Well that was rather damp!

Went off to Caernarfon with my dad with the intention of going walking up various nice places - Tryfan, the Glyders etc. Friday night was even quite nice, with me managing to take some nice photos. We stayed in a little independent hostel just by the harbour and Crown Court. It was down one of those little back streets where you can wander about admiring the architecture while also thinking “100 years ago I’d have been mugged and stuffed on a boat by now”. It had a definite Captain Hook feel to it

Woke up the next morning to mist, murk and nastyness. Drove to the Ogwen Valley and saw wall-to-wall mist. Then, in a fit of insanity, walked up Y-Garn in the wall-to-wall mist. Strangely someone had decided to dump two PC monitors over a wall in the carpark. Very odd seeing bits of PC lying around the hillside.

After being blown sideways we descended into The Devil’s Kitchen, walked round the lake and back to the car. It was only 3pm and having nothing better to do a trip into Llanberis was decided on. I bought two nice prints from Mountain Art. It’s a little shop on the high street and I’ve always liked the detail in his pictures. Most mountain paintings seem to be of the “misty hills and clouds” variety. These pictures show rock structure of a detail only a climber could paint, I’ve seen guidebooks that are less well drawn

Also, to keep up a tradition in the area that has been going since 1978, we went to Pete’s Eats and stuffed ourselves with insanely large amounts of food and mugs of tea. If you’re in Llanberis and it’s raining it’s your right to go into Pete’s Eats and consume cups of tea.

The next day was even worse. We’d moved to the Pen-Y-Pas youth hostel and had intended to walk up the mountains behind the YHA as it involved no driving and was easy. But no, the weather decided we should go and plod around the lake at the bottom of Snowdon. Still, I got to play with my waterproof camera taking photos of the rain We saw so many ill-equipped people plodding around too. Everything from cheap “waterproofs” that weren’t to the “We just stopped here because it is famous and went up the path” crew who were wearing whatever they put on that morning - jeans and a fancy jacket usually. Some of the truly mad were off up Crib Goch in the mist and rain and wind. Been there, done that, it’s no good if you can’t see.

Take a look at my pictures here

3:30am - “My god, it’s raining hard outside, glad I don’t have to take people climbing tomorrow!”
4:00am - “It’s still raining! My god, it’s really giving it some, it even sounds like it’s raining in here”
4:01am - “Eh?! WTF?! I’m getting WET! It IS raining in here… how? There’s another floor above me. Has the roof gone, what the hell is going on? Is this some surreal dream?”

No, it wasn’t unfortunately, it wasn’t raining either. There was a huge jet of water spouting out of the side of our house though, which in the dark looked like it was coming from between our upper floor’s ceiling and the floor above (which has someone else living in it). Crap, just what do you do at four am when water’s pissing through your bedroom ceiling? Well turning on the light isn’t a smart idea, I think this energy saving bulb is now dead - it certainly made some interesting sounds.

• Step 1 - capture the water by putting the washing up bowl under it
• Step 2 - Move mattress
• Step 3 - Move everything that is getting splashed as a result of the water hitting the bowl
• Step 4 - Think “Shit, what if the ceiling comes down?”
• Step 5 - Decide that nothing else can be done and that going to sleep will help. The water will either stop or get worse. While not that nice, water running off a lightbulb can be controlled and isn’t causing much harm.

Eventually half seven arrived after a long morning of lying on the living room floor and I rang my landlord. He came down and went to tell the people upstairs they might have a water feature in their bathroom. Naturally he was told to go away and procreate with himself as cheap housing attracts a certain kind of person who don’t have the best social skills. While the landlord was talking to me again there was a yell out the bathroom window of “Oi! We’re sorted now mate, there’s water all over the floor” (or words to that effect) and the torrent stopped.

Stuck ballcock we think. Their ballcocks had better not be sticky again.

The water was really spouting out the wall though, it was quite impressive, but definitely something that shouldn’t be used as an alarm clock.

God, this is almost as bad as standing around in Cotswold on a quiet Wednesday morning. August is a pretty quiet month here, we don’t have any school groups in, it’s just day visitors. And when there’s no people doing activities, we’re on site work.

