Peak District Cottages – Chris's Blog

Log Burning Stove in Shippon

Old and New PCs

Not a good few days.

Its snowing ‘again’ so it was out to clear the drive to our Peak district cottages this morning (before breakfast). At least it seems to have nearly gone already.

The log burning stove in Shippon is still giving us problems. Although hopefully I have now got to the bottom of the problem at  last.  It seems that the wood we have been burning has not been dry enough. Don’t ask me what the difference between this year’s and last year’s is.  I can’t tell the difference.  The wood has been stored for at least 2 years so should be dry.  Anyhow what has been happening (apparently) is that we have had a build up of  creosote in the chimney and with the damp weather we have had over the last month or so this has lead to liquid forming in the flue and running down it, past the fire cement and onto the top of the stove.  The chimney sweep immediately identified the problem, fully swept the flue and told us to burn a anti-creosote log immediately afterwards. This we did and it seems to have solved the problem (I hope).

I have just purchased a new computer for my office.  I was hoping to put off purchasing one for another 6 months but there was a rumor that Microsoft might be stopping XP so I thought I better get a new computer now.  I wanted XP rather than the new Windows 7 which I don’t want to touch for at least another 1-2 years (whenever service pack 2 is out).  The new computer is fine but I now have the task of transferring the data about 500 GBytes (simple job) and all the applications/utilities/plug-in (massive job) to the new computer.  I estimate I may have something in the order of 100 applications/utilities/plug ins to transfer.  All these need installing and setting up with preferences etc, so the job is quite daunting. For instance the software I use to manage our web site took over 4 hours to get working correctly. Other software of course takes minutes (once I have figured out that it needs moving). I have a server that holds all (or most) of our software so once I have identified something to move I can usually find it on the server and install from there. Other times of course I have to download it from the Internet, find the ‘key’ and then configure it.  It will take months to get everything across.  I now have the main software and have now switched to the new computer but need to keep the other one up and running as I slowly migrate.

Blue seems to be behaving himself since is escapade last week.  In fact if anything he seems to be sticking to me like glue.