Witterings – Page 11 – Steve's Blog

A trip to Bude

Last Saturday (23rd June) morning we headed down to Bude for a couple of days. Leaving Cheltenham just after 7am might have seemed mad but it worked extremely well and, including a stop at Bridgewater Services (which I wouldn’t advise) we arrived outside the Falcon Hotel at about 10:20am.

As we couldn’t check in until 2pm we parked the car and walked down to the sea lock at the entrance of the Bude Canal. Although the canal has been closed for a long time and, due to its use of inclined planes, is unlikely to ever re-open the first couple of miles are in water. Although the first two barge sized locked and the low level swing bridges have been replaced by fixed spans it is a real pity that this length of canal isn’t being used as anything more than a linear park lake. I’ve suggested that Nick adds the canal to CanalPlan AC (at least the barge canal – the only section likely to be restored) as it is, for some reason, not in there at the moment.

After a wander round the lock and a quick potter round the wharf area we went and had a coffee at the Castle Tearooms before getting back in the car and heading off to Boscastle.

Rather than take the main A39 road we took the old coast road via Widemouth Bay, which is a very popular spot for surfers as the bay is very wide so the surf can be very good. Its certainly a good road as its quite quiet and the views from the top of the cliffs is very impressive.

We had to do a few miles on the A39, past the Rebel Cinema at Poundstock before turning off the main road and onto the winding road that goes through Boscastle to Tintagel. As Bostcastle had suffered some minor flooding on the Thursday our plan was to see if it was open, and if not continue through to Tintagel. On the steep road down into town was a notice that said “Shops and village open as normal” – so Tintagel was put off until Sunday.

I have to admit to being somewhat “let down” by Boscastle. I wasn’t sure what to expect but there didn’t actually seem to be a lot going on in what is actually “Boscastle Harbour”. The best part had to be the walk out to the headland that helps form the natural harbour – the scenery was excellent and there were some great photo opportunities.

Rock Formations at Boscastle

Looking back into the harbour

Weekend… what weekend

So its the weekend – those two days when you don’t go to work, those two days when you relax and don’t do the things that last week you said you’d do this weekend.

Ahh – if that was only the case.

I headed into work at 6:30am yesterday morning, worked through lunch and got home at about 7:30pm last night.

Then today, Kathy got up early to pop over to Richard and Michelle’s to feed Blackie (Kathy is cat sitting for them for the weekend) and then she went off with Nick, Colin and Linda to move Mintball over to Norbury Junction for some maintenance work.

I had to stay home as I had to work from 11am to 5pm.. OK today I could work from home so at least I got a couple of things done – I actually mowed the lawn which wasn’t as easy as it sounds, but at least Sooty won’t get lost in it again.

Talked to one of the neighbours about the houses going up behind us. The builders have ripped out the old GCHQ fence and the concrete covering over the culverted Rymans Brook. On Friday, after the heavy rain, there were several “springs” in what will become the garden of the house behind us.

It seems the concrete and the gravel and the large kerb edging GCHQ had put in place had been put in for a reason and that was to stop the surface run off from the site flooding the houses that we live in. Now there is MORE built up area on there than there was before, hopefully more of the water will go into new drains but……..

The Day after the

Well it has to be said that yesterday was a good day… Due to a slight miscalculation on timings Nick and I nearly missed the train but after a mad dash we made it to the station… just to find that the train was late. Richard turned up as did Mike and Paul and, after some problems with tickets, got on the train to Gloucester.

We had planned to start at “The Fountain” but we actually decided that as we were walking past the “New Inn” we might as well start there. They had 8 Real Ales on and the Theakstons Mild was extremely quaffable and enjoyable. The “New Inn” of course is a complete misnomer in that it dates from the 15th Century. Unlike a lot of buildings in Gloucester a lot of the structure of the New Inn retains, if not its original form, a close approximation to it.

