Today I visited Meriel and Chris.. much tea was drunk and words spoken. Enough said.

Another slow day.

The highlight was visiting Godrevy, near Hayle, and attempting to photograph seals relaxing on a beach at the bottom of a cliff. The weather wasn’t helpful, the wind was trying to blow me over the cliff and even with a good tripod the vibration was noticable at full 300mm zoom and caused a little camera shake blur, though this was nowhere near as bad due to the softness or lack of focus the lens has (it’s going to take a trip to Sigma for adjustment after the holiday).

The evening was spent watching episodes of Firefly on DVD.

A slow day. Not much to report other than grey skies and a bit of breaze.

The only thing of note was on the way back from the tip^H^H^Hrecycling centre we went past Goonhilly Downs Earth Station to see how the demolition of Aerial 2 was going.. it’s down to a pile of grey I beams now. It seems a bit like sacrelige to destroy that dish. That and (the now preserved) Aerial 1 were two landmarks which made Goonhilly what it was. It’s like knocking down one tower of Tower Bridge. THe coming and going of the other dishes makes no difference, just the first two from the mid-60s, the pioneering days. Oh well, there’s now only one left. Oh, and even the “Telstar Cafe” across the road has changed its name. Obviously the “bright, exciting future” is all in the past now.

Yet another late morning, but hey, it’s a holiday. 🙂

Early afternoon I set off for a little walk with my camera. I decided to start where I finished yesterday and so walked down the bridle path I’d walked up before down to Polurrian Cove and then headed south along the coast path.

When I got to Mullion Cove it was still only just gone 2pm so I decided that rather than head back along the road I’d continue along the path and hoped to meet up with the path which goes to Predannack Farm.

A couple of miles later I was sure that I’d missed the turning so headed back for another mile to the junction of two paths and headed inland. It was quite interesting trying to traverse one bit of trackway which passed through an old quarry as it was extremely boggy ground with a huge puddle on the road itself. To one side of the trackway was some higher follage so I tried to walk along it… it turned out to be moss which hardly held my weight.. a rather precarious and bouncy experience.

At the end of the track I met a junction between a road and another footpath which looked to be going in the right direction so that it would cut off a large chunk of ground and seeing as by this time it was half past three I chose that route. It was quite a nice walk, mostly along a sort of hollow way and was obviously an ancient right of way, passing a stone cross at one place. The stone stiles were in varying degrees of delapitation and all of them were a potential death trap, but I survived. It was only in one point where there were no stepping stones over a small stream where I got my shoes a bit wet and that was as I almost reached the village and looked as if the reason had been due to agricultural destruction of the previous stone path over the stream.

Anyway, although it seemed like a long walk, in the end, looking at the map, it turns out that the whole thing was amere 5 miles, the same distance as from my house to the city centre. How strange it is that distances seem so different when you’re walking country paths.

A bit of a slow morning, I got up at half ten.

The weather didn’t look too promising at all. It was dull and grey. So, after playing some “Colin McRae Rally 04” for a bit it was time for lunch, roast beef and Yorkshire pud. 🙂

By the time lunch had finished miraculously the clouds had cleared and moved to the north, leaving mostly blue skies over The Lizard. Having seen the weather forecast for the week ahead on “Country File” I decided that it’d be a very good idea to take advantage of this window in the weather and go for a walk (with my camera).

So, after fitting my chunky F2.8 Sigma lens on the camera I proceeded to the Marconi memorial then south along the coast path to Polurrian Cove and then followed the bridleway back into the Village and home again. A total of about one and a half hours of pleasant walking and photography.

At Meres Cliff is noticed that the gorse bushes had been very much killed off relative to a year ago when I took a picture. So, as a contrast I tried to recreate the original photograph. I didn’t quite get the same site of framing but it’s close enough. It’s amazing the change just one year makes.

Surprisingly, there was a reasonable amount to watch on telly this evening, starting with “Time Team” and then following through “Bremner, Bird and Fortune” and “The West Wing” and finishing with the update programme for “Balderdash and Piffle.”

So, that’s the end of another day in Cornwall. If the weather holds out I may go for another walk tomorrow.

After a late start (needed after being awoken at 2am by my Mum cooking eggs and bacon for her ficticiuos friends) we popped out to Tescos in Helston to get lunch things for the rest of the bank holiday weekend.

