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I finally managed to get a working “system” together after months of playing around and trying to learn far, far too many things at once. Not that it really does much at this stage, but as a proof of concept and a confidence booster it’s been very helpful.

The system is made up of 4 parts:

• An “echoserver” on a pc that waits for clients to connect, and sends anything that any connected client sends to it to all other connected clients. (I actually have 2 versions of this one: a “quiet” version that just does it’s job in the background; and a second version that shows all the stuff that comes through in a nice window so I could see what was being transferred  through it and work out why it wasn’t quite what I expected).
• A graphical client that has some button on it that send commands to change some outputs through the echoserver.  It also listens for responses to the command and changes the image and state of the buttons depending on the response. There could be as many of these clients as needed. The next stage for this client is to try to re-build it for my N800 touchscreen tablet.  (If I can control the lights wirelessly  from across the room then all of this might actually impress Bec!)
• A PC client that listens for relevant commands, and when it’s got one it like the look of it forwards it to a Microchip Pic microcontroller attached to a serial port.  It also relays back the responses from the Pic to the network.
• The microcontroller unit itself.  This does the fun stuff of… Ta Da!  Turning some leds on and off! 8 individually controllable outputs at this stage, though it could easily be more or less… Excellent!  Of course the microcontroller could really control anything,  but leds will do for now until the system’s fully tested and debugged.

All in all it’s been fun, challenging, frustrating and rewarding to get all this together.  A lot of thanks should go to a heap of people that take the time and effort to write tutorials on web sites, author clear books, and answer questions in internet forums.  But there’s too many to thank, or even remember!

Now the hard bit.  Working out what could potentially go wrong and seeing if I can break things, working out how to avoid those things, fixing them, then testing to see if I can still break it in new and exciting ways. Then rinse and repeat…..

Luckily winter’s coming!

Some days you’re lucky, and some days you’re not.  Yesterday was one of those lucky days.  Actually, maybe it’s been about the only lucky day for a while, but I’ll take it.

Why was it lucky? Thanks to a guy at work’s girlfriend, he and I got a last minute invite to the Arsenal v Porto Champions League match.  Free tickets in a corporate box event!! With free food and drink chucked in for good measure!

Yippeeeeee!

Wasn’t going to turn that down! Even if it meant leaving Bec pining at home for the evening.  Sorry Bec!
Great game too. 4 nil to the Arsenal!

Let’s hope it’s the start of a lucky streak!

I lied.

Boo hoo hoo.

Sometime this morning some big booming noises started to echo across the dock…  Took us a while to work out what was going on. There was a big dragon-boat event going on.

Quite impressive to watch, but seems like all too much hard work on a lovely sunny day…

Immediate panic over.  All the advice we’ve had confirms that we’ve got at least 3 weeks minimum until the time that bailiffs could turn up at the door. Whew!

And in even better news, we think we’ve found a flat to move into. In another block of apartments just across the road, so moving should be reasonably easy. It’ll be the second time in London we’ve moved just down the road we’ve been living on. We still got a man and a van for that move as there were lots of stairs involved then and it was a bit further away, but this time we might either do it ourselves or just get some guys without the van, but with some trolleys.

So assuming our reference checks all come back fine (and there’s no reason they shouldn’t that we know of, unless we catch something nasty from the landlord’s issues)  we can stop worrying about finding somewhere and just worry about packing.

Did I mention that I hate moving?

As of last night we live in uncertain times. It appears our landlord has been lying to us and this flat is due to be repossessed by his bank. In a week.

AAAARRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

We did know that there were issues, but he’d told the property management company that they were all sorted out, and he was paying the mortgage again. The lying *#&#^#£&* $£#&#$ #$#%#£&$££$!!!

What that really means for us we’re not quite sure yet. Worst case is we’ve got a week to move, or face not being able to get into the flat one day next week. But I’m pretty sure it’s not quite that bad. Still pretty bad, but not that bad. I think best case we will get another 28 days from next week, which at least will give us time to find somewhere to live!

Looking on the (very small) bright side, one impact of his lying to us that things were all sorted out might be that we didn’t end up being in exactly the same situation in an identical flat one flight up. When we heard he had issues, we thought of moving, and there was a flat just upstairs that would have made moving easy. But we believed him and didn’t (purely to avoid the hassle of moving). And now the property management company tell us that that landlord now appears to be going into liquidation too. Looks like the falling house market here is claiming quite a few victims.

Unfortunately some of them are us, and other tenants around the place.

What has struck me about this whole saga is how little rights tenants have, and how little information they/we are entitled to. It’s perfectly possible that the first thing a tenant would know about any of this is when the eviction notice arrives. Doesn’t seem very fair to me, but there you go.
More information on the situation as it comes to hand…

Sigh.

I really, really hate moving!

I’ve never understood the giving of flowers. It just seems a bit pointless and mean to give someone something that just sits there and dies at you, dropping it’s leaves and stuff all over the place.

Now in a garden, that’s different. That’s where they belong. (Except roses. I’ve never really liked them much, except for the climbing ones. Scraggly looking plants that bite you are not my favourite things.)

But Bec seems to like them, as do most women I know, and occasionally wishes that I’d bring her some. Well, kind of. I think if I did buy her some now her first thought would be that I’d done something really, really, really bad!

Just as well some of her friends give her some now and then!

Any regular readers of this blog will have noticed the distinct lack of chilli entries this year. That’s because there really hasn’t been much to say! As I suspected, the plants don’t seem to have been getting enough sunlight to really have a go at producing too many chillies. That’s not to say there aren’t any on them. There are a few on most of the plants, but it’s taken a long time for them to get to any reasonable size.

But the first one to appear, long before the rest, came in handy the other day. I’d noticed it going yellow one day, and by the next it was almost completely yellow. Didn’t muck about!

And just as well. The next day we were making a recipe that called for 1 yellow chilli.

So we used it, and it was good!

Autumnal.  I think I like that word.  It just seems to roll out of the mouth nicely.

However, I’m not quite sure I like what it refers to.  We seem to have moved almost straight into autumn this week.  While we had a nice sunny weekend for a change, it was still cold enough to require a jersey to sit out in the sun.  The nights are a lot colder. And the days are getting very noticeably shorter.

At least the trees aren’t yet changing colour to make it really, really obvious that the summer is over.

Let’s just hope it’s a blip this week, and we’ll be back to some Indian summer weather for at least the rest of this month.

Somehow I doubt it though!

Just to add a bit of exotica for the weekend, for dinner tonight we made quite a lot of Sushi!  I am lucky sometimes and manage to talk Mike into making sushi (and believe me sometimes it’s a struggle to get him to agree).  We used to make it quite a lot but lately we seemed to have not been bothered.  We made it a while ago and it was pretty much a disaster, in fact, I would go as far to say it was our worst sushi ever!

But tonight’s was definitely an improvement on the last. Nowhere near our best, but we just need to remember how to get the rice right.  Next time maybe!