After that we took a gentle walk down to “The Linden Tree” – a Wadworth Pub that has 4 Wadworth’s Ales and 4 guest Ales. We decided to have lunch here and it was extremely good value. Its a bit of a hike from town but more than worth it.

After lunch we were going to head back into town via “The Nelson”, but it was closed, so we stuck our head in at “The Whitesmiths” which is an Arkells pub and has some very impressive 17th Century wood work visible inside their “new” extension.

After a refreshing pint of Moonlight we continued the walk back into town and called in at Cafe Rene. Sitting outside in the shade in the Marleone the name “Cafe Rene” almost seems to fit as there was a distinctly European feel to the setting, as the following photo hopefully shows:

Outside Cafe Rene

From Cafe Rene it was an easy walk back to the Cross where the four “Gate” streets meet and down Westgate street to “The Pig In The City“. Obviously the PITC was refurbished a few years ago to make it “trendy”. Its now aged and slightly worn which makes it actually feel more pub like and less “showroom”. After a quick pint there it was a short dash across the road to the Dick Whittington,

The Front of The Dick Whittington

which despite its rather Georgian front is, like so many other buildings, a Georgian front on an older Tudor Building. We sat in the beer garden which is tucked away down the side of the pub behind the church. As the sign indicates the pub was serving Hook Norton Ales.

The final call of the day was The Fountain where we had a couple before heading back to the railway station and Cheltenham.

All of these pubs (but especially The Whitesmiths) are within easy reach of Gloucester Docks

Pubnight Pub Crawl

Today Pub Night Council are off on a pub crawl round Gloucester. We are only planning to do a handful of pubs, but those we have picked have a wide range of ales – which is more important than the number of pubs as far as we are concerned.

Combining blogs

Well today I decided to pull over all my old posts from the blog on Camsigh.

Using the export and import features of WordPress made it a breeze.

Now all I have to do is go through all the posts, remove a few that are now redundant, put each post into the correct categories and then tag the posts with appropriate tags.

Colds and stuff

Well after the trip on the boat last weekend I went down will the mother of all colds. I was OK on Tuesday but by the time Wednesday rolled out I was feeing stuffed up and my throat was hurting.

Woke up on Thursday morning feeling like a train wreck : tonsils all inflamed, no voice, stinking headache, hot and cold sweats – the works. Spent half of the day asleep. Went to bed early and got up on Friday still feeling pretty ropey and all sweaty and clammy.

It seemed a shame to waste the weekend – its the first good one we’ve had for a bit and so many things needed doing: the front lawn needed mowing and there was stuff to do round the house but frankly I just didn’t have any enthusiasm.

Last night we went out to celebrate Richard’s Birthday – started with drinks at Laze Daze and ended up with a curry at Mahek’s which has become, amongst our friends, the favourite place to go for a curry.

A few days on the boat

Well if all goes to plan we are off to the boat on Thursday night for a few “relaxing” days away from work. I say relaxing because we haven’t quite decided how much to push. If the weather is lousy too hot me might not go far, if the weather conditions are just right then we’ll push on a bit.

Smokey is coming with us as are Bandit and Pixie because we can’t leave Smokey at home by herself due to her diet and Bandit and Pixie would just reduce the house to a complete wreck if we left them for 4 days.

Here’s a picture of Bandit and Pixie looking innocent:

Cable

When we first moved into the house back in 2002 there was a Telewest cable installation. We had it re-activated and used it for a bit. When we came to re-arrange the living room we asked Telewest how much it would cost to move the isolator box. They told us it would cost approx £100.

So we told them where to go and moved to Sky.

Sky installed the dish and everything was OK. Then over time the picture deteriorated. Sky came out and looked at the install – their response was basically “which idiot installed this – the dish is in the wrong place and the cable run is all wrong”. It was all ripped out and re-installed with the dish wedged right under the eaves and the picture got better.

That was a couple of years ago and the picture slowly deteriorated – blacks got very pixellated, signal went whenever it rained heavily, box kept crashing and rebooting.

