After a slow morning I went for another walk. This time I turned south at the Marconi memorial and followed the coast path down to Mullion Cove before turning inland and walking back through the village.

Nothing else to report really other than Trenance Barton farm has a chocolate factory and shop and the cafe latte’s in the coffee shop are quite nice.

Today I went for a little walk north along the cliffs. It was only a couple of miles each way but it was good to get out.

The weather is mixed, as in it’s sometimes sunny but sometimes cloudy. The chilly wind was still blowing which made the walk a bit bracing at times.

Not a lot else occured.

A pretty quiet day really.

I planned to give my new car its first wash (Ihad to leave it at least a week to allow the protective coating to bond to the surface) and so got my dad’s high-pressure washer out and looked for the shampoo. Well, I couldn’t find any shampoo for a start and even worse, after about 2 minutes one of the bearings in the compressor unit seized. So my car was wet but the only thing I’d managed to do was move the clingy, fine, red  sahara dust around the paintwork a bit.

Oh well, so we had a trip down to B&Q in Penryn where I bought a chamois leather and some car shampoo and my dad bought a replacement pressure washer.

And so, I now have a nice, clean, shiny car again and it’s not at all pinkish in colour.

As for the weather, it was slightly cooler than yesterday but the wind was slightly less strong and the continuous hazy sunshine brought the temperature up to the mid-teens (or low 60’sF for those still using imperial measurements :-)).

After a lazy morning we drove over to Godrevy as planned yesterday. The weather was lovely, very warm for the time of year (about 20C according to the car’s thermometer) and the Sun was shining. The only fly in the ointment was the wind, it was very gusty and almost gale force it seemed.

My Dad and I both took our cameras with us and I took my big lens.

As hoped, there were a large number of young seals lazing down in the secluded cove below the eastern cliffs. I managed to get some reasonable shots despite the wind. Even laying down and using the image stabilisation it was hard to get a good shot as the camera and lens were being buffeted so strongly by the wind.

This evening I helped my Dad load Nikon PictureProject onto his machine and download the images from, what is now, his D70. (I’ve sold my old camera to him along with the Sigma 28-300mm lens which is best suited to a lower megapixel camera than the D200.)

Got up quite late after doing the web browsing in bed.

After lunch went for a drive around the tiny roads of the Lizard Peninsular and used the opportunity to calibrate the car’s speedo using my Garmin GPS. It seems to read approximately 2 mph too low at all speeds above 20mph (where it only reads 1mph too low).

We might go off to Godrevy tomorrow, as the weather’s supposed to be good, to see if the seals are basking on the rocks. I’ll take my camera and BIG lens with me.

Well, it was up at the usual workday time, shower, breakfast as usual before starting the final packing and starting off along the roads to Cornwall. I managed to get going a little earlier than usual due to having pre-organised the stuff to pack the night before.

The traffic for the first half of the journey, as far as Taunton, was surprisingly heavy. Thankfully though, the rest of the journey wasn’t too bad and there were no traffic jams so got to my parents’ house by half past two.

Other than showing my dad around the new car I didn’t do a great deal for the rest of the day. I did catch the approximately 1 second film clip of Mick and Sam (a couple of my pub quiz team mates) in The White Horse pub on the “National Lottery People’s Quiz” show. Not exactly 15 minutes of fame really. It sounded a far bigger thing when they were talking about the filming. Apparently Dale Collins (the quiz master) made a big thing of it.

I had a phone call this afternoon from John Hugill, the Oxford SAAB salesman, enquiring how I was getting on with the new car. I told him fine except that I couldn’t find a way of setting the navigational computer to imperial measurements. He said that he’d ask around.

About 20 minutes ago John phoned back. I had given the chaps at Oxford SAAB quite a poser, apparently. In the end the solution was to set the central computer to IS units and then back to imperial. It seems that the navcom and main computer were merely out of sync.

Don’t you just love complex systems? 🙂

I’m at home lurgified. :-/

After work today I cycled quickly home to get the 380Z ready for collection by Nick Ryman-Tubb later in the evening.

Anyway, I decided to have one more go at getting the old machine to boot so thought about swapping the A and B floppy drives over. Anyway, after much wrestling with the hardware I managed to remove the drives, reconfigure them and put them back into the machine.. not without having 4 screws left over due to not being able to get them in, however.

So, I switched the machine on, put the CP/M disk in the new drive A and hit the B key to start the boot process… The drive springs to life and CP/M loads… yippee! Not only this but when I put a second floppy into the B drive that works as well. I’ve no idea what caused the pop and crackle the other day.

Nick arrived at about twenty past seven and left with the machine just after nine. Now I’m just relaxing watching Battlestar Galactica.

Well, after Googling, and doing as much research as I can, reading manuals from cover to cover, there seems to be no way at all to force my new car’s sat nav system to use miles. I’m being forced to use metric distance measures even though the main computer knows that I want to use imperial measurements.

It’s not as if the sat-nav system was originally designed for SAAB. It was developed for the new Cadillac (which is in turn based upon the SAAB 9-3) and “back-ported” to the 9-3 so you would have thought that the default measurement system would be Imperial, for the American market. Indeed, there is one place in the manual where the global search and replace missed a reference to “the Cadillac navigation system.”

Oh well. It seems that I’m going to have to judge distance the continental way and mentally replace “metres” with “yards” when the digitised woman gives distances to the junctions.