Failure is the Key to Success

Great Great Grandparent’s Grave Part 2

by Ian Posted on August 13, 2006

Rainy
A few month’s ago I wrote to the funeral directors for my great great grandparents [link]. I had hoped that they would be able to help me with burial records and cleaning and repairing the memorial.

They did write back quite quickly at the beginning of July. It is never a good sign when someone cannot copy your name or address correctly from a word processed letter. There was no information regarding the burial, but they did quote for refurbishing the memorial. However, at just under Â£1000, I think I will need to come into some money before pursuing this. I’m not sure if it is a good or bad price, but I seems a lot to me.

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Weather Icons

by Ian Posted on August 13, 2006

Sun and Rain I have added weather icons to some of the earlier blogs and will try to remember to add one each time I post from now on. This morning when we got up, it was raining quite heavily, but now it is dry and overcast, with the sun trying to break through.

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Updates on school network

by Ian Posted on August 2, 2006

I went into the school today to work on a couple of outstanding issues.

Primarily my visit was to retire the old Linux pc that was acting as the local proxy server and DHCP server. Over the last year, this had become increasingly unreliable and a couple of weeks ago it wasn’t giving out IP addresses, which was a bit of an issue. The DHCP pool was activated on the Windows server and the second network card was plugged into the broadband connection. In common with the county configuration, a static route to the county servers was created and no gateway settings are made. This ensures that all Internet access from the school computers can only be via the county filtered proxy service. The computer suite and all classroom computers have been configured to use the new proxy server. While visiting the classrooms to make the proxy settings, I took an inventory of the computer equipment in each classroom. This will allow a replacement schedule to be drawn up.

One of the computers in the suite had been showing an unmountable volume error on boot. This was resolved by running chkdsk /r from the recovery console.

In addition to this, the classroom computers running Windows 98, were configured to log onto the domain. This gave them access to the shared class data area and shortcuts to the appropriate year groups were added to each class computer. I had to use TweakUI to configure the autologon, as just setting the registry keys didn’t work.

I managed to install the Espresso software on most of the classroom computers. Most needed Internet Explorer 6, so this took a while to download first. Two of the computers will not run Espresso; when you launch it, it crashes Internet Explorer, so that needs looking into. One of these computers had a lot of MALware that I removed using Adaware, but I’m still not convinced its clean.

There’s still work to be done, but after seven hours it was time to call it a day.

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Joust Photos on Gallery

by Ian Posted on August 1, 2006

I have finished scanning the 4 films that I took at the Joust and uploaded them to my Gallery. I have created one album for the Joust itself and one for the Mediaeval Baebes. Looking at the number of photos I took, it looks like I only went to take photos the the Mediaeval Baebes. I did get most of a film of the jousting.

Mediaeval Baebes
Jousting

I saw on the Mediaeval Baebes website that Katharine Blake was taken ill on the Sunday after we went and had to be taken to hospital. She is feeling a lot better now.

Posted in General, Photography | Tagged joust, Katharine Blake, mediaeval baebes | Comments Off

Stay at Centre Parcs

by Ian Posted on July 29, 2006

Sunny
We had a short break at Center Parcs at Elveden Forest this week. We had booked in for a comfort villa, the same as we had 3 years ago, but the Monday before we went, I had a phone call from Center Parcs offering to upgrade us to an Executive villa. We were moved to a villa 3 doors away from where we originally selected, still an easy walk to the center and a much nicer villa.

You really get the feeling of being in the middle of the countryside, from the moment you get out of the car and walk past the lake to the village center. We had several regular visitors to our patio area on most days including, moorhen, grey squirrels, ducks and ducklings, geese and rabbits.

Although there are several restaurants on the site, we mainly ate at Huck’s Diner and the Pancake House. There is something very holiday like about eating sweet pancakes for lunch.

We planned to visit the Subtropical Swimming Paradise each day, but by Thursday the kids had run out of steam and wanted to stop.

Stormy
The weather was good while we were there, but there were thunder storms on Wednesday afternoon, while we were swimming and during the night. There were also thunderstorms on Thursday evening while we were eating; I’m not sure if the two things were related, but during this storm, the fire alarm went off and we had to evacuate the restaurant. The staff calmly and efficiently cleared the restaurant. You had to feel for those people swimming, they had to leave the 29.5ÂºC temperature straight out into the rain. It was a false alarm and we were able to return for rest of the meal.

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Visit to Joust 2006

by Ian Posted on July 22, 2006

Hot
We went to Joust 2006 at Berkeley Castle today. We left about half past seven and got there just as they were opening at ten.

We did stop off at the Little Chef in Burford for a coffee before we got there, but after over 5 minutes of waiting to be seated, with the staff walking past us and deliberately not catching our eye, we, and several other people waiting, left in disgust.

As I said, we arrived just as they were opening and as we had already got the tickets, we were able to go straight in. We went over to the cake stall and had some homemade cakes to make up for our eariler lack of a stop. I unfortunately managed to pour boiling hot tea across my fingers of my right hand and burn them which was rather sore for the rest of the day.

We bought a variety of things from the various stalls including a Mollenhauer wooden soprano recorder for Jo. We watched the first session of the jousting just after lunch and I used nearly a full film on this alone. We then turned round for the first set of the day from the Mediaeval Baebes. This was excellent, even though they did have a bit of a problem with the sound setup and feedback. I used over a film and a half on just this set. The only drips of rain were during this and it only tried for a couple of minutes. After the concert, I collected the 10th anniversary DVD that I had pre-ordered. They only received the DVDs on Friday, so as they had all been signed, they must have been busy.

We watched the bird of prey display and visited several other displays including Berkeley Castle itself, however as it was such a hot day, it was too hot to spend long inside. The kids had a go at archery and had pony rides in the Children’s Kingdom area before we all sat down for the second set from the Mediaeval Baebes. This was a relaxed set which I think everyone listening enjoyed, even if there was one totally unexpected bit of feedback during Dringo Bell.

We left at quarter to six after spending the whole day. We stopped on the way back at the George Inn on the Bristol Road. This had a excellent children’s play area and the service was lightning fast. It was so quick, that the meal had arrived at the table before Jo got back and told me what we had ordered. The portions were substantial and the food was brilliant. Well worth recommending and we will probably stop there in the future.

Now I just need to get the 4x 36 exposure films developed and scanned, before I can put them up on my gallery. I will probably get them developed next weekend.