In contrast to yesