Clipper Race at Hull

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The Round the World Clipper Race does exactly what it says on the tin. Ten yachts from various countries are setting sail around the world. The different thing about this race though is that the crews are made up of ordinary folk who have signed up, got trained and will join their boats for various stages on the round the world trip.

It starts from Hull tomorrow, but today the boats were in Hull Marina so we went for a look. I took the little camera for some snaps. I had a go at making a panorama shot of the side of the marina.

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It seemed to come out OK.

The atmosphere was great and the weather amazing.

Carcassonne

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While we have been on holiday we have been playing some new games. Number one son got a copy of Carcassonne. We have had some fun with it (and I’m not just saying this because I managed to win a couple of times). The game revolves around a landscape that is built up by players adding tiles and different types of settler to claim as much of the land as they can. It has just the right balance of skill and luck. When I win I can claim skill, but when I lose I can claim that the cards were against me. The games don’t take a long time to play, (which is something else I quite like about them) but they are quite absorbing.

If you like board games it is well worth a look.

Van Driving Man

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Spent lots of today driving a big van. It was time to move number one daughter to her new pad in London, and so it was up with the lark and off in the big tin box on wheels that I’d hired for the day.

I like van driving. Everything in a van cab has been carefully designed to do a job. There was even a little clip in the dashboard into which you could put your delivery notes and a big area under the windscreen for your copy of “The Sun” and empty MacDonald's boxes. They also have monster (and completely un-burstable) engines and sound systems. And other people get out of your way. I’ve even figured out how to reverse them. Great stuff.

Project Runway Rocks

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While I was spending my summer mostly writing, number one daughter and me had a little lunchtime diversion called Project Runway. It is a reality TV show for aspiring dress designers. Each week the contestants are given a stupidly short time to make some kind of clothing and then, after a fashion show, the weakest one is kicked out. A bit like “The Apprentice” but with sewing machines. Just the kind of thing I’d expect to hate.

I love it. I like the way that the people taking part really can do stuff. They can draw a design, make the pattern, cut out some cloth and then sew it together, and at the end they have something that looks like what they wanted.  Part (all right, most) of the appeal of “The Apprentice” is discovering just what kind of people have crawled out of the woodwork and been allowed by the producers to take part, and then watching them fail at whatever footling task they have been given.

But the appeal of Project Runway for me is that the people taking part are there because they really want to get into fashion, not just appear on the telly. The big prize is a chance to run their own fashion show and by the end of it you can really see where each of the designers is coming from. Good stuff.

Idiot Printing

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Last night I thought I’d print out some pictures for my office walls. I’ve just switched back to using my venerable HP inkjet as I think it prints better colours than the Canon one I got last year. And 7dayshop were doing a good deal on proper ink cartridges for it. So off I went. Of course, I’d forgotten how horrid HP printer drivers are, and coupled with the “quirkiness” of Photoshop Elements (I’m being very generous here) I had a much rougher time than I expected.

I discovered that if you are daft/clever enough to try and print with the preview enabled in the printer driver (which is one way I try to avoid wasting a quid's worth of paper and ink) the driver just hangs up, with no way of clearing the print job. You have to delete the printer and make a new one. Of course I didn’t find this out straight away, I had to waste half an hour doing reboots and trying lots of other things before I finally managed to get the thing to work.

And the printing looked horrid. There were awful smears showing through on the page. I stared (and this is true) at the page coming out of the printer for at least 30 seconds before it dawned on me what I’d done. I’d put an already printed page through the printer. I’d used some enormously expensive amount of ink ruining a perfectly good picture, which I’d popped into the paper box to stop it from getting creased.

Idiot.

Scarborough Sea Battles

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We went off today for a day trip to Scarborough. They say that “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” and I’m starting from a fairly dull base, and so we went off for some fun and games. Took the big camera.

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Scarborough Seaside

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Posh Hotel

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Artistic Nets

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Sea Battle

They have this thing where they re-enact naval battles in a boating lake. No, really. Number one daughter didn’t believe me either, until I took her along. Great fun.

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If you look carefully you can see that there is actually a man in the ship..

Pain

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Went up town today. Bought a copy of a game called Pain for the PS3. It is not what you would consider intellectually demanding (but then again I don’t want any demands made of my intellect just at the moment).

Anyhoo, Pain just gives you a destructible environment, a very large catapult. And a victim. You just fire the victim out of the catapult and watch as they bounce off the scenery suffering all manner of impact damage.

There are quite a few different scenes, a number of different people to fire (including David Hasselhoff if you pay an extra pound – not worth it though) and some themed games where you have to hit targets and stuff.

I think long term appeal is somewhat restricted, but as a quick blast it is quite fun.

Bed Dismantling

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Today was a bit of a break, which was nice. I’d bought a bed on ebay (as you do) and so we had to get the old bed to pieces and round to next door.

Then we had to make space in the bedroom, put the new bed in, find it fits exactly (wahay!) and then I went off and picked up my new car. Turns out that buying new cars is another good displacement activity. And no, I didn’t get it on ebay.

True Story

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I’ve not been writing all the time I suppose. Last week I had to take my computer in to the mender to have a working cpu board replaced with another working one.

Some time back, just hours before my trip to Cairo, my lovely MacBook became a lot less lovely by dropping dead on me. Fortunately I had a tiny spare machine in the form of my Advent notebook which did a sterling job of standing in for my shiny paperweight.

When I got back I took the laptop to the menders and they put a new cpu board in which worked fine. Unfortunately the board they fitted was the wrong one, and so last week I had to take two hour break from the courseware while my machine was back in the workshop having the board replaced with one that was 0.2 GHz faster. I’d like to be able to say that I can tell the difference, but I really can’t.