Michael Clarke

Yesterday I decided that since the weather was so nice it’d be a good idea to go for a nice bike ride. One of the guys who works in the call center, Vlad, showed interest in a bike ride also having been a bit of a keen cyclist before some woman drove over him!

So, we met at Sun about 3pm with plenty of water and every tool under the sun that we could possible need. The plan was to cycle to Fleet, then around Fleet lake and perhaps pop into The Heron on the Lake for a quick pint before cycling back - no too bad at all.

Things were going excellently - we arrived at fleet and got about 1/2 way around the lake when Vlad pulled up and said - “your back tyre is looking a little low”. No problem we thought - we’ll just pump it up a bit and off we go. No such luck - the inner tube had rotated slightly in the tire resulting in the valve being at such a funny angle that no pump would attach to it. No matter what we tried we couldn’t move the inner tube around so in the end we figured we’d just have to let the whole tyre down, move the inner tube around, and then pump it up again.

We were soon pumping the tyre up again - but every time we stopped there was a loud hissing - puncture. Unfortunately the puncture turned out to be right on the valve - probably because the inner tube had pinched… No puncture repair kit was going to fix that and the only inner tube we had was too big for my tyre.

After some debating I decided the best thing to do was to leave my bike nice and hidden in the bushes. Walk home (about 1 1/2 hours), pick up the car and then drive back to pick up my bike. The only problem with this truly cunning plan was that Vlad and I weren’t entirely sure where we were… all we knew is we were approximately 1/2 way around the lake (though it later turned out to be 3/4 way around the lake - throwing our directions off slightly).

However, all was not lost. Vlad’s mobile had GPS on it and so we were able to walk roughly in the direction of home. At one point we slightly overshot our turning and the distance started increasing so I decided to take a shortcut through some woods rather than following the path. This seemed quite productive until we hit a locked gate next to a road… wondering why the gate onto the woods we’d just walked through was closed we climbed over and then saw the ‘DANGER! Army Training Grounds. DO NOT ENTER” signs in bright red coupled with the ‘Do NOT pickup suspicious objects” with a delightful picture of an explosion - oops.

Anyway… this is basically where the excitement ended. From here on we walked home, got the car, picked up the bike and then decided a BBQ was an excellent idea… the only think I’m regretting about the whole experience is that our chosen location for our attempted repairs on my bike was riddled with midgies - I now have rather red, bumpy and itchy legs I count approximately 16 bites on one leg and 44 on the other… time to go to the super market and pick up some cream for insect bites me thinks…

On a lighter note it turns out that Friday was Fraser’s (my house mate) birthday. He kept that very quiet - the only reason I found out was because I saw one of his cards…. As such we bought a cake which we all consumed after the BBQ last night.

I’m sure that if you’ve read the title for this entry you’re most confused as to what the FAT file system has to do with PrePay Credit Cards. I have to admit that if I were in your position I would also be confused, indeed I have now confused myself in an attempt to see if there are any similarities, the answer to which I have concluded to be that there are none, other than perhaps they are both mentioned in this entry and have already taken up far too much space - having successfully distracted me totally from the originally point of this blog entry.  Good Oh!

I suppose I ought to explain. Last week I decided, in my infinite wisdom, that it might be a good idea to get one of these ‘PrePay Credit Card things’ that seem to be taking off. The idea is very simple. You buy a card (Visa, MasterCard or Maestro) and top it up with money online, via another credit/debit card, in the post office, or using top-up points in shops. Having done this you go out and spend all your money in places where normal debit cards are not accepted - one such example being hotel and flight reservations etc. As far as everyone who views and uses the card is concerned you’ve got a bog standard, normal credit card… as far as you’re concerned it’s the best credit card ever as you don’t have to pay anything back!

I think there are a number of focus groups for these cards. Those people with poor credit history who can’t get a credit card. Those people who don’t want a credit card - but need an alternative for paying for hotels, flights, hire cars etc, and teenagers who want a more ‘modern’ way of dealing with their pocket money/paper round wages. Personally I decided that getting one of these cards would be an excellent way to sort out my hotels and stuff in France without having to increase my real credit card limit - and so far I have been most impressed. My only gripe with the card that I got (but this could just be a Virgin Money thing) is that, instead of having embossed numbers it has printed numbers meaning that the card says “ELECTRONIC USE ONLY” on the front in small letters. Basically this means the card can’t be used in one of those old machines where they used to take a carbon copy of your card. Ah well, gone are the good old days I suppose.

Anyway - enough about PrePay cards. I spent this weekend programming some more stuff for MouthOS. Specifically I fixed a few bugs in my floppy disk driver (which now fully supports writing and reading of whole disk sectors) and started to implement my FAT file system driver.

I was truly amazed at how easy it was to start writing a FAT driver. Microsoft have for once (and I thought I would never ever say this) done something right and released a lovely (well, fairly good) document (found here)  which details  everything you could ever want to know about the FAT file system. Whilst FAT may be a bit antiquated nowadays it’s a nice simple file system that people writing Operating Systems can easily and quickly adapt so they don’t have to (initially) think about designing their own file system. Furthermore, because GRUB supports the FAT file system it means that you don’t have to go through all the hassle of partitioning a floppy disk into a FAT and a “MouthFS” partition… for the moment anyway.

Anyway. It’s now getting on a bit and I fear that if I don’t get to bed soon I shall have trouble getting up in the morning. Until my next post I bid you all good bye…