Little-mum becomes Sophie, a far more suitable name for her – here’s a pic, done with my camphone, so not brilliant, but not awful either….

Also, as you can probably see – draft1 of my 50s themed homepage is done – VERY early draft, I hope it turns out to be. Something a little more, um, crafted will hopefully be the final result.

Oh and Lois‘ moving over to WordPress too.

Carol is still dead, but I’ve not even tried to fix her yet. I’m waiting for Nancy’s upgrade to finish (that should be today), but to accelerate it I’ll poke Adam some more…. He’s migrating his home-directory to a new 80gig disk.  This will free up the 40gig disk I loaned him back last year when his previous home-directory, an aging 13gig drive, started showing the strain. I then plan to migrate carol’s SCSI array to the bin. It works, but it’s NOISY! Real Noisy! Kind of a cross between fingernails-on-blackboard and drilling plate-steel! It’s so bad that I can tell if Carol’s running or not from the room next door (my bedroom) with the all doors closed!

Martha’s printer died today. It was a pretty Canon edge-to-edge photo-printer (with an impressive 14ppm in B/W, 11ppm in full colour) that I bought about 3-and-a-half years ago. To say the printer died isn’t exactly fair, the print-head expired, but with new printheads costing more than the printer is actually worth now, it’s probably not going to get replaced.  I know it’s the print-head via several different tests – but for those in a similar situation, this is how I worked it out.

While I don’t own a maintainance manual for the Canon, I do have (rather anally) the maintainance routines pretty well comitted to memory (how many cryptic flashes on its single multi-coloured LED-cum-power button mean what) – 8-rapid-Orange + 1-long-Green mean "The head-cleaning print-well is full".

The easiest way around this is to reset the "well-count", which I did as so:

1. Turn off the printer.
2. Press and hold the RESUME button, then press and hold the POWER button.
3. Release the RESUME button, then press and release the RESUME button two more times in succession. (youre still holding the POWER button during this). The printer mechanics will move momentarily.

   You are now in Service mode.

4. Pressing the RESUME key will select a function; for example, pressing RESUME 4 times will select the clear waste ink counter function. The lamp will alternate color with each key press.

(Why 4 times? Because you’re navigating down an (invisible) menu which reads something like:

1. Service/factory test printout, including ink sensor check
2. EEPROM info printout
3. EEPROM initialization
4. Clear the waste-ink counter
5. Printer model setting. (more selections beyond this, but I can’t recall what they do!)

Upon printing now, of the four individual cart’s it had, only Magenta would work, so it only printed the red-tones of the pictures. Cleaning out the nozzles with proper print-head cleaning fluid (I bought a bottle about 12 months ago and it’s sat on a shelf until last night, when I used about half of it) revitalised Cyan and Yellow, but still no Black (what kind of printer makes black out of all the colours?! I’ve seen them you know, hidious evil old Epson things).

So, I removed the printhead and gave it a gentle non-intrusive clean – with the same results.  A slightly more intrusive clean showed up the problem. It looked like something had crawled inside the print-head and died in the black channel.  It was actually just globbed up ink, at some point in the past week (since I last used it) the cartridge had sprung a top-side air-leak and dumped its load into the printhead and which had promptly spent all its efforts turning what which had not been thrown into the waste-well into icky-black ink-jam!

Cleaning all this out and refitting the head worked wonders. It printed perfectly (if somewhat noisy, sounds of catching plastic on each carrage run) – and it looked like I was the proud owner of a glossy little test-print, until about an inch from the bottom of the page, when the printer just stopped and started "morse-coding" at me in its own little canon-varient (as described above) but this time 8-rapid-Orange instead of 7.

This is worse, far worse, this implies the printhead is, effectivly, dead.  But I wanted to be sure as I don’t trust technology….

