All of a sudden Britain has taken another American cultural icon, ‘Black Friday’.
I and most people I know don’t know what that is nor what it means. Well we do now. It’s a sales promotion based on the Friday following something called ‘Thanksgiving’. I have no idea what thanksgiving is other than it must be a religious feast. There is no comparable celebration in Britain or Europe for that matter. More arcane therefore is the strange name Black Friday, not a good name, and where did it came from?

Anyway, it all went wrong in that people were acting like it was the last turkey in the shop and pushing, shoving and even flooring others or being floored. Not a pretty site and for what? To save 20 pounds on a product that wasn’t your first choice anyway. One major company only had the 20 percent discount for the 10 minutes from midnight. After that it was normal prices. Crazy crackers.

The whole of the Western world runs on consumerism so I shouldn’t really complain. What would we do without it? Work two days a week and be almost as well off?

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I have been busy this week replacing radiator valves. Most of them weep from the wheel flange but there is no way to re-pack the gland. They are not made to repair, they are made to fail and be bought again and replaced. Consumerism?
It should of course have created a days work for a plumber but I was let down by two of them so decided to do it myself. It wasn’t an easy decision as I don’t like plumbing; correction, I hate plumbing. In the past I have found that whatever part I repair or renew an associated part will break and need working on too.
Anyway, a couple of days ago I set to having purchased the valves and checked that the olive ring nuts were the same thread as my existing ones so It would be a simple exchange of valves and not a cut-the-olive-off job. It’s plastic pipe and removing crushed olive rings is a nightmare. The olive would have to be removed to change the nut if it wasn’t the same thread you understand.

After turning the boiler off and draining down I replaced 10 valves but then found that although they all looked the same two of them were a larger diameter thread, Sugar. I had to take them back to the store and rummage through their stock to find two correct ones. An hour out of a busy day. As I said, something always goes wrong. I turned the water back on at 17:10 and found two small leaks. For once the magic dust settled on me and so with a little brutal torque with the spanner both leaks stopped. The heating was back on by 18:30. The radiators all get hot but only eventually so it seems I need to throttle back the valves on the first to warm up to balance the system but that can be done over the next few days can it not.

A day of my life in that tray

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Here is the solution to the quiz if you haven’t already de-coded it yourselves.
I can’t type it out so have written it out and photographed it instead.

One-Off-Pad solution

Without the OOP list that is only used once it is impossible to decode the message. It can’t be broken.
What we can do strangely is back engineer it and get it to decode into any message that we like. In some countries It may even fool a judge into believing that was the message you sent. I will have a think about that one 🙂