Summer hols days 8, 9 and 10

Well, Saturday’s weather didn’t get much better so I played Half-Life: Opposing Force for most of it.

Sunday didn’t start off very nicely either but suddenly in the late afternoon it cleared up and the skies cleared. So after finishing “Opposing Force” and having tea my Dad and mysekf went for a little walk down Polhorman Lane to the farm at the end. It was so good to stretch my legs. The muscles were very out of practise when it came to walking after being couped up for a week.

Today’s weather has been wonderful. I spent most of the morning sitting in the garden. This afternoon I drove over to Godrevy with my parents and had an enjoyable afternoon there. This evening, after my Mum went to bed, my Dad and I went for another walk, down to the Marconi monument and watched the Sun go down over Mount’s Bay. The air’s really quite clear today and when looking at the horizon using my binoculas discovered that you can see the Longships Lighthouse poking over the horizon. That lighthouse is about 25 miles away.

Summer hols days 6 & 7

The weather on Thursday did improve a little in the afternoon, but not enough to go out and do anything.

Friday, again, was rubbish weather-wise. Basically, it drizzled all day, well until about 8:30pm anyway. So, I went back to the normal wet holiday activity of playing computer games.

I finally finished Half Life 2: Episode One, which I had given up on a year ago when I reached the final “boss level” and got fed up (I hate the artificial boss levels in games). Well, that took me about an hour. I did try playing “Thief II” but got bored with the game-play 2/3rds of the way through the first level. So, in the end I fired up Steam again and downloaded the original Half-Life along with the “Blue Shift” and “Opposing Force” expansion packs. Unfortunately, to save disk space on my previous laptop hard disk I have deleted all the saved games for Half-Life so I had to start from scratch again. Still, it kept me occupied for a few hours. I then turned to “Opposing Force” which, from what I can remember, I’ve not played before. Not too bad so far, though there are a number of areas where the player avatar gets stuck when lifts complete their journey, so it’s important to save just before pressing the button to start the lift.

Today, Saturday, has started dull and grey. I do hope it cheers up a bit as tomorrow’s forecast to be really wet and horrid.

Hmm.. I wonder why this year’s holiday journal is focused mostly on the weather…?

Summer hols days 4 & 5 (and a bit of 6)

Well, Tuesday was a lovely day. We went off down to Coverack and wandered along the sea front. After this we popped up to the Roskilly Farm for some ice cream.. yum. (That farm was where we used to park our caravan for holidays in the 1980s before we moved down. Also, Mr. Roskilly was an acquantance of my parents as he was a friend of the Roberts family in who’s farm (Little Trevovan) we used to stay during holidays in the late 60s and very early 70s.)

Yesterday started poorly. Basically it was dull and very wet, mostly drenching drizzle. However, in the afternoon it cleared up and the sun came out so I took a nice drive around the peninsular via Penzance, (almost) Lands End, St.Just and St.Ives before returning back via Penzance and Helston.

This morning has been a washout. Heavy, persistant rain and it’s been really dark and dreary. Apparently it’s supposed to clear up but the end of the afternoon.

This summer reminds me of the summers of the 1970s (except for 1976) where you had to pick your way around the rain to do things on your holiday. Having picnics in the car sitting in a seaside park park watching the rain tumble down and the waves crashing on the beach was quite common. I remember thinking in ’76, “Wow, we’ve got up to 25C, that’s the same as the average temperature as Africa” during a geography lesson and The Sun proclaiming “Phew! What a Scorcher!” when the temperature got into the 80s F. Of course, today we think of 25C as a normal average day in the summer and it’s not news until the temperature gets into the 90s F. We’ve definitely been spoilt over the last 10-20 years with the warm summer weather!

Summer(?) hols days 2 and 3

Well, a bit of a wash-out really. Sunday was a mental wash-out as I could do little more than sleep and watch the Grand Prix, Today was a wash-out due to drenching drizzle outside until late in the day.

At least, having looked at the Environment Agency’s flood maps it seems that both my house and the Department aren’t under any risk of flooding.

Summer hols day 1

Dispite the weather pretending that it’s some other season, it’s is actually summer so it’s time to drive down to Cornwall again for a couple of weeks of complete relaxation.

Having read the long-term weather forecast for the next fortnight I think going for cliff walks is probably not a viable option, other than possibly for next Tuesday, as I’ve not packed my waterproof trousers and would prefer not to get wet. I have packed a few jumpers etc. as I’m guessing that it’s going to feel like Autumn more than mid Summer.

The trip down wasn’t too eventful, other than having to avoid the A420 due to floods. (On that front I’m pleased to say that my house wasn’t affected by flooding.) There were a few traffic jams due to the large number of holidaymakers travelling down.

Anyway, time for some sleep!

The final edit.

I’ve finished (as much as I’m going to) the video for the air show. It could do with slightly more trimming here and there but I can’t be bothered to wait another 3 hours for the iBook to render it and the jerkiness of iMovie makes it difficult to cut at just the right place.

Anyway here it is, it’s rather large, nearly 300MB, but it’s far higher quality than the previous effort (double the resolution and you can actually see the aircraft!) and about half the length.

Update 12:31pm:
A shortend version now (or soon will be once it’s finished processing) available via YouTube:

Royal International Air Tatto movie

I’ve managed to cut together a *very* rough draught of a movie based upon a combination of photographs and video footage taken using my Fujifilm F31fd compact camera of yesterday’s airshow. This hasn’t been helped by iMovie not being able to play or edit the clips in real time as I’ve had to put them on an external USB drive and the display updates get in the way of reading the disk so all I get is 1-3 second clips of video separated by 1-3 seconds of frozen display which then jumps on by that amount and starts playing again, often with some visual corruption, so I couldn’t do detailed editing or determine what was iMovie artifact and what was real artifact. (Oh and I got the name of the stealth fighter wrong in this draught, now fixed but I’m not going to run the 1 hour encoding again just to fix that.)

Update: I’ve changed the link to point to a faster server for the video.

RIAT 2007

This is my first live posting from the Royal International Air Tattoo via my N800.

WELl, I’ve mansged to get a grandstand ticket… the last one on sale! So I’m in a nice position for the displays.

I’ll be updating images in my gallery.

Tech slot.

For those who have Nokia N800s.. there’s a new update out which adds, amongst other things, support for SDHC cards up to 8GB, Skype and Flashplayer 9. It can be found here.

There is one extremely annoying factor here, however. The only way to do an upgrade is to re-flash the internal memory completely, losing all your applications and many of your settings at the same time. It wouldn’t be so much of a pain if the back-up utility actually backed up all your settings and data, but it doesn’t. Basically it backs up about 70% of the settings used by the default applications which come with the machine out of the box (and not even the Nokia applications you download from their site). It would be *SO* much more user friendly if the upgrade was just that, an in-situ update of all the changed items and not a complete re-install.