My family and I spent a week on a sailing boat chartered from Sail Ionian in Vliho on Lefkas. The boat was in excellent condition and everything worked, but I will make a point of ensuring that I can stand up in some part of the cabin of any boat I hire in the future. The attention and assistance from Di and Neil and the rest of their staff was matchless; nothing was too much trouble for them. They came out to help us at 9pm one evening and I heard other stories of their willingness to assist, including driving 15 miles in a rib to untangle an anchor chain. Very friendly too.
We spent the week largely circulating around Meganisi, returning frequently to the various coves and bays of its North coast for moorings, anchorages and swimming in the sun-warmed shallows. Sun-warmed shallows are desirable because, though it is not generally cold, the sea around the Ionian islands is mostly rather deep. After a week sailing these seas it was amusing to reflect that at any indicated depth less than 10 metres I was starting to get twitchy, since the bottom comes up rather quickly in many places, just like the land above the water, which is predominantly steeply rugged maquis. We also visited Kalamos and a couple of ports on Lefkas itself, as well as stopping to swim in the bay on the South side of Scorpios.
Food and drink were generally good, with some highlights (for me) including a white snapper at Stavros' in Vathi, greek salad almost everywhere we went and a mousaka in Porto Spiglia (in the bay beneath Spartakhori). The low point was the Dolphinia restaurant in Sivota where the lamb Kleftiko turned out to be a lamb stew with chips wrapped in foil - this was possibly due to the meal being taken during the Greece-Poland football match, so disabling all the men on the island.
We failed to see any dolphins, but the water was full of fish and crab life, as well as star-fish and octopi. The afternoon breeze was good for sailing most days, though we spent some afternoons just archored in a bay and swimming from the boat. Winds, when significant, were 10-20 knots with the notable exception of a storm on Tuesday afternoon which blew up to 28 knots (that I saw) and brought half an hour of torrential rain, which was almost the only rain we saw all week. Mostly the weather was hot and sunny with daytime temperatures up to 30 centigrade.
We took up sailing, a few years ago, with the idea that sailing holidays would be cheaper than skiing, only to both sail and ski for a couple of years. Now I think that although we still fancy skiing, the sailing holiday is a perfect alternative, working out slightly less expensive and more relaxing. Both holidays are made difficult by the need to fit around school holidays; this trip's cost was dominated by the air travel, rather than the boat charter - staying another week would almost have been cost-effective by offsetting the differential price of the air fares against another week of boat hire. I'm sure we'll do it all again soon.
Checking on Panoramio now I'm back home I find that I need not have taken a camera with me, since so many of the scenes I recorded are already available online. All I needed to do was to photograph my family in swimming attire and photshop them into the relevant images. Pride of place on my desk at the moment are two pictures from the holiday, both of the aircraft we flew out on, taken at Gatwick and Preveza respectively. In Greece the sun sparkles off the leading edge of the wing and my family look relaxed in sun hats; in London the sky is grey, the tarmac wet and everyone looks a bit down-trodden. If the sunny picture isn't enough to lighten my mood, then I look at the other one too.
Thursday 14 June 2012
Forget oil, peak maintainability already past
Many (26?) years ago a new Hewlett Packard HP4L printer came into our lives and, other than a drum replacement due to low-usage, has worked faultlessly in all that time. This is not our only printer, but it produces clean, permanent black and white printing on A4 paper, essentially for the cost of the paper.
Just before going on holiday last week, half way through a physics GCSE paper, the usual quiet sound (as of a page being gently torn, followed by a few clicks and a hum) was replaced by a strident grinding noise.
Out came the (perfectly standard) screwdrivers, the Web immediately produced a PDF service manual, off came the lid and, after finding where to defeat the case-off detection sensors, it became apparent that the problem was the first nylon gear in the power chain, on the motor spindle. Close examination revealed that it had cracked, probably due to the ingress of a small hard black particle wedging two teeth apart and cracking the gear down to the shaft. Fifteen minutes on ebay and a replacement was sourced from the US for around ten pounds sterling. Yesterday it arrived; it was fitted this morning, and the physics paper set off to printing just where it had left off.
This demonstrates the best of the Internet and the original printer design, but it is not the sort of happy outcome that can be relied on with modern equipment. For colour printing we have had a selection of mostly free, cast-off printers over the years. The most recent to die was an HP 7310, a fine printer except for a serious design flaw in the too-fragile ink carriage. This results in a difficult repair job when an escaped spring pierces (very precisely) a flexible PCB, killing the print cartridge detection mechanism. No-where on the Web is there a tear-down of this printer, although there are several signs that many people have searched on a variety of forums. Having learnt how to do the tear down my self, I can see why it is not described anywhere and, having been unable to get the spare part, I haven't yet tried to reverse the procedure.
All that iStuff is designed, AFAIK, to be virtually impossible to take apart without specialised tools and my experience of repairing compact cameras is that the guts of these wear out so fast that it is barely worth the trouble of fixing them before the lenses jam because the gear wear stalls the motors.
We have gone wrong somewhere. My HP4L is still a useful device, it fills a niche in my printing needs, but all the more youthful devices have gone the way of dust either through (criminal) use of DRM which expires the ink before it is even used, or through simple design flaws and lack of design for maintenance.
</rant>
Just before going on holiday last week, half way through a physics GCSE paper, the usual quiet sound (as of a page being gently torn, followed by a few clicks and a hum) was replaced by a strident grinding noise.
Out came the (perfectly standard) screwdrivers, the Web immediately produced a PDF service manual, off came the lid and, after finding where to defeat the case-off detection sensors, it became apparent that the problem was the first nylon gear in the power chain, on the motor spindle. Close examination revealed that it had cracked, probably due to the ingress of a small hard black particle wedging two teeth apart and cracking the gear down to the shaft. Fifteen minutes on ebay and a replacement was sourced from the US for around ten pounds sterling. Yesterday it arrived; it was fitted this morning, and the physics paper set off to printing just where it had left off.
This demonstrates the best of the Internet and the original printer design, but it is not the sort of happy outcome that can be relied on with modern equipment. For colour printing we have had a selection of mostly free, cast-off printers over the years. The most recent to die was an HP 7310, a fine printer except for a serious design flaw in the too-fragile ink carriage. This results in a difficult repair job when an escaped spring pierces (very precisely) a flexible PCB, killing the print cartridge detection mechanism. No-where on the Web is there a tear-down of this printer, although there are several signs that many people have searched on a variety of forums. Having learnt how to do the tear down my self, I can see why it is not described anywhere and, having been unable to get the spare part, I haven't yet tried to reverse the procedure.
All that iStuff is designed, AFAIK, to be virtually impossible to take apart without specialised tools and my experience of repairing compact cameras is that the guts of these wear out so fast that it is barely worth the trouble of fixing them before the lenses jam because the gear wear stalls the motors.
We have gone wrong somewhere. My HP4L is still a useful device, it fills a niche in my printing needs, but all the more youthful devices have gone the way of dust either through (criminal) use of DRM which expires the ink before it is even used, or through simple design flaws and lack of design for maintenance.
</rant>
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