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Day 43 – Poetry

Another rainy day, and the forecast is for a couple of weeks of rain, although we had some sunny spells over the course of the day.

I was off today, and Tracy was at work. We played a bit with zoom backgrounds, did school work and took a breadmaker apart.

Zoom backgrounds

We’ve seen many people with fancy backgrounds in the zoom meetings we’ve done. However I couldn’t work out how to enable it. What I realised recently was that you can’t do it on a phone, nor on the Linux client. Out of the 11 devices we have that could run zoom only two aren’t android or Linux.

So we got a Windows 10 machine and turned on a single person zoom meeting so we could try them out. I was wearing a green t-shirt, and it became the zoom background!

We then worked out how to spot the colour, and made it blue like a room divider we had. Both Alexander and Lucy were wearing blue and they also blended in.

Disembodied heads and hands were a strong draw and made us all laugh a bit. We also tried a number of other things, like Lego marvel models, Alexander’s shield and a mug.

Once we’d had enough fun I hung a blanket so we’d get a full background next time we’ve got a zoom meeting.

Poetry

For writing practice Lucy chose the option to write a poem with Hello as the first word. She did a plan, thought of all the rhyming words she could and wrote them in a circle. Then she decided that she’d pick a form. Once she’d done that she practiced it out loud and then wrote it on the computer because she didn’t want to keep copying it out when she changed it. You can read Hello on the earlier post today.

While she was doing that I also wrote a poem. Mine was a villanelle, a format I quite like, and which has a standardised rhyme scheme. Mine is titled Hello, Hullo, Hallo.

Breadmaker disassembly

On Monday the breadmaker stopped spinning the paddle about ten seconds after we switched it on. The motor was still going, so it wasn’t completely dead. However I couldn’t get into it because I couldn’t find the U shaped screwdriver head.

Today the replacement U shaped head arrived. So Lucy and I undid all the screws on the bottom of the breadmaker (a Morphy Richards fastbake breadmaker model 48280 for the record).

It was clear from our initial attempt that the manufacturer didn’t intend for people to fix this themself. It was particularly awkward to take apart. We took five screws off the base, and used a screwdriver to separate the base from the body, but it wouldn’t come off.

At that point we were able to dislodge the control panel from the front plate. I also took the lid off, which was super easy. I guess they expected that we might want to wash the lid!

With the front panel off we could see more screws inside. Five more screws later, which were unscrewed through the hole in the fascia, and the front part lifted. It wasn’t free yet, but we could see that the drive belt had disintegrated. We could also see two more screws at the back of the breadmaker. They were behind the oven compartment and completely inaccessible.

Lucy decided that she’d seen enough and went off to build Lego. I watched a couple of YouTube videos. This included one that said the easiest way was just to take a Stanley knife to the bottom cover! I think that’s true.

I found another site that said to remove the seal round the main compartment. Once that was off the top cover just lifted off. This gave access to the last two screws. With both covers off I removed the fragments of the old belt. Then came the job of finding a replacement. All the branded ones were very expensive, about five times the price of the generic ones. However I couldn’t really tell from the online pictures whether or not they were compatible. Usually I’d have gone to a shop and had a look. But I couldn’t, so I bit the bullet and ordered the cheapest that would arrive in the next week or two.

Scouts

We had another scout meeting on zoom. There were 14 scouts and 4 leaders online. Like last week I found the zoom connection unstable. Afterwards I realised that Alexander was playing an online game.

I ran a bit of it, questions on a segment of an OS map. I’d wanted to put the scouts into breakout rooms, but we didn’t set them up in advance. So instead we put them all on mute and let them find the answers individually. We then used the annotate function to identify the places on the map that answered the questions.

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Day 6 – Monday 23rd March 2020

My space for working at home, definitely not adhering to the clear desk policy! (photo: James Kemp)

Today was my first day back at work after almost a fortnight off sick. One of the things I read this morning was the NwSpk guide to remote working. Someone had suggested that we run a virtual workshop. While I’ve lost count of the number of workshops I’ve run over the decades I’ve always shied away from online workshops. They’re much harder to get engagement from people and need a lot more preparation than face to face ones. As a result of that guide, and a medium article, I’m more confident that I could probably pull it off.

School at Home

The other feature of the day was helping Lucy do some schoolwork from home. Alexander has already been at it for almost a week, but he’s in Y9 and is used to just getting on with it. Lucy is only in Y3 and isn’t really used to homework. The first hurdle was that her tablet seems to have disappeared, she used it yesterday morning but it was nowhere to be seen this morning. It has to be somewhere in the house, we haven’t been anywhere because of the self isolation we’ve been following.

So after we’d looked on and under both sofas, in and under the beds and on all the likely surfaces I gave up and set up reading eggs on my personal laptop. A big chunk of this was done while I was in hold to the department IT help desk, because my password change hadn’t properly synced and I couldn’t login initially.

Lucy spent a couple of hours happily doing Reading Eggs and made it to level 120, although I’m not sure what level she started at. After lunch (packet pasta, which she complained about sharing it with Tracy) Lucy switched to Mathletics. When I checked in with her she was competing in live arithmetic with kids from around the world (mostly UK, but also Canadian, UAE and Irish kids). Her class had a scoreboard on the home page, and she was on 1,138 points, a mere 8 points ahead of the second ranked kid. So I guess she’ll need to do some tomorrow!

At twenty past three Lucy called me down from where I’d been hiding so that I could work. When I got there she asked me if I knew what time it was. When I told her that it was twenty past three she then informed me that she thought school hours were over.

Games

The basic concept of Celestia is moving your pawn in a cardboard airship between the cities, and surviving the hazards to get to the end. (photo: James Kemp)

After a very lovely dinner of Chicken Parmigiana courtesy of the Pinch of Nom cookbook we played Celestia. It’s a 2-6 player game we got for Christmas in 2018. It works really nicely as a collective push your luck mechanism with individual scoring. The aim is to get as far along the path as possible without going down with the airship. If you land it as the last player inside you get treasure. All the treasure cards are slightly different values, and the average value goes up the further along the track you get.

Technology

The various updates must have broken something in my Apache web server configuration. Most of my websites were showing an internal server error (500). I needed to edit the site config files to make them work, despite them working fine until a couple of days ago without any changes.

The edit I made was in the Directory section, where instead of the full file path on the server I replaced it with the relative path from the domain root. No idea why that was necessary, but it seems to have fixed the problems.

The other technology fix I was at was trying to work out why my wife’s Lenovo Yoga 300 is so glacially slow. It’s been disappointing since we got it. So this evening I made a live USB for Ubuntu 18.04.4 and fired it up. Not surprisingly it was pretty responsive and the touch screen also worked fine. So I think the machine might be getting reformated shortly from Windows 10 to Ubuntu.

The next fix is to get Alexander’s laptop to open PDF and PowerPoint files from his school OneDrive. At the moment if he tries to open one it spawns hundreds of tabs in his browser.

Cancelling Holidays

The most depressing thing this evening though was not Boris Johnson announcing that we’re all on lockdown, everything is closed and we can only go out in dire need, or to exercise once a day. It was cancelling our planned family holiday to Denmark and Sweden in May. I cancelled the Airbnb I’d booked and Tracy moved the easyJet flights to October in the hope that we will still be able to go then. We also cancelled the hotel. Hopefully we’ll get a refund on it all, but we won’t know for sure for a few days. It was all booked a few months back, before Christmas for most of it. So we should be okay.