Author Archives: essiep

The hounding

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24°C.Perfect

Unpleasant experience: walking the dogs. I took my camera because the light is just perfect as well  as the cherry trees are ripe with fruit. Then while the dogs were running about one of them came over and said
"are you taking pictures of us? if you are I’m going to take that camera off you"
then it went on. they tried to argue, it’s illegal to take pictures of children,  reply" no it’s not, this is a public place"
The picture is below… the children concerned aren’t even in the same field as me.
 
They followed me home, chanting abuse, obsenities about my mother, paedophiles, wanking. They cicled me as I walked taking pictures with their mobile phones whilst one boy inparticular fired absurd questions at me.
"Does yyour mother know you take pictures of little children and wank over them "
"you’re like Michael Jackson"
 
So what’s happening here:
I guess they are a gang, they are building-up kudos with their peers and enjoying a taste of power that numbers can give. There were about five of them, mostly riding small mountain/bmx bikes.
 
I walked to the nearest phone box and rang the police. Then the boys dissappeared. The police thought that since the gang had gone then it would be safe to go home. My main concern is tha they’s find out where I live. But as I cam out of the phone box, there they were. So I walked to the next phone box which is quite a way off in town.
The police said they would get a patrol car here in about 20 minutes.
that was just over an hour ago.
 
Here are the offending photos, I suppose it needs some contrast adjustment, either to darken the forground trees or to wash out the background. This picture has only been resized, that’s all. The second one is a crop, but since the camera was aimed at the trees, the people in the distance are not clear. the main antagonist is wearing the green tee-shirt

Shostakovich- The Nose

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24°C, beautiful crisp warm clear day.

Opera at the Garrick: A story about Major Kovalyev sawho one day lost his nose one day. Technically iswas faultless but more than that- it was hilarious. The acting, direction sets and the rest were world class. The whole experience left us feeling wide eyed and elated.

Dragon Rapide

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20°C, windy

Yesterday: Duxford- I took a short flight in a biplane. It was a twin with seats for 8 passengers and was built in the 1930s. Although there was only canvas and a wooden frame between us and the engines, the sound wasn’t very  loud, perhaps because the engines were relatively low powered and under the lower wing.
The views over Cambridgeshire was spectacular- the sunlight getting low- longer shadows and mid-summer golden colours.
 
Another bit that amused us was earlier in the day. They’d set up some demonstration tailers for rolls-royce aero engines, two merlins and a griffon. Each had small propellors to drive, and since these engines are run on open exhaust pipes – the noise was tremendous. Each trailer had an engineer controlling the engine ( see picture below)
 
I have shot some video clips which I can post to my photobucket site when they are edited together. so… that means Adobe Premier needs re-installing.
 
My mother’s cousin was there(John) which had lots of interesting stories to tell of our fmaily history, most of which I have no clue about before. Moreover- there were plenty of people to meet , some who’d crossed the atlantic to get there.
excellent and tiring day.

Bus shelter

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Thursday:24°C, thunderous storms

Electrical storm: It doesn’t take long for a big punchy storm to build up. Today’s ones are quite slow moving, slow enough to allow the rain to turn roads into rivers. I hid in a bus-shelter to avoid the lightning strikes- which never came in the end. The bus-stop was across the road from the one I hid in last year to avoid a morning storm.
 
the photos below was part of a series where it was clear how they billow up. When scrolling through the folder of photos the movement is clear- perhaps a project for the weekend.
 

Resentmant and recriminations

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30°C, like yesterday, no storms though.

A game of two halves: Everyone seems to be upset about the football. It ended ina penalty shootout with the English team losing. What a rubbish way to conclude a match, a football game is only an hour & ½, so they had a bit of extra time, scored nothing so had this kind of russian roulette. That’s not a game, it’s just chance. A football game is only short anyway; the Tour de France runs for four to six hours, every day for about three weeks, tennis matches are often over four hours. So let the footbal go on, play until someone scores, I’m sure thay can do it, if not players could do some stamina training.
 
