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.

A lazy day.

Most of the morning spent in bed listening to the radio.

Most of the afternoon and evening playing “Colin McRae Rally 04” on my laptop.

Though while waiting for dinner I watched the episode of Earth Story with the amazing, magical hand lens which allows Aubry Manning to view a rock as if it had been cut up, placed onto a slide and put under a polarising microscope. It was also the episode where Simon Lamb is shown lecturing GCSE level plate techtonics to bored postgrades (such a Suman Chowdury and Fiona Reid) who had been roped in during the filming. It also showed the old head of department suite of rooms which are now just admin offices. How things have changed in the 7 years since the programme was made. Of course, in a few years tine, when the department has moved into new premises, all this will be historical record. Or should that be hysterical record?

I went to the RNAS Culdrose Air Day today. I’ll give a fuller update when I get home, but the edited highlights are:

Even though I wore a hat and other protective clothing I still got caught by the sun on my face and neck.

I took almost 800 photographs!

I told you, madness!

It was Culdrose Air Day…

Before going out, as it was the day that Mullion officiially became available for ADSL, I helped my Dad sign up with Tiscali for their 512K service. The only problem is that Tiscali give a 15 day lead time which means that by the time the system is up and going I’ll be at home and my Dad will have to try to sort out the connection himself. This could prove difficult with the combination of the ethernet modem and router as I can’t remember how I had to set the combination when it was at home.

We left home at about 08:45 and got to the air station at about 9am. I was expecting to have to queue up and wait as officially the gates didn’t open until 09:30. However, we went straight in and got a parking place on the grass on the edge of the air field, a perfect position for watching all the aircraft land and much of the show.

I enjoyed the day, taking nearly 800 photographs. I did find the slow (and eratic) auto focus on the Sigma lens annoying though and I wish I could find a way of cleaning the dust from the camera’s sensor. Maybe if I can find a can of high pressure I can do it without sending the camera body back to Nikon.

Anyway, dispite wearing a full sleeve jacket and baseball cap I’ve managed to get a bit sun burnt. Not only this but because for a while I had to tun the cap around backwards to stop it blowing off in the strong wind (which also made aiming the camera at the planes difficult) I’ve got a burnt in the shape of the gap between the adjustment strap and the body of the cap.

Anyway, at least many of the photos came out well, especially some of the Red Arrows and of the Royal Jordanian Air Force display team.

Time for bed.

It’s see, most of the day was taken up using my camera and tripod as a monocular with about a 3x magnification to watch the preparations for tomorrow’s air day at Culdrose and waiting for the stuff for my Dad’s computer to arrive.

Well, the computer stuff arrived at about 2pm. This allowed us time to pop into Helston and buy the airday tickets for £10 each rather than the £15 each on the door (saving £15 in total).

This evening I installed my Dad’s hard disk, loaded WinXP and various other stuff. The updates took all evening to download… I don’t think anyone thinks about dial-up users anymore. Hopefully we can order ADSL for my Dad tomorrow.