As usual for an August bank holiday, my parents are up from Cornwall.

My Dad was obviously a little on the bored side on Friday as, while I was at work, he attacked my back garden, cutting the grass and tidying the borders. All the sorts of things I’ve not had time to do since I got back from holiday. He also attacked the budlia. By the time I’d got home more than half of it had been “pruned.”

Well, I have had an idea to, in the future, attack the bush and remove it as it had become rather too large for the garden, about 20 foot in diameter and a similar height. This was now just an opportunity to remove it now. So, over the weekend we attacked it further and by yesterday evening the site where the bush once was contained merely a stump. However, the rest of the garden was filled with bush.

So, this morning, after taking some of the larger lumps to the tip, sorry recycling centre, we popped into B&Q and I bought a garden shredder/chipper. Well, it took us about 3 hours constant work to reduce a garden sized pile of twigs, limbs and leaves into a medium sized pile of chippings. The Mountfield shredder was definitely a good buy as it chompped through quite large bows with little difficulty… well other than one which had a knot in it, which pulled part of the chute down into cutter and took me about 20 minutes to extract. Still, the chute didn’t get damaged too greatly and it was relatively easily put back in place.

Anyway, it’s late afternoon and it’s time for a bit of a rest.

Pondering the popularity of the somewhat primitive and random “Pirates” application whilst cycling into work this morning I came to the conclusion that this system would be the (almost) ideal interface for a MUD.

Let’s have a look at the reasons:

• Early MUDs such as AberMUD have a restricted command set, drop down selection boxes can handle these. There are only a few items per location also, so this could easily be handled in a web format.
• MUDs are multi-user, so is a facebook application.
• MUDs allow user-to-user interaction in  a game-space, ideal for all those slackers using facebook.

The problems I forsee, however, are these:

• Getting full interactivity during fighting or users “say”ing things.
• Finding the people with the right skills to do the coding. Goodness knows, I don’t have them. I’m guessing that you need someone with a good knowledge of efficient coding in PHP for the front-end and possibly the back-end as well. I’ve not looked at the facebook SDK.

So, any of you old guard want to port the original AberMUD to Web 2.0? *grin*

I’ve just been outside watching the sky looking for the meteors.

Yes, there are some, not that many though at the moment, far fewer than the estimated two per minute. Curiously as many, if not more, are coming from the south rather than radiating from Perceus.

The sky at the moment is very clear. Clear enough that even on the outskirts of Oxford, if you find a dark corner and allow your eyes to adjust you can make out the ghostly form of the milky way. Though my viewing wasn’t helped by a neighbour at the back turning on his porch light “so that he could sit in his deckchair to look at the meteors.” (And no, I didn’t think that a 100watt bulb would help his viewing pleasure either.)

Anyway, I’m too tired to look any longer, so I’m off to bed.

This weekend Em, Jerry drove down from Bolton to visit along with little Laura and Amy.

It’s been a lovely, if exhausting, weekend. The exhaustion was really to do with the visit, merely mild insomnia or at least interrupted sleep due to the weather being a bit too warm at night for my taste.

Friday evening was a nice, quiet chatter, after the copious pizza, that is. 🙂

Seeing as the weather forecast for Saturday’s weather looked good a picnic was planned. Grim and Holly were able to come over from Godalming for the day so we all met up at the Harcourt Arboretum just down the road. What I hadn’t known was that this weekend there was a Forest Festival event going on at which there was wood working, home-made food, working horses and, most importantly, farm fresh ice cream. Yum!

Annnnyway…. the picnic was lovely. We almost ate all the humongous pile of food, including the army of gingerbread men bought in Sainsbury’s, but there was still enough left over for the evening meal. It was also fun watching Laura being chased around by a younger suiter who was wearing football kit and wanted to play with Grim’s flying ring. Anyway, much fun was had by all.

Today was slightly less eventful with only a trip to Sainsbury’s (for more food), a delicious lunch croned by an apple and blackberry crumple made by Em using blackberries from my bramble, all eaten out on the back meadow within feet of the blackberry bush. That only left a quick journey to the park to run down the batteries of the little girls before it was time for the good-byes.

I was really lovely to see them all agian and to see that little Amy had now grown up so much and was a real person now. It’s been almost 18 months since I last saw them, about a third of Amy’s life. Hopefully we’ll all meet up again rather sooner than that in the future.

The weather was quite devious, having started sunny and inviting. However, soon enough the cloud rolled in and by mid-afternoon the drizzle had started.

As for events of the day, other than a trip out to Truro, which was curtailed by the weather, I didn’t do a great deal. Due to the lack of anything else to do I continued re-playing Half-Life. (Yes, I did get beyond “Blast Pit” but I’m not looking forward to the part where you have to jump over/under trip-wire bombs which is not too far in the future.)

The day didn’t start brilliantly, weather-wise. It was rather dull. So during the morning I continued re-playing the original Half-Life and for up to the annoying “Blast Pit” section with the “worms” which kill you by “pecking” you. Getting through that is more based upon luck than prowess.

Anyway, the weather cleared up by the afternoon, the sun came out and it warmed up. So I drove over to Church Cove and had a nice walk north along the coast path as far as Gunwalloe and then along the beach to the far end of Looe Bar and then a bit of a sprint back over the cliff path to get back to the car before the parking ticket ran out at 5pm. (I won’t get into the National Trust parking ticket charges. Suffice it to say, don’t arrive between 2pm and 5pm otherwise you’ll pay through the nose.)

I didn’t do a great deal in the evening.

Yesterday’s weather was again lovely. I visited Chris and Meriel down in Carleen and had much fun being geeky and doing stuff with technology of various vintages.

Today was RNAS Culdrose’s Air Day so I avoided going on the roads as they would be impassable due to the traffic. Instead I sat up stairs watching the meagre flying displays at this year’s much reduced event. The air show is a pale ghost of the event it used to be in the early 90s where there was flying all day and loads of aircraft from all around the world. Today, many of the displays were aircraft based on the base with two aircraft from overseas. At least the weather was good.

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.

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…?

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!