See! I can do the football BS like the best of them. Here’s me never watched a game in my life.
Easy.
 

July, the thrips

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30°C, humid

70.3 miles in the heat. Some places must have been at 40°C, especially near fields of straw. I have that cough referred to in a post a few weeks ago. It’s said to be caused by an ozone haze, but I bet there is straw dust involved too.
Thrips must lead an interesting life, as adults they look like little bits of rubber left after using a pencil rubber. There must be vast numbers of them, they form clouds under trees, and stick to jerseys and car radiators in large numbers. I’m nearly puzzled by them as much as I am by Crane Flys.

Error 651

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27°C, some clouds+humid

I’m baaack!
Last Sunday, I switched on the computer and windows wouldn’t boot up. It reported a corrupt file in the system32 folder. I tried all afternoon to get it running, endlessly loading up the four floppy dics needed to run the installer & repair modules. In the end I reformatted the drive and put a fresh copy on. Unfortunately the boot drive had to be formatted too, so I’ve lost the dual-boot up too.
 
Anyway. Now I have a fresh installations, but the modem wouldn’t work, giving the above error code. Finally after about four days of trying things out to fix it, I had a nagging feeling the modem wasn’t talking to the motherboard properly. Today, I removed the modem completely, then took out the motherboard drivers. Cleaned out everything to do with the modem and finished with putting stuff back in with more care over the order they they are put in.
 
Things learnt:
  • Install motherbaord drivers first
  • Backup the boot drive
  • Backup the OS partition (move all temporary folder to another drive to make this easier)
 
Tomorrow, the virus checker gets put back in, but it’s amazing how much faster the system runs without it.
More arty talk tomorrow…
 

You’re not allowed to say that

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Chicken is a banned word in Space titles:
 
See the attached picture, We’re prohibeted from using the word "chicken" in our  titles.
Instead I am going to say it in my post here:
Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken & so on…
 
See! it lets me do that!
 "Chicken" must be either obscene or blasphemous in American English (since msn is American I can only assume).
try that in your next entry title & let me know if the same thing happens. It made my last post rather difficult to post intill I could isolate the "offensive" word.
Hold on! has an American corporation patented the word "chicken" and blocked me from using it without paying a license?
 
puzzled.

The rabbit that played ch1cken

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17°C,cloudy & more wind
Riding home: there was a rabbit in the road. A busy "A" road with rush-hour traffic. Something made me stop to save that rabbit. It took 30ft of braking to stop then put my bike down before running back. As I approached it- the little bunny hopped away- Is "hopping" the best word, it sounds like something you do if you only have one leg, not four.
Anyway,  I got it to hop to the verge so that  I could get back to my bike. But as I went, it hopped back into the road again. After shoo-ing it again, it "boinged" over to the other side of the road – then dove under by lying bike for shelter from the silly bloke wearing shorts and a lycra shirt.
What should I have done at this point? Carry on the rabbit’s game, possibly getting in the way of the cars myself? Or should I have done what I actually did do?
I grabbed the little rabbit & threw it over the hedge into long grass in a farmer’s field. There were quite a few cars stopping by now, and that meant I probably looked quite comical.
Some treacher’s I know stopped and asked if I’m alright- I told them I had just thrown a rabbit over a hedge.

Displacement activities

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21°C, sun & lots of SW winds

Reports: so many to do, so little time. 80 are complete, that only leaves 200 to do by the end of Friday. Trouble is, it’s so painfully tedious to do. Displacement activites are (jargon) things you do to avoid a boring task. Like vacuuming, reading bland forums, talking rubbish with peers ( It’s not got so bad that I talk about football).
 
and… playing computer games.
Ya sas!
Later: made a database so I can drop in my most used comments with a click. It’s absurd to go on writing individual comments for 270 full reports. that should save soem time. And… now another 60 reports asre all written and submitted. Pah!