Philip Nicosia

For once the weather got it right predicting severe weather for the area and on waking up this morning all you could see was snow and lots of it.

Being in the UK that means schools are closed, airports are closed, roads blocked, mass disruption to public transport amongst other things as we simply aren’t prepared for any of this.

Personally I love the snow and wish we had it more often and for longer. I’d already decided last night that I wouldn’t work today and would set about building a snowman which I haven’t done for years.

Our pets don’t quite know what to make of all this, especially the rabbits who ventured out for 30 seconds and ran back into their nice warm hutch.

The cat walked slowly across the path with her little feet buried in the snow until she thought it was too cold and decided to run straight back in.

Later I walked around the lake and took some pictures which you can see in the Gallery section.

Finally 5 visits, 1 missed appointment, 3 different engineers and 7 days later British Gas have now fixed our boiler.

The cause of our breakdown? A faulty ignition lead that had a short in it once it was warm and would tell the boiler that the pilot light wasn’t lit so it stopped the gas from getting through and would just constantly click trying to light itself even though it was lit.

Such a lot of hassle for such a minor problem.

Before when I wrote about Dirk Benedict’s books I said that Amazon.co.uk didn’t list ‘And Then We Went Fishing’ on their UK site and that if you wanted to buy this book you would have to go to Amazon.com.

Well I checked today and you can now get it on Amazon.co.uk but if you want to buy it you better be pretty rich. It is listed as from £366.98!

Amazon.com is a bit cheaper at from $199.98!

That’s just totally outrageous but I guess it is market forces prevailing.

Anyway, if you really want this book then you can get it as an eBook for $8.96 at eReader.com

A much much cheaper option.

Description from the site:

From Dirk Benedict, author of Confessions of a Kamikaze Cowboy, comes an equally brilliant autobiographical look at fatherhood, fate, and forgiveness.

And Then We Went Fishing is an intertwining of two unique and engrossing stories. The first revolves around Dirk and his wife Toni’s unexpectedly complicated attempt at home birthing, and the second around Dirk’s coming of age in Montana and the violent death of his father. Tales of love, friendship, hatred, and fatherhood careen together to explode in front of him in the taking of his dad’s life and the birth of his first child.

Dirk Benedict’s writing style is lively, creative, and always engaging. His use of humor, pathos, and imagery is masterful. He has taken two rites of passage in his life and woven them together to produce a story that’s every bit as entertaining as it is moving. Given the author’s unique storytelling ability and well-honed sense of timing, And Then We Went Fishing will keep the reader hooked from page one to its powerful and poignant conclusion.

“Life and death are the themes of this intriguing book…. The intertwining of what happened in the past with the events of the present makes for an excellent story. The humor, drama, and frustration that Benedict experiences results in a moving book for all levels of readers.”
LIBRARY JOURNAL

We’ve got a Warmworld HE 70 boiler which unfortunately broke down a few days ago. We also have a service contract with British Gas so called their engineers out to fix it. When the engineer arrived he said to me “has anyone told you that this boiler is obsolete and the company doesn’t exist anymore so we can’t get spares for it?”.

To cut a long story short, after the 3rd visit it was diagnosed that we needed a new sequence control board which they didn’t have and as it was obsolete probably wouldn’t be able to get one and we would need a new bioler. I was told the call would be left open and their obsolete spares department would search the country for one but that would take about a week before I even got an answer. I was also told that if I found one they wouldn’t be able to fit it as they didn’t supply it and I’d have to make my own arrangements.

Meanwhile we freeze. Anyway, a quick search on Google for Warmworld Boiler Spares proved fruitless so I thought I would do a search for Warmworld UK Ltd to see if there was any details on them being taken over by a different company.

Imagine my surprise when the first result was Warmworld.co.uk

The company does exist so I rang them and asked if they had the spare part and was told yes, its in stock, part number BS7707 and it costs £62.09.

I explained to the gentleman on the phone that we had a British Gas Service contract and that we were told the company no longer exists to which he told me, yes they do (obviously) they have the spare parts and they supply to British Gas.

So I called British Gas, gave them all the details and they sent them off by email to their spares dept and was told they would contact me. When they didn’t call back it was explained to me that they aim to read emails and return calls within 48 hours.

I could get the part delivered to me before they even read their email!

So if British Gas or anyone else says you can’t get spare parts for Warmworld boilers anymore that’s rubbish. Warmworld can be reached on 0117 949 8800.

Don’t let the engineer leave your house without giving him the number and insisting the spares team call them while he is there otherwise you may end up cold like us for days to come.

It looks like Google has fixed the spamming issue with Google docs. When you do a site search of Google docs it only returns 1 result whereas before it was a couple of thousand url only listings.

Google docs was being used successfully to spam Google and gained many top 10 competitive results which contained little more than an external link to an affiliate site.

It took them a while to sort out and it must have been embarrassing for them as a lot of these search terms were for adult themed site.

I guess it was good for the spammers for a while but like anything obvious was destined to end. I bet some of them made a ton of money though.