Well, I could go on. But who would believe me? If I went on to describe it as weighing two and a half kilos, wired in, and rented to us by the State-owned post and telephone monopoly people would think I was making it up.

So I won’t mention that it didn’t even have a screen, for that would be unimaginable.

So far so great! Then I opened up Google Calendar, to receive this message:

Your browser does not support all features of Google Calendar. If you are having problems, try Google Chrome.

Why have Microsoft made something which doesn’t play nicely with Google Calendar? Or have Google made their Calendar deliberately incompatible with IE9?

Whatever the reason, I would like these two internet superpowers to sort it out please.

How likely was it that a Chicago synagogue would be expecting to receive a printer from Yemen where half the population are illiterate and most people are Muslims employed in agriculture?

I’m not suggesting that parcel companies make that kind of value judgement before accepting consignments. However, what if the sender were required to show in advance that the recipient was expecting the item? Some kind of authorisation barcode could be generated and fixed to the parcel.

Not foolproof of course, but better than the current situation where effectively anyone can send an unsolicited parcel to anyone else.

One such firm was Adana (Printing Machines) Ltd in Twickenham, England. I could not resist the coupon for a free sample of printer’s type. They sent me nine characters which spelled the words ADANA TYPE wrapped in a plain piece of paper, together with brochures for their printing presses and accessories.

I took these curious shiny rods of lead (exactly 0.918 inches or 23.3172 mm high) with the mirror-writing letters on top to primary school with me, where I would carefully unwrap them and show to friends and teachers.

At first that was the extent of my interest in printing, but I read and re-read the brochures which had enticing pictures of their ‘Five Three’ and ‘Eight Five’ presses, accompanied by impressive lists of items the hobby printer could produce on them. Everything from business stationery to dance tickets, small posters and leaflets.

The machines’ names denoted the size in inches of the ‘chase’ or frame in which the type is firmly clamped for printing. I cannot remember the price of the Five Three, but eventually when I was a few years older my parents decided to buy me the more expensive Eight Five, which I know cost £27.10.6d. This pre-decimal sum equates to £320 today. In my parents’ eyes this was no doubt a worthwhile investment if it led to me pursuing an absorbing hobby. We also ordered a ‘printer’s office’ comprising a selection of essential tools and accessories, various tubes of ink and several founts (or fonts as they are universally called now) of type.

But what if you want to find conversations with multiple labels? For example you are interested only in messages labelled ‘Sales region 2′ and ‘Quarter 3 2010′.

Instead of going into ‘Show search options’ simply type your search into the search box at the top of the Gmail screen thus:

label:sales-region-2 label:quarter-3-2010

and click Search Mail. This will return a list of conversations containing both labels. Note that the label names are case insensitive, but you must replace spaces with a hyphen.

What if you are interested in messages with either label? Then you would use:

label:sales-region-2 OR label:quarter-3-2010

The OR operator must be uppercase. Alternatively you can use the pipe operator ‘|’ (shift+backslash on your keyboard) like this:

label:sales-region-2 | label:quarter-3-2010

You are probably three steps ahead of me here, and wondering about other compound searches. In fact you can choose from a long list of “query words” to build up a very specific search. In Gmail see Help articles › Using advanced search for the (almost) endless possibilities!

The roads would be safer if all vehicles were automatic, of course. No risk of stalling half way out of a junction. No need to take one hand off the steering wheel all the time. More attention available to deal with hazards and to control the speed and direction of the vehicle.

To quote Jerry Seinfeld:

The thing I admire most about the Chinese is that they’re hanging in there with the chopsticks. Because if you think about it, you know they’ve seen the fork, by now.

Well, I admire people who insist on buying cars with manual transmission, despite being fully aware of the automatic gearbox.

Today I went on a Technical Tour of that same aeroplane which, after five years standing out in the open, is now housed in the Concorde Centre. (Whilst this purpose built hangar protects the iconic plane from the wind and rain, it is unheated. The seven of us on our tour were bitterly cold for most of the 90 minute experience. If you are considering a tour, wait until spring!)

Our guide was enthusiastic and fluent, with a great deal of detailed knowledge which he seemed to take pleasure in sharing with us. He walked our small group slowly underneath the fuselage from tip to tail, explaining what each protruding sensor did, and describing the many design challenges which are unique to a supersonic passenger aircraft.

Compared with everyday airliners of course, Concorde is petite – it carried only 100 passengers. What I found surprising was that the four powerful Olympus engines which could propel her to 2,395 kph were also very small.

Our guide explained why the engine housings are rectangular, not round (because there have to be adjustable baffles in front of the intakes to reduce the velocity of air rushing into the engine). He also explained why the undercarriage is so tall compared with subsonic passenger aircraft (because Concorde took off and landed at an angle of some 13° compared with about 3° and so a stilt-like undercarriage was necessary to provide the necessary ground clearance at the tail).

