Engineering changes

A cold grey day again, and the house gas supply was switched off again after breakfast for the last stage of the job of replacing the street's gas pipes. There as a few more houses to do, and then the mains supply is moved completely from the old supply line to the new. We've been loaned a little electric fan heater to take the chill off the house if needs be. A nice touch. I can't imagine how the switch-over is engineered. If there was time to ask the guys working outside I'm sure I'd get an explanation, but they're busy  today, working to their deadline. 

A couple of days ago when they were taking a breather from carefully uncovering pipes excavated, I stopped to chat with them about it. The oldest wide bore pipes, through which the new plastic ones are threaded are made of a substance called 'ductile iron'. it's harder than cast iron and doesn't shatter when hit with a hammer. Holes can be cut into it using a powerful circular saw, for the insertion of control valves, and now, new pipes. There are two generations of narrow bore pipework under the road, connected to the old main pipe. One is made of steel, and the other is made of steel coated in plastic. 

From their experience of working on them, they'd learned that the plastic coated steel pipes deteriorate more than the plain kind. Is this to do with the poorer quality of the stuff with the plastic coasting? Or is there something about having a plastic coating that generates problems? If water with a consistent acidity  seeps in under the plastic layer, this might create conditions that cause steel erosion, which don't exist in when bare steel is surrounded by soil with a more complex changing chemistry. High quality all plastic pipes will engineered to perform more durably, no doubt, even able to convey other kinds of gas under pressure to consumers in the long run, methane, and hopefully 'green' hydrogen, the sooner the better.

I did some more work on the bi-lingual funeral service after breakfast this morning and had a long talk on the 'phone with the son of the deceased, a family originally from the Preseli Mountains in Pembrokeshire. Dad had trained as a mechanic on National Service not long before it was discontinued. Being a farmer's son he had a head start with using and fixing machinery, and was able to deal with any kind of vehicle during his working life. Mechanics today have less scope to learn how to fix problems on modern vehicles given the rise of complex electronic systems components, made in closed modules. You can't step into a workshop and fashion a broken component on a lathe. it's a matter of finding a serial number and ordering it on-line. The switch to electric propulsion will see further reduction in the number of components for a mechanic to work on. I imagine that maintaining and restoring vintage and redundant vehicles will remain a labour of love for those harbouring a passion for traditional mechanical engineering.  

Clare went in to the kindergarten and did her weekly session there this morning. I cooked us lunch, then made an early exit to drive to Thornhill for a funeral. By co-incidence I cuaght up with the hearse at the Gabalfa interchange and followed it all the way to the Briwnant Chapel parking area. The next of kind had travelled down from a village near Hungerford. The deceased was a single man, living alone. Only five mourners were present. He got the same send-off as he would have done if the chapel had been full to capacity. Nobody deserves less.

I reached home, sat down in the lounge, drank a cup of coffee, fell asleep for three quarters of an hour, then went for my walk of the day. Having written a text for tomorrow's refection on the way of the cross, I was looking for ideas about presentation. As I walked, I remembered taking photos of the Via Crucis in Taormina in Sicily, two days after arriving there for a month's locum duty in December 2012. Fifteen remarkable sculptures representing Stations of the Cross made by a local artist are set beside flights of stairs ascending 300m from the town to the summit of Monte San Rocco. 

After supper, I found the original photos archived on a hard drive, re-sized and corrected them for over exposure, recorded my reflection, and put words and images together into a four and half minute video. It's a lot easier when you've got all the photos you need to hand before starting! The pictures wee taken with a Canon Powershot G9 camera I'd won in a computer magazine subscribers' prize draw just before travelling. It was quite a sophisticated point and shoot camera for those days, but many of the outdoor images look over-exposed and needed post-processing. 

This is easy enough to correct, usually by enhancing shadows or boosting the black colour content. It's a common enough problem due to high levels of ultra violet light even in cloudy scenes. A skylight filter could compensate for this with a film camera but seems to have no impact with a digital camera's automatic settings. If there's a compensatory setting, I haven't found it yet, so post-processing is essential, and time consuming, but worthwhile.

The Windows 10 video editor is a simply set out and easy to use once you've found out how it works. I had to learn it from scratch when I was in Ibiza last year and found that it lacked a built-in user guide. In addition, it's designed to work primarily with files stored in the Cloud, and is much slower accessing any file stored on the PC's hard drive desktop, which is naturally where I put files acquired while I work on a project. I still store material on my hard drive, and use Cloud storage as a backup. Microsoft designs its operating system around giving priority to using Cloud files, even when using apps on the PC itself.  It's noticeably slower when accessing files locally stored. I've not found a way around it, and it's frustrating. In reality, from switch-on to the document editing cursor is as slow now as it was fifteen years ago, despite fabulously faster hardware. For speed of use, a Chromebook or Linux device is far superior.