So we ‘ve moved back to cable ((and having been told that I was “cutting off my nose to spite my face” by Sky I’ve no intention of ever using their services again)) … picture quality is spot on – no pixellation of blacks, no visible artifacts…. bliss.

We’ll probably take the dish and the box and see how well it works on the boat… will give better reception than the aerial! 😉

Can there be too many Online Fora?

Over the weekend, when I was moving the boat, I was sitting on the back deck thinking about a lot of things. Camsigh has gone quiet over the past couple of years, and other boards that I’m signed up to such as Ghostly Stay , PhantomFest and Café Phoenixx all seem to have similar cycles – a flurry of postings and then it all goes quiet for a bit, then some more come along and then it goes quiet again.

So why should this be? Is it part of the normal cycle that forums go through or is there something else happening?

I think its the latter – When I set Camsigh up back in January 2004 the only way to get a forum was to either pay for one or run your own server (either from a hosting company or if you were really sad – yourself) and run a forum on there.

Then along came proboards, myfreeforums etc. etc. and the “free” forums phenomena took off. Running costs are recovered through the placing of adverts (over which you have no control) but in return for that you get a good uptime, a responsive server and it would seem some pretty good anti-spam measures.

So now there is a forum for everything – a forum for bunion sufferers, a forum for people who collect pictures of buses, a forum for every conspiracy you could ever imagine (and then a few more). The list goes on and on, it is endless. The Internet is full of forums.

But something is going on with these free forums. Running this site and doing admin on a few others there is a rising level of spam advertising forums (hosted on various free forum sites). These forums aren’t real forums – they contain nothing but a URL redirect to another site which will then try to sell you dodgy drugs, iffy insurance, or manky mortgages. These sites bring no money into the coffers of the companies hosting the forums and give the scam merchants yet another marketing vector. Sooner or later the free forum hosters will have to clamp down on the processes needed to create a forum and put more stringent controls in to stop their services from being abused.

Of course the spammers are well ahead of the game – they are now spamming free Blog services which they using in a similar way to the way they abuse forums.

So who knows what will happen – maybe a couple of free forum providers will go down the tubes, maybe users of the forums will get sick and fed up of the continual stream of spam being forced down their throats.

The Web should be a great place for people to learn, to communicate, to share. But the problem is that the spammers just don’t give a shit : they don’t care who they annoy, who they abuse, who they peddle their shit to. They have no morals at all – I’m sure they spam cancer support forums and such like with their odious filth.

Of course the spammers are just doing what they have been paid to do. At the end of the day its people like Visa and MasterCard who could put a stop to a lot of it. If they refused to do business with companies who spam or who deal in products like “Generic” counterfeit drugs then the money flow would stop. Mind you it would stop if people out there actually stopped believing the crap they are being spammed with.

Was it all Worth it?

Well I sat down the other day and decided that I wasn’t happy with how Camsigh looked. I’d bolted a Blog mod onto the PHPBB forum and it was having problems with spammers and the code was rather messy. I’d also got functionality in the main board that I didn’t actually use – basically because it had been superceded by RSS feeds.

So I looked around and found that I liked WordPress and someone actually did a plug in that integrated it into PHPBB.

So some hacking around of WordPress and PHPBB and some tidying up and it all looked good.

To finish it all off I moved the board. Camsigh had been sitting in /board/ on one of my domains and I wanted to tidy things up so I registered another domain through DynDNS and made the appropriate adjustments inside the Board to get it working. I then put a rewrite command in the .htaccess file in the original directory to do forced re-writes to the new domain. Finally as I’d been doing all the reconfiguration work in a new database I had to export the user posts and private messages, search and replace any domain references (I use a PHPBB mod that allows you to upload and insert pictures) which had got buried in the posts.

Did I say that was it? Well it wasn’t: I then moved the posts from the old Blogging system into WordPress. Its not 100% correct but its near enough. There also seem to be a few navigational issues… which I’m looking into