flip more mats that Craig can.

21 beer mats flipped!

]]> http://old.fscked.co.uk/index.php/2009/02/pics-from-the-comtex-curry-club-090220/feed/ 2 http://old.fscked.co.uk/index.php/2009/02/i-have-ruined-sashimi-for-myself-forever/ http://old.fscked.co.uk/index.php/2009/02/i-have-ruined-sashimi-for-myself-forever/#comments Sat, 14 Feb 2009 19:29:25 +0000 rich http://www.fscked.co.uk/?p=271 On Thursday I had sashimi for lunch.

I did not enjoy it, sadly. I haven’t eaten sashimi since an… incident… in 2004 that I am about to relate for you. Sadly, it seems I still cannot eat it, and hence perhaps this delicacy is lost to me forever.

How bad must an event be to cause such trauma? Read on.

In 2004 I presented a paper entitled The design, modeling and optimization of channel allocations for frequency hopping at the 4th IASTED international multi-conference on wireless and optical communications. Yes, really.  A quick ProTip: don’t ever fly across seven timezones for five days, sleep fans. If you study my pics you’ll come away with the idea that Banff has no people in it — because most of them were taken at 5am as I wandered the streets, wide awake and totally jetlagged.

Early in my stay, I and some of my colleagues ate out at a rather good Japanese restaurant, which was the first time I’d eaten any Japanese food more authentic than a Boots meal deal (I was complemented on my pronunciation though, having learnt some Japanese a few years beforehand; like a true tourist rube this made me feel very special). We returned there on our last night. Heartened by the first night, I got a bit more adventurous with the menu, and ordered a lot of different sashimi. And a lot of sake.

I liked most of the food, though I wasn’t so keen on some bits; the eel wasn’t that nice, and I particularly didn’t care for cod roe. For those who have never eaten it, this is a glistening sack of mucous that initially tastes of nothing in the mouth until you burst it. Then your find the oils inside, which taste so strongly of fish that the flavour is all the way past fish and into some strange æthereal realm of its own. More sake. I ate quite a bit of the roe, trying to decide if I liked it or not.

And some more sake. You may think you see where this is going, but believe me, it’s worse than you think.

I was stinkingly drunk by now so, naturally, we went to a bar, where I drank some silly amount of excellent Canadian single malt whisky. When we came out from the bar, I was having trouble seeing; I can remember standing on the street corner outside the door but that is the only memory I have for hours before or after that point. My ever-sympathetic colleagues asked me “where is your hotel?” and I apparently pointed in vaguely the right direction; this was enough for them to send me on my way. Bastards. Somehow, I beat the odds and made it to bed.

Now with the preamble done and the scene set; my story can start in earnest.

I wake up with the cold sweats around 6am, still dressed, with the worst hangover I have ever had. I lie very very still, trying to calm my nausea… and I burp fish. I rush to the toilet and am violently sick. I spend an hour or so very, very slowly packing, being sick a few more times and trying to keep some water down. I check out of the hotel and walk halfway into the town before collapsing onto a kerb where I sit for three hours with my head on my knees. Half a dozen friendly Canadians ask, annoyingly chirpily, if I need medical attention.

Eventually I trek back to my hotel where my transport awaits. I pass the next three hours on a crowded shuttle bus slowly winding through the Rockies. All the way, I taste fish.

At Calgary airport, I wait for two hours, then get on a plane. Next to me is someone else from the conference, an incredibly enthusiastic grad student at Cambridge doing something interesting with MIMO aerials. I can taste fish. The flight is ten hours. I manage, somehow, to keep the vomit down and some semblance of conversation with the guy. We talk about his life in Africa before he came to Cambridge on a student grant. I can taste fish.

Somewhere over Iceland, they serve a soggy, greasy airline croissant with cheese and bacon in it. It’s the first thing in 20 hours that hasn’t tasted of vomit or fish. It’s also the best thing I’ve ever tasted in my life, a Platonic ideal of taste, a plateau of flavour I have sought in vain to replicate since.

I land, and spend the usual hour retriving my luggage. There then follows a three hour train ride with three changes, followed by a taxi, then bed; nearly 7000 miles with the worst hangover of my life, every inch tasting of fish.

And that is why, I can now confirm, sashimi is still dead to me five years later.

The cloud formations as I walked the dogs this morning were stunningly pretty. Sadly I didn’t have a real camera with me, so you’ll have to make do with an iPhone snapshot instead.

Seeing “New Blog Post” in such big letters there has encouraged me to decouple my blog and Twitter. Since I’ve started enjoying Twitter more for it’s own sake, I don’t want those notifications cluttering up my Twitter stream (which is already full enough of the crap I write), when they can be just as easily delivered to people who want to track my blog over RSS. Removing those words from the Wordle diagram gives (I claim) a more interesting picture:

]]> http://old.fscked.co.uk/index.php/2009/02/twitter-wordle/feed/ 0 http://old.fscked.co.uk/index.php/2009/02/daisy-and-jake/ http://old.fscked.co.uk/index.php/2009/02/daisy-and-jake/#comments Mon, 02 Feb 2009 12:29:07 +0000 rich http://www.fscked.co.uk/?p=418

Seconds after I took the photo of Jake, he decided to get up (he doesn’t seem to like having his picture taken); Daisy lept onto the bed and promptly claimed it.