The shape of the wings is a beautiful curve, with an almost imperceptible upward ‘flick’ of the outer trailing edge. This made it possible to fly at low speeds with wings designed to fly at twice the speed of sound.

Inside, we sat in comfortable leather seats with generous legroom. There was no provision for in-flight TV, and the overhead lockers are very shallow, with room for perhaps a briefcase or handbag each. The windows too are tiny, but it didn’t feel claustrophobic.

The washrooms were similar to those on everyday airliners, but the galleys were remarkably small. It must have been quite a challenge to serve 100 five-course haute cuisine meals on china plates from ovens the size of a child’s wardrobe.

Two-by-two we went forward to the flight deck and were invited to sit in the captain’s seat. Our guide explained all the displays and controls available to the crew – including the flight engineer who had his own wall of instruments to monitor. It was a cramped, austere environment with quite a restricted view through the visor.

Concorde is a magnificent technical achievement and beautiful too – a marvel which for 35 years could fly non-stop across the Atlantic faster than a rifle bullet. It is a shame that for financial reasons it was not possible to keep one or two in an airworthy condition for air shows and exhibitions.

I thought that was the end of our problems, but it dawned on us that the system seemed to be on at weird times of the day – and night! I checked and re-checked the clock and programme settings, and tried once more to make sense of the badly written Honeywell instruction manuals. Here’s an example:

The HCW80 and HC60NG are already teached-in (bounded).

Not quite one for engrishfunny.com but I couldn’t be sure I was doing everything correctly. In the end I called the electrician back, half expecting him to tut and push an obvious button marked “press to make everything work properly.”

Thankfully he didn’t. My relief quickly turned to dismay, however, when he declared that there was nothing wrong with the system and that I should just see how we got on with it.

“Er, no. Fix it please.” I said. So he phoned a friend (actually his boss) who talked him through a fault-finding procedure which revealed – guess what? – the thermostat had been wired direct to the boiler, missing out the timeclock altogether!

So our central heating has in fact been on 24 hours a day since it was installed. Now I can actually feel the room temperature dropping for the first time in two weeks.

Note to Honeywell: it helps installation electricians if diagrams are correctly labelled and instructions are intelligible. Yours are not.

The hot water storage cylinder in the loft also got replaced – with one encased in foam lagging so we no longer have to have a pile of old blankets and duvets on top of it.

The flue was attached to the back of the house and ran right up beyond the eaves. Being made of asbestos, a specialist team was needed to take it down safely. On Monday they took one look at it and refused to go up on a ladder. So a team came yesterday and spent several hours putting up scaffolding, although they couldn’t see why the job could not have been done from a ladder.

I felt the same, but the contractor was paying the extra cost so it didn’t make much difference to me. However, I was annoyed to find that the scaffolders took it upon themselves to partially dismantle the asbestos flue in order to avoid having to build a higher scaffold. So,

• they did not do what they were paid for, and
• decided they could do a job for which a professional asbestos removal firm had been specified by the surveyor.

They cheerfully declared that they had found an asbsetos warning label when they pulled off the cowl and top section.

The asbestos men returned this morning and had the lot down and in the back of their van within an hour. The plumbers cracked on too, and by 2.00 pm the new boiler (a Baxi Solo 24 HE) was running. The first thing I noticed was that the flue (now only about 40 cm from the ground) sent out plumes of warm steam. “That’s normal.” I was told. So much for efficiency! The old one didn’t do that.

The other counter-intuitive thing was that they replaced the thermostatic radiator valve in the hall with a non-thermostatic one. The logic is (according to the Regulations) that all parts of the system must be under thermostatic control. So the boiler itself is controlled overall, based on the air temperature in the room which has the most air changes (ie the hall). A wireless hall thermostat is to be fitted on Monday when the electrician arrives.

People always quote the efficiency of condensing boilers as 95%-plus, but I have read that it all depends on whether condensing is actually occurring. As I understand it, if the water circulating around the radiators returns to the boiler too warm, then the water vapour in the exhaust gases cannot condense. This would occur if the boiler output is too high for the requirements of the house, or if it is a mild day, or if most of the radiators are calling for little or no heat.

Anyway, we shall see. Our gas bills were quite high and I am hoping that the cavity wall insulation, extra loft lagging and new boiler we have had installed this year will bring them right down – and maybe save a polar bear or two.

An appeal on the WordPress forums produced no solution, and I had assumed that I would just have to put up with it, because very few bloggers write posts with dates in the 1960′s.

But today I did another search for a solution and discovered this thread.

All I had to do was find the file

wp-includes/functions.php

and comment out this code:

// Sanity check for PHP 5.1.0-
if ( false === $i || intval($i) < 0 ) {
if ( ! $gmt )
$i = current_time( 'timestamp' );
else
$i = time();
// we should not let date() interfere with our
// specially computed timestamp
$gmt = true;
}

Thanks to gosunatxrea for providing a solution.