Well, I’m back from Cornwall.

The journey wasn’t too bad with only a few heavy showers and one traffic jam.

This morning before I left I saw my Dad’s ADSL modem breifly try to sync with the exchange and then cut out again. BT are probably just testing their equipment before the proper installation happens.

Anyway, as you may have noticed, I’ve uploaded all my diary entries and have also put all my photos online on the Nikon gallery, though I broke Gallery/PHP with my first attempt. I’ve also factored out the events into another album which includes a very much abridged collection of the Culdrose Air Day photographs.

Back to work in the morning… blurgh!

It was a partly drizzly day today, grey and a bit dreary at times.

Despite this I decided to take a bit of a detour on the way to the petrol station in Helston via a circuitous route which covered most of the eastern side of The Lizard peninsula: Mullion -> St.Keverne -> Porthoustock -> Portallow -> Manacan -> St.Martins -> Gweek -> Trewenack -> Helston. Lots of miles travelling on narrow Cornish roads, some where the follage brushing both sides of the car continueously.

After we got home the weather was kind enough to allow my Dad and myself to dyson out the car before it closed in again.

So, now it’s gone 11pm and it’s time to go to sleep so I can be ready for the journey home in the morning.

I know that on Monday I’ve got to try to sort out the mess caused by the power fault which I was informed had taken out our machine room at work. On Tuesday I have a visit from an AV company to quote yet again for the lecture theatre stuff. What fun.

Half decent weather. Yay!

We went off to Charlestown to see the tall ship and maritime museum there.

On the whole, it’s not that brilliant with mostly junk from ship wrecks which is poorly marked and in no real order. As for Charlestown, well it’s not picturesque and has only one set of public loos which are across the harbour and up the coast path on the top of a cliff. Not the most convenient place, especially if you’re disabled.

The visit was also marred by my Mum having one of her less good days, especially when in the museum where her only thought was where the exit was and why weren’t we going for food yet.

After lunch, because my Mum wouldn’t get out of the car and wanted to go, we left Charlestown and started going homewards. However, my Dad and I hatched a plan to visit somewhere else on the way. To this end I took some turnings and eventually made our way to St.Anthony’s Head via St. Mawes.

The views from St. Anthony of the Carrick Roads and the eastern side of The Lizard are spectacular on a clear day as today was (despite the showers ).

There’s still no ADSL for my Dad, so he’ll have to cope on his own with getting it working as BT Wholesale only work during the week and I go home on Sunday.

It started off with drenching drizzle with periods of sporadic heavy rain which then slowly dried up as the day progressed. It stayed very much dingey and overcast, however.

The highlight of the day was getting out of the house to go shopping. That’s the trouble with Cornwall. Unless you want to either get soaked walking or want to pay lots to visit a mediocre theme park, there’s not a lot to do when the weather’s against you. This is especially true now with my Mum being very much like a five year old except without the bounce. i.e. a very short attention span and has to have a eye kept on her at all times so that she doesn’t wander off on a whim and very little thought of longer term consiquences of her actions, always living for now. She does still have better days but these are becoming fewer.

One word:- Rain.

OK, there was more to the day. It wasn’t worth going anywhere special. However, we did go down to Redruth to get some steel box tube and some U bolts so that my Dad can build a frame to allow him to fit the bike carrier we have onto his roof rack.

Because of heavy traffic on the road between Helston and Redruth we decided to divert over to Pool and see how Tesco had rebuilt the old “Big W” warehouse to be a new Tesco’s Extra. This was a tactical error for two reasons: firstly, I saw that they were selling decent colour inkjet printers cheaply so I decided to buy one.. And so did my Dad. Secondly, it meant that we reached Andrews during their lunch hour so we could only get the U bolts and not the steel.

The Epson Stylus C66 prints photos reasonably, actually well for a 4 head printer, which is all I’ll be using it for. It’s silly how the cost of the printer including ink is only £25 more than the ink.

The ADSL is still not up and running after a week. Of course, we can’t chivy up Tiscali to remind BT Wholesale about the connection until Tiscali’s deadline of the 4th August. I wouldn’t put it past BT Wholesale to have lost the order or didn’t have the Mullion exchange ready for ADSL on its published ready for service date.

Today was the usual visit to Meriel and Chris.

Much chatting and putting the world to rights ensued.

I didn’t have to worry about missing the good weather on “the best day of the week” as it wasn’t that good today anyway.

The weather isn’t playing fair. It’s cold, damp and not fun. The forecast for the rest of the week if cold and wet, except for tomorrow when I’ll inside chatting with Chris and Meriel and can’t take advantage of the better weather. Typical!

The only excitement today was a trip to ASDA. Other than that, due to the weather, it’s been game playing time.

My Dad’s ADSL is still not up and running yet so I can’t make sure everything’s set up on that front yet either, which is a bit frustrating. It also means that I can’t download and install OpenOffice.org for him either.

It rained. OK, it didn’t rain all the time but a lot of it.

I discovered the addictiveness of minesweeper and played on my Tréo for most of the day, hardly listening to Broadcasting House and the Grand Prix.

This evening I had a phone call from Meriel and have arranged to visit her and Chris on Tuesday.

Rubbish weather so stayed indoors.

I watched the Grand Prix qualifier and then played “Freelancer”, which is one of the 3 for £20 games I bought a couple of weeks ago.

“Freelancer” is slightly like “Elite” in that it’s a space trading and combat game. However, that’s basically where the similarity ends. “Freelancer” isn’t a patch on “Elite” as it’s not at all open ended, it’s harder to control and doesn’t have a good ship tracking scanner. Oh, and the scripted story and cut scenes are tedious and a bore.

It was a day of good intentions.

I had intended to have a nice long walk this afternoon around the edge of Predannack airfield before the rains came and made the paths muddy. However, events prevented this.

I had not been happy about the transplanted CPU and motherboard I’d brought down to upgrade my Dad’s machine as his old case has the power supply sitting about 1cm above the top of the CPU fan. The CPU during normal operation was sitting at a rather unhealthy 68°C. So it was decided to pop down to the local computer shop and buy a new, cheap case, preferably without a power supply as we have two of those already.

So, this morning we go down to Gigabyte Computers… They have no cases in stock other than those ready to be built into new PCs for customers but they are expecting a delivery of them by 2pm. So, went away, had lunch and came back. Still no delivery but the proprietor kindly offers to sell us one of the cases he has ready for pre-built machines.

The upshot of all this dashing around was that it was getting late in the day. Add to this the fact that sea fog was rolling in and I gave up on the walk and instead moved the guts of my Dad’s PC from the old case to the new. The CPU is now far happier and runs at a pleasant 48°C.

The evening was spent getting frustrated by dial-up modems when trying to download some utils for my Dad. I’ve still not managed to get the Palm Desktop downloaded due to the combination of Palm.com’s european website being broken and modems dropping the line 51% through the 15MB download. Grrr.