I think I’ve fixed an irritating bug with this diary uploader. It used to crash when I tried synchronising with my website. The data would get transmitted OK, and nothing got lost, but the damn thing still crashed.

After putting a check in for NULL data and debugging the thing online it seems content to work properly.

I’m going to see if I can go home next month for a few days. I’ll also see about going to Retrovision as well, and will try and configure my PC at home to accept PPP connections so I don’t have to use the hideously expensive 0845 number for my ISP (I dread to think how much I spent on that so far!) and use the merely slightly expensive (4p/min) calls to my house.

I need to phone a man about a plane…

Just got back from a walk in Glen Coe with Pete and Nat. We almost didn’t go. Several times after leaving the center I noticed Nat’s car kept skidding when she stomped on the brakes. I didn’t give this much thought as the ground was icy and damp but as the car went over a bridge in Arrochar there was a nasty grinding noise. Nat pulled the car into a convenient petrol station and we all got out to see if anything was wrong.

Her front-left tyre was completely buggered. The rubber had worn through all around the side and there was a hole big enough to stick my little finger through. To make things that bit more interesting, this tyre was her spare, the other having gone flat the week before. The AA wanted lots of money to come out and fix it, but we found a local garage that’d put a new tyre on the wheel for a lot less.

The three of us finally arrived in Glen Coe about 11:45, aiming to go up the Little Shepherd of Etive (I’d give the proper name but the map is downstairs somewhere) and along the three peaks it has. Unsure whether we’d have enough time we set off anyway. The ground was icy, it was windy and cold, but the sky was clear and you could see!

It took around an hour and a half or so to walk up to the coll between the first peak and the second. On top it was even windier and lots of hard packed snow had collected. Nat claimed to be too tired to go up any further, however I think she was just put off a bit by all the snow and ice and the sets of crampons me and Pete were strapping to our feet. She found a rock to sit behind out of the wind and claimed to be alright, so off Pete and me went. I had my crampons strapped on wrongly, the complicated way to tie the damn things on having escaped my brain, but after a bit of faffing I had them fairly secure on my feet.

Going up the second peak was excellent. The snow was very steep, frozen solid, and great to walk on. It only took 20 minutes or so to get up to the top, and after a brief look around, I readjusted my crampons (the rear strap goes around your ankles twice then through the catch) and feeling much happier about my feet, we stomped off down to the coll again.

At the coll we had a small debate about what to do, Nat still didn’t want to go up anything, but Pete wanted to go up the first peak which was ice free and just rocky. Eventually we decided splitting the group again was a bad idea, this walk would have taken longer and sitting around in the wind is a bad idea (people from Southern England should be taught mountains are cold places with snow so it’s not such a surprise to them) and what with it being about 3pm we began to walk down to the car.

For various reasons the walk may have been chopped a bit short (one day I’ll walk all three peaks, we didn’t make the last one when I went with my dad last year either) but it was still a good day out and much better than sitting around in the center.

I don’t know what I’m doing tomorrow. I was going to go on another walk, but some people are going into Glasgow and I’m tempted to go along too. I need to get some speakers or a cheap hifi to plug my PC into. Its tinny speakers don’t sound that great.