Hermione’s printer happens to be a Canon Smart-Base MPC-400 which takes the identical same ink and printheads so I did a quick swapout to see what would happen. The MPC-400 is a much bigger and more expensive printer (but slower and does not do edge-to-edge), as it has an intergrated colour photo-copier and scanner, but the (happy) side effect of this is that it has more than two buttons and a single LED – it posesses a full diagnostic LCD with real English words!  Fitting the printhead to that imformed me that "Wrong Cart. Present" – which is a polite way of saying, "Your printhead is fscked".  Hermione’s printhead and cart combo, in my little Canon did wonders and the thing prints like it’s brand new, again confirming my workings/guesswork!

Swapped all the parts back, I now have a printer that’s as good as dead, and 4 brand-new ink-carts for it, opened and drying out.

I just hope Hermione runs out of ink soon so I can put these in her so they don’t go to waste! I’ll chase Lois to print out this 30 page/100% coverage printjob that needs doing, that should start it on the right road – I say "start" as we fitted brand-new cart’s to the MPC about 2 weeks ago and not really had many big print-jobs run since then, but I’ve got lots of DVDs I’ve run for clients that need labels too, so I’m sure we’ll exhaust it quick enough! (MPC-400’s don’t like network printjobs, for some reason. I blame the stupid Win32 feedback applet they make you run!) 

In other news, my Decree Absolute arrived in yesterdays post – so I’m officially single (well, unmarried!). I am glad, very. But it kind of feels weird, like I’ve finally thrown away a pair of old shoes that don’t fit, have leaks, were uncomfortable, are a mess and that I wouldn’t wear ever again anyway. I know that I don’t want or need them, but I’m still a little sentimental about it all….

Of course, there’s the "cooling off period" which they phrase so lovely – "sufficent cause be shown to the Court within six weeks from the making thereof why the said decree should not be made absolute" – but I doubt that Nicola will be pulling that into effect somehow being as two weeks ago when I phoned my solicitors to chase it, they told me she had already actioned it which I was glad of, soonest done and all, but I would have loved to have actually sprung it on her(Nicola) myself as I suspect she would not have been expecting such an action from me!

If anyone reading this is ever in need of a good divorce solicitor, I can heartily recommend Mrs. Carmelita Ardren of Raworths, Harrogate and Knaresborogh, North Yorkshire. She did a fantastic job – I got very lucky – I found her/them through nothing more than a random Google many years ago (it’s been a long divorce!) and they have been truely-Truely fantastic.  They gave me a little tickbox questionaire-thang to fill in at the end of it all too, it was very cute!

Finally, we have a new cat, currently called "Little-Mum" (nurgh! That’s going!) – it’s another Cats Protection foster cat (yes, the CPL website sucks if you’re not using IE – the kind of site that makes you want to gouge your eyes out – we are begging them to let us redesign it, but the guy who did it, a TRUELY LOVELY bloke called Ron Lowe, who owns a local vets, and admits, "I enjoy tinkering, but I’m not a web-designer", is really fond of it.

They told Lois when she was going to collect Little-Mum that she was all cute and nice. Well, she’s VERY cute, but hardly nice! Lois has HUGE holes in her hand, her arm and most of the clothes she was wearing at the time. The injuries are seriously hampering her movement.  Thankfully she took her grade-8 clarinet exam only a week ago so there’s no appointments, that I can think of, that this will effect. But it looks so sore! She slept with a ice-pack on it last night just to get to sleep!

Little-mum is only a year old, and teeny-tiny (photos will follow, as soon as we get her tame enough to bring out of the training-cage) but has not-too-recently dropped a litter of 5 (hence her name, I guess) – she looks (and is, really) too little to be having babies, but she was stray – so stray it’d be called feral – so no-one really cared for her or anything – she adopted some people who let her live in their basement, and took care of rehoming the kittens when they were born – including keeping two themselves – but they never wanted to keep the mother.

We’ll get her nutured and calm her down and make her all loving and then we’ll work on finding her a new home, so we can do it all again to the next one. It’s very rewarding, but sometimes hard to let go of an animal you have come to consider a part of the family.

This is the first kitten that’s arrived since I’ve started this journal, but won’t be the last, so if you like pictures of previously unloved cats that have been rescued and are looking for new homes – you now know where to come!

Flip, that was a long entry! I’m off to do something else now, this may be sleep, or maybe not….