Diary

I thought I would have a little adventure so I installed Ubuntu Linux on my lovely Vaio laptop, to dual-boot with WinXP.

Amazingly enough, nothing went wrong.  I did all the necessary disk partitioning like the instructions said - setting up partitions for Linux, for a swap file and for a shared Windows/Linux data area.  I then installed Ubuntu and it all worked beautifully.  I was presented with a lovely brown interface thingy.

But I wasn't quite satisfied.  I decided I would uninstall it all and change some of my partitions sizes, and perhaps remove this weird GRUB thingy from my MBR and use the Windows dual booty wotnot instead of the weird GRUBBy thingy.  And that's when it all went wrong.

Does anyone know how to repair a MBR when you don't have the original Windows XP CD (because it was preinstalled on the laptop, not because I'm running anything dodgy) and therefore can't use a Recovery Console?

Subject: Your petition has been rejected

From: 10 Downing Street (team@petitions.pm.gov.uk)

Date: 16 March 2007 14:20

Hi,



     I'm sorry to inform you that your petition has been rejected.



     Your petition was classed as being in the following categories:



        * Intended to be humorous, or has no point about government

     policy

     If you wish to edit and resubmit your petition, please follow

     the following link:     
	[link to petition]
     You have four weeks in which to do this, after which your

     petition will appear in the list of rejected petitions.

I mentioned the other day how our washing machine had started playing up and refused to enter its spin cycle without the application of a walloping great kick, which occasionally leads to the house fuse box

exploding.

Anyway, this evening I decided to fix it. Here are some very bad photographs (don't blame me - blame the low light levels and the phone they were taken on) of my superior DIY skills. This was a delicate operation that took nearly an hour. Clicky any piccy for biggy.

Firstly, here is the broken washing machine before the repair procedure. See how horribly broken it looks?

So, step one is to scalp the evil beastie to allow access to the interior. Here I've completed this delicate step and you can see the brains and muscle of the robot:

The washing machine clearly looks unhappy at this process so you have to cheer it up by unscrewing and removing its front control panel:

After that, the best thin is to slit it up both sides and allow its entrails to spill out on to the floor:

Usually at this point of time in a major DIY project such as this I manage to injure myself. However, now that I am much much more adept at these things, this time I didn't, which was something of a relief.

Actually, that was a lie. I did injure myself really. Watch out for those sharp edges, people!

At this point in time it's best to patch oneself up, take a sharp knife and sever the remaining innards that are holding the guts in. The washing machine guts, not my guts:

This, of course, leaves the empty exoskeleton, which doesn't make such good eating, although some people like to cook it in a hot oven - say 220 degrees Centigrade - until the fat bubbles and the skin goes crackly. Should take about 40 minutes:

Take all the constituent parts outside to air them:

Finally, find the fault, fix it, put all the bits back together, move the washing machine back inside and plumb it in again, give it a quick lick of paint and Bob's your father-in-law. You now have a fully working washing machine that is not only quieter than it was before but also spins faster and is more efficient. What more can you ask for:

Someone who'll remain nameless has reversed into the back of my MR2 at a million miles per hour.