And of course, there’s only so many times a fence can be painted or grass mown. It doesn’t help when it rains either. Most sitework now involves some sort of token job to do and then it’s just a case of hiding in the staff room until either told to do something else or it becomes dinner time or five pm.

Somehow though I’ve managed to get three days off this week. Two of them were in return for running the bar for two nights (now there’s something that is as boring as working in a shop… watching people get drunk is just unpleasant as they always moan when I have to close up).

Twelve days until I finish… hurry up hurry up hurry up hurry up I’m booooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooored. Really, there’s absolutely nothing to do. It’d be alright if I could actually do my job rather than becoming a part time handy man, grounds keeper, barman and house cleaner. I thought I was getting paid to instruct.

Another day off tomorrow…

There’s a small storm moving over us. One minute the sky was hot, sticky and dry, the next it was like standing in a shower. About as warm too.

Newlands Mere has reformed on our back lawn again and I had to go and open the storm drain to prevent the bar getting flooded. The Newlands Valley is reclaimed land where there used to be a small lake and every time it rains like this (which is often) the water does its best to reclaim its territory.

And in a while we have to go and do some activities with the kids in it.

It was our annual staff barbequeue. Yes, it rained. Yes, the men stood outside around the barbequeue poking it with things and watching the food burn. Everyone else sat inside away from the midges.

Later on we played some very silly games.

A huge storm has just finished blowing over us. All day the weather has been exceptionally hot, sunny, hazy and strangely windy. The kind of weather that makes people tired, sticky and want to go to sleep - or, if you’re English, to strip off and expose white flesh to the elements. I came outside this evening to a black sky and the most spectacular light show going on up in the clouds. The electrical imbalance in the sky was being discharged as giant swathes of sheet lightning and, when it got too near the tops of the mountains, real lightning. Naturally, armed with my camera I have lots of images of just after a particularly good show - i.e blackness. Photographing random events requires some kind of skill I don’t have it would seem.

The air was so hot that when the storm passed over us, emptying quite a lot of rain onto my head I felt like I was stood in a warm shower. I stayed out for a good five minutes getting wet watching the sky completely failing to capture any of it on my camera, but by the time I went in I was dry again it was that warm. It was quite a novel experience being rained on with warm rain, much more agreeable than the usual icy cold stuff that tries to strip skin off. Big fat raindrops that splash when they land and soak to the skin.

The air is now cleaner, fresher and feels somehow thinner. It’s not like it was this morning where you had to force your way through the hot stickyness. It’ll save me having to water the newly sprouted grass I sowed earlier last week.

Of course, while watching a particularly intense bit of the X-Files my room was plunged into total blackness. The timing of the powercut couldn’t have been more precise.

Well, Scotland is still as wet as ever. Me and Paul were planning on doing Tower Ridge on Ben Nevis. We’d planned to camp by the CIC Hut as neither of us belong to a secret cult recognised by the SMC. Gear was arranged. Vast quantities of gear - in fact so much we could have gone big wall climbing in America! A vague weather report found which indicated we’d either get wet or be alright.

I was planning on visiting Angus after, so Paul went in his car, and me in mine. My car makes weird noises, and after this trip it made a few new ones. It needs a service and the MOT is due next month. I’m pretty sure it shouldn’t moo going down hills.

The day dragged on and on, doing ever boring and mildly pointless sitework. There really is no need to mow the grass every week, it doesn’t need to look like a bowling green! The weather didn’t look too bad, and the cars were packed.

Five o’clock arrived eventually and I arranged to meet Paul at the King’s Arms Hotel at the start of Glen Coe. The way to Glasgow is rather simple, I’ve done it countless times before. The road going out of Glasgow is equally simple. There’s one and you drive along it until you hit the end or drive into the sea, whichever comes first. It’s just the whole of Glasgow which is confusing.

I now know that I should have gone down the M8 which would have taken me over the Erskine Bridge, or around the side. I didn’t know this and driving down the motorway isn’t the place to look at your map. Eventually I ran out of motorway and arrived in Glasgow itself in the nice little area of Govan.

