My car is due for both a service and it’s annual MOT. I have a knocking sound from my right front suspension that I’ll have to get fixed before it can go in for the MOT certification. I’m guessing it happened when I rode up on the kerb a couple of months ago. I thought at the time that something might have broken.

I’m going  to the National Tyre depot in town this morning to have them check over the suspension. If they have the parts to fix it, I can leave the car with them. Otherwise I’ll need to return tomorrow or later in the week.

Then, once the suspension is fixed, I can arrange for an MOT and service to be done. In the past this would have been straightforward.  For several years now I’ve had my cars loooked after by a small backstreet garage where David, the head mechanic (and usually the only one), has been very helpful.

However last year the garage owner died and there was no-one in the family left to run the place . It looked like it would close and leave David without a job. This had just happened when I rang to book a service and David was very upset.

I haven’t heard since then what happened to David. I just hope he found himself an alternative place to work.

I’ve finally begun to tackle the jungle of my gardens, starting with the front one. I’ve been hacking away at the rampant vegetation for the past few nights for about 10 minutes at a time.

Even after a small amount of work I’m beginning to make a difference. At least now when the postman makes a delivery, he can actually find my front door. OK, I exaggerate, but not by a lot.

As to why I don’t do a concentrated assault and spend a few hours at one go on it, that is more complicated. I have a number of things on the go that I want to devote regular time to. So setting aside a whole evening or weekend afternoon to the garden just doesn’t seem practical at the moment.

I also feel that building it into a regular event (another habit, like my writing project) will have more lasting results.  Maybe ‘m making excuses but that is how it seems to me.

I’m mulling over the latest offer of cable broadband but I’m hesitating because of my previous bad experience with a cable provider.

I signed up for their telephone service shortly after I moved in to my present house, when cable was still pretty new. Things went very badly then with a delay of around a month with the switch-over and terrible service from their help desk. I swore never to use them again.

Things do change though. That original cable company is long gone and the new owners swear they’ve learned the lesson of the damage poor customer service can do to them.

The other main factor pushing me in the direction of cable, at least just for broadband, is the poor quality of my ADSL line. I’m quite a distance from the local exchange and this severely limits the speed and reliability of the ADSL line.

And, of, course, it also helps the cable case that the new offer comes in at almost half the price I’m paying now.

When I got home from work yesterday, I found that my broadband service was down. It was not a disaster, merely an inconvenience. I’d emailed a colleague before leaving that I’d complete a piece of work when I got home. Now it looks like I didn’t bother and will he believe my excuse? Ah well! This is doubly annoying because I very rarely take work home, and people are aware of that.

It’s surprising how quickly we’ve become adapted to the convenience and range of opportunities presented by the internet. It is a development that truly has changed our lives, mostly for the better. Apart, of course, from the ubiquitous spam. And the very real danger of letting work invade even more of our lives.

To be able to enquire about something without having to make frustrating ‘phone calls or trek into town or to the library is terrific.

I’m in the middle of rationalising my web hosting arrangements. Over the past 3 or 4 years, I’ve ended up with paid hosting accounts with 5 different providers as well as two or three free accounts.

I have quite a number of different sites along with several domain names I haven’t yet created a site for. Even so, five hosting services is at least one too many.

The decision of which one to drop is pretty straightforward. There is a single affiliate site hosted with one of the providers and that is the only one with them. It is also the most expensive host, charging around $30 per month. Any additional sites cost $10pm each and only 3 MySQL databases are allowed. This is not competitive today.

The reason I haven’t left them before now is that until recently I had two affiliates, reducing my monthly charge to $10. Now I’m down to one affiliate and I find it hard to justify paying $20 per month for a single site. This hosting service has to go.

It’s raining again here today in Warrington. July has started off poorly after we suffered a really wet June. There were floods in many places in the UK last month. I’m fortunate to be on reasonably high ground here, so at least I’ve been spared that nightmare.

What surprised and saddened me about the flood victims was to hear so many saying that they were not insured. Having lost so many of their belongings was an even bigger blow than it might have been.

I guess that those people renting their houses are not under the same compulsion to take out insurance as those with a mortgage. Lets hope that the rains in July don’t return as heavily and that we avoid further flood damage.

On a lighter note, one result of the rain is to allow the vegetation to flourish. My neglected garden is running amok. I’ve used the bad weather as an excuse not to get to grips with it. However, I’m not going to be able to avoid it for much longer.