After lunch my Dad discussed with me what his options would be to replace the HiFi we bought in 1990 as both the tape drives have died and the radio no-longer holds its stations if it’s turned off. Basically, the old Sony is on its last legs. Anyway, I thought I might cost up a separates system for him so did some Googling. I could put together a reasonable system, including turntable, for about £620. That’s quite a bit more than even the most expensive non-separates system and the separate units wouldn’t have half the specification.

I then did a little more Googling. The DVD derivative of my Technics HiFi I have at home is still on sale and at less than £500. Now, with a separate turntable with inbuilt pre-amp this would save about £100 and would be a *FAR* higher specification.

My Dad decided there and then that that would be the way to go. It would amongst other things simplify the wiring in the living room as there’d be no need for the separate DVD. So we went off to Camborne and bought one.

Now, concidering that my HiFi is 8 years old it’s surprising that a direct decendant product would be on the market, let alone it looking almost identical. This is even more surprising in the fast moving, fashionable world of HiFis. Other than a few tweaks to accomodate the 5 disc DVD player, some advances in the sound processor and a change in the colour of some of the speaker decorations it looks the same as my unit. Maybe Technics have found a good design and are loathed to change it. It certainly works well and more importantly sounds good.

Anyway, after dinner we put it together, set the clock, preset the radio and watched a DVD (which was surprisingly good quality display seeing as were merely using composite video as we don’t have an S-Video cable). As with my unit, there’s no need for a separate sub-woofer as the speakers have one.. and they shook the room at the part of Spiderman 2 where the mini Sun Doctor Octopus is ignited.

Anyway, it’s now time for bed. Night all.

Well, it’s the first day back down in Cornwall for the usual Easter holiday. However, this time it’s rather shorter as I’m having to save my holiday days up for the trip to Norway in September.

The trip down wasn’t exactly the best. It took exactly 7 hours in total, with a half hour stop at Taunton Dean. The highlights of this particular journey were:

(1) The rain… I’m sure the Rain God was travelling down with me and I’m sure that we went through quite a few of his classification types. The Sun did come out eventually at Truro and beyond that point it was clear blue skies.

(2) The traffic jams… Let’s see.. 1 hour at the M4 Bath/Stroud junction caused by the recovery of a continental coach which had somehow gone beyond the hard shoulder and onto the grass verge. Then there was the half hour or so caused by the Clifton Down roadworks on the M5 and finally about another half hour on the Bodmin by-pass where they’re working on the extension to Indian Queens (though it did give me some time to enjoy the huge carpet of primroses which had burst into life where the trees had been cut down).

After all that I’m feeling rather shattered. I’ll probably have an early night tonight after unpacking and making the bed. I could try to find the energy to go for a walk with my camera before the Sun goes down, but I’m not sure about that.

If any of you have seen the film “The Fifth Element” will remember how the whole of Li-loo is reconstructed from one cell and is effectively printed back into existance. (OK, “The Fifth Element” isn’t really hard SciFi, more a comedy with a SciFi-like setting. But it’s still enjoyable.)

Now, it seems, the technology to do at least some of this is coming true as can be seen in this New Scientist news article.

Where has the year gone? Oh well.

Atleast at work most of the stupidity about spending the HEFCE-3 funds has gone away, there’s just the small matter of helping Vogon International recover the 3TB of data which got lost when two twin RAID arrays went belly up at the same time.

Vogon’s supposed to be one of the global leaders in data recovery but the simple task of getting data that they’ve recovered off their disks and onto a set of Solaris SPARC UFS partitions has defeated them so they’re putting the data onto tape and lending us a tape drive. It seems that they can only cope properly with Windows. :-/

More work for me.

As for other life things, well, I’ve been playing with my new camera a bit, though not as much as I’d like due to weather and stuff. I’ve been going to a pub quiz on Thursday nights. Not a lot else, really.

I’m looking forward to Easter. I’m having a one week break during which I hope I’ll be able to recharge my batteries enough to cope with the coming summer term. I’m definitely feeling run down at the moment and seem to have little energy.

This evening I’ve been playing with my Nikon D200, Sigma 28-300mm F3.5-6.3D Macro lens and manfrotto tripod and in tribute to Patrick Moore, here’s a picture of the Moon (sharpened to get every last detail out and cropped), a subject dear to his heart.