Fantastic. I was in the middle of town, and all the sign posts had vanished. Oh well, time to look around for the large overpass that goes through the middle of town. It’s up on stilts and fairly obvious. I did find it eventually - it passed over me as I went down a road. Had I wanted to leave Glasgow and go back the way I’d just come, I could have done a dodgy U-turn and gone onto it. This bit of town didn’t have a way to get on to go my way. I drove around some more.

I drove around some more, chopped and changed lanes, hopped white lines and shot off around little bypasses. In other words I drove like most of the locals seem to do so perhaps they are all lost too!

Finally I spied a sign saying “A82 / Clyde Tunnel” on it and I followed it religiously until at last! The Great Western! Aha! No more being lost! Nobody gets lost on the A82, just drive up it!

All this had consumed half an hour so I thought it best to text Paul and let him know I’d be late. I shortly received a text saying he’d done the same thing!

Knowing of the way the local police like to trap speedy drivers down the side of Loch Lomond, I drove carefully to Tarbet, resisting the urge to jam my foot down on the long, empty straight bits of road. Tarbet approached and to remain on the A82 I turned off it and went right. This small manoeuvre always confuses people and lead many an unsuspecting soul to turn up at the Goil asking how to get to Fort William.

This road is both awful and great fun. It’s just wide enough for two cars, has a white line to separate the two streams of cars. Unfortunately, it also has real streams running down it and pools of water. One side mostly consists of small crags where the road was blasted out, with the other side consisting of the cold, dark waters of Loch Lomond. It was dark, so I could see any oncoming cars and by straddling the white lines I avoided the nasty water and made up lots of time. Arriving at the King’s Arms about ten minutes behind Paul.

Rannoch Moor was as depressing as ever, quite how we convinced people to build a road through a swamp I have no idea. The mist and rain was blowing sideways across the road giving it a desolate look and feel. We were both hungry and a bit tired from four hours of driving in the dark. Plan ‘A’ was aborted and we decided to camp in Glen Coe and do plan ‘B’ - the Aonach Eagach Ridge.

The bored, chatty man in the Red Squirrel Campsite extracted five of our English Pounds each and we set up our tent, made some food and went to sleep. In the morning we woke up to the sound of rain drumming off the tent and mist swirling around the valleys. Plan B was aborted, and plans C through Y skipped.

Emergency Plan Z was initiated involving a trip to Fort William to sit in the Nevis Sport Cafe followed by Paul going home. In Fort William the weather wasn’t too bad, we’d have probably been alright although everywhere was rather damp and wet so the climbing wouldn’t have been fun.

I made my way to visit Helen at Helensburgh, going via Glen Orchy to see the waterfalls in full spate. Lots of water churning through small gaps. Most impressive. What’s more impressive is that my car does 350 miles on a full tank of fuel, and coincidentally that was around the same number of miles to Helensburgh as I arrived low on fuel. Helen doesn’t actually live in Helensburgh, she lives across the water from Faslane on the little sticky-out bit of land. It’s a one-road affair with no petrol stations at the end.

I stayed the night, and awoke to see gales and rain beating down. Definately not a day to go outside. I’d arranged to meet Angus at the Glasgow Cotswold store, and had a rather confusing text off him with some directions in. After borrowing some of Helen’s fuel (it’s handy knowing people high enough up food chains to get some fuel) I trundled through the small river the road had turned into, refuelled properly and rocketed off to get lost in Glasgow again.

And how I got lost! At some points I was driving around places I’d been the day before! Had I been able to see in the future I’d have realised just how close to the A82 I was at times. Sometimes it was just off the side of the road I was on! It’s damn irritating getting lost in the dark. After nearly going through the Clyde Tunnel I found Angus’ shop and went to have a chat.

Originally I was planning to spend some time in Glasgow shopping, but on the way out I noticed the time and just carried on back to the Lakes. The rain was lashing down, turning the motorway into a river of spray and mist. At one point I saw a rather confused looking driver get out of his car on the grass at the other side of the central reservation. He was looking confused because his car was pointing the wrong way and had managed to get itself up a 45 degree grass slope.

Lots of cars parked on the side of the motorway too. They must have got too wet and conked out. My car decided it’d be fun to join in that game and lit its engine management warning light for me. Naturally this alarmed me somewhat, but seeing how the car didn’t seem to be doing anything unusual at the time, I waited to see if it went out. It did, so figuring that so long as the engine continued running all would be well, I proceeded to get home as quickly as was safe.

The Lakes weren’t much drier, the road down to here having some very large puddles. My car, now thoroughly soaked was acting weird, making mooing noises going down hill as the fanbelt slipped. Brakes were a bit unresponsive too.

It’s amazing what you can do if you put your mind to it. This place is aparrently undergoing major restructuring and management changes. We, the trainees of this place had our little say, jiggled the place up a bit with what we said and caused a bit of a fuss. This place has all the fun politics of a big company at times.

I also managed to build a fire out of soggy cardboard, wet and rotten wood and a firelighter. If you turn a cardboard box over, light the firelighter inside it, then put some wood on the top it’ll light. The gale ripping across the field helped draw the fire nicely and after feeding it with more cardboard it was blazing hot enough to melt glass. Quite bizarre watching a fire burn in a torrential downpour, it just shouldn’t work. I also spent a fun 20 minutes ripping chairs apart and putting them in the skip.

I’ve finished coding most of the guts of Shooty. It’s got title screens, menus, and a complete game structure involving lives. The ship has a working control system. I originally had the ship just shooting upwards from the bottom, but that felt too restricted. I tried a four-way control system, but not being able to shoot diagonally got irritating, plus the gameplay in Sinistar on the GBA is good with its 8-way controls. I couldn’t get a convincing 8-way rotating control system like Sinistar working though, so it’s now got a Robotron-style 8-way control. You can lock the firing direction by holding down the right-hand flipper button for the situations where you need to run away while killing things.

I’m trying to make it less like Robotron though, but if you take a bottom-up shooter and let the ship move around in 8 directions it becomes hard to not make it similar.

Drawing the sprites isn’t that difficult either. Despite my lack of artistic ability, making abstract coloured shapes to shoot at is easy. I have five baddie types and their behaviours designed (you’ll learn to hate type 3 baddies…) which should provide enough hassle for the player. A small particle system is wired up so you get pretty explosions when things die. The explosions don’t kill the framerate either which is nice.

Can’t wait until I’ve finished the game and I’m designing levels and tweaking gameplay.

The text-printing routines need changing too, they’re crap and have a few nasty hard-wired limitations. The code could probably do with a bit of a going over to find silly things and remove junk code. I’m sure I can squeeze some more frames out of the game by reshuffling code - but before we optimise, we code the game and get it working no matter how slow it is.

An in-game level designer might be an idea, it’d let me take my GBA places and create levels without my computer. I guess the players might find it fun too.

Once I’ve finished Shooty I’ll begin something else. I’m quite into the whole retro gaming at the moment, plus coding versions of old games is a good way to learn how to write games.

SPA Re-Assessment on Wednesday. Not gonna bugger it up this time!

I have just come back from an entertaining day at the beach near Macrihanish. This beach is known for its surf, which was our main reason for going. Our other main reason was to escape this place for a night and a day.

Our normal route is to go to the top of our road and go along the A83 through Inveraray. This time though, due to two large landslides blocking the road we had to take a rather convoluted detour via Crianlarich. The landslides were huge! The first one was from the very top of the hill, right down the hillside and into the sea, with the hill being at least 500m high. The slip was around ten metres wide by the time it hit the road, and judging from the whole trees and boulders in the water - on the other side of the road - it was travelling at some speed. The whirling mass of mud and water missed someone’s house by inches as we saw a digger uncovering their driveway and removing the unwanted fresh load of topsoil and trees from their front garden.

Having been on camping trips before with people from the Centre, I know how disorganised everyone is. Apparently we were supposed to be leaving early and eating when we got there. I either never heard this or forgot since I had my food before going. This was a good thing. Also apparently a six-man tent was going and was to be used for sleeping in and as a general tent to sit in if it was raining. No, that didn’t go either. A two-man tent for myself did though, securely strapped to my rucksack along with my own things. Another thing that didn’t go was a torch… nobody had one, and it was dark when we arrived. It wasn’t raining, but it was dark. Putting up a tent you’ve never seen before is tricky enough, doing it in the dark and finding one snapped tent-pole is harder. Not as hard as trying to light a fire consisting of damp wood and cardboard, or as difficult as trying to cook burgers on a gas stove in the dark.

Yes, we were well prepared.

But it didn’t rain, it was warm and we weren’t in the Centre near screaming children so we really didn’t care.

Morning saw… not a lot… it’d stopped raining and was attempting to be sunny. I’m sure there was sun in the sky… I just couldn’t see it through the dense sea-fog that was covering the place. The surf was non existant, along with anything to eat breakfast with. After doing my best to clean a pan I slowly ate a bowl of Corn Flakes using a plastic mug as the spoon.

It was then that we had the brainwave to go and buy some charcoal and a box of firelighters. Until then people had been using disposable barbequeues, which are OK for half an hour until they burn out and people leave them lying in the grass. Once we had a proper barbequeue going food could be cooked properly

The sea was moderately cold, my 5mm wetsuit doing its best to keep my nice and warm - and surprisingly bouyant too. I’ve never been in the water in just a wetsuit before, it’s really strange. In a bouyancy aid you can feel your body hanging in it, but in a wetsuit that makes you float, all there is is the feeling of floating. Your arms float, your legs float, your head remains above the water and you can float upright, on your back, or on your front. It’s just enough bouyancy to keep you from sinking, but not so much that you can’t dive under the water if you want.

While taking pictures of people reacting to the cold water my camera made a strange bleep and turned off. I turned it back on and it did the same. It was then that I noticed the large collection of water inside the Aquapac containing my camera. My camera doesn’t like water, it goes funny and makes the batteries go rusty. Seawater is even worse.

Back on the shore I performed emergency surgery and took the thing apart. The insides looked OK and weren’t the corroded salty mess that I expected. After leaving the guts of my camera in the sun for an hour I screwed it back together and… Succecss! It didn’t set on fire in my hand, explode or do anything else unexpected. It just bleeped and asked what the date was. I went to press the button to tell it not to bother with the date and not a lot happened.

My camera is broken in the most infuriating way. The optics work, the memory card is fine, the batteries still hold charge, the camera’s LCD is even working. The only thing wrong is that the buttons on the back don’t do anything so I can’t actually make the camera do anything except show the first picture on its memory, display the settings screen or turn off. It worked once when I got back, but it’s not worked since. I even resorted to rinsing the circuit board containing the switches and buttons in fresh water in case any salt was getting in the way, but it didn’t do much.

What a bugger. I need a new camera anyway, this one takes pictures that look like scanned photographs and I think the CCD is a bit buggered from being pointed at the sun a lot. However I can’t afford a new camera right now :-/ What I’d really like is a digital SLR camera for taking nice photos of things, with a good wide-angle lens and a really good zoom lens (so that I can take wide shots of mountains, or shots of animals and mountains far away) and an OK regular digital camera (preferably a small one) for general pictures. Them both taking the same kind of memory would be an advantage too.

It’s my birthday and I have the next two days off Today I went climbing with Angus at what turned out to be a really good crag called The Whangie. It’s in the Lowland Outcrops guidebook should they ever reprint it so people can buy it again. The guidebook advises you top-rope the routes, although “belays are in some cases difficult to arrange”. Go there and you understand why. The crag consists of a short rocky outcrop on the side of Auchineden Hill with absolutely no belays at the top - the grass ends and the cliff begins. Just in front of this is a big wedge of rock that looks as though it peeled away from the main face. The wedge has a knife-edge top with nowhere to sit, let alone belay from.

We dispensed with the ropes, the routes either being devoid of any protection anyway or impossible to belay from the top of. On two of the taller routes I used a rope and once reaching the top I just took in the slack and as Angus climbed, I walked backwards down the hill, using the top of the route as a pulley.

I managed to climb ten routes, which now means I have enough to go and do my SPA re-assessment. We’re supposed to be going climbing again tomorrow. I’m off down the pub tonight so who knows what tomorrow will be like. Also, a storm is blowing its way through at the moment and it’s bucketing it down outside - so much so that I have to shut my window. Let’s hope it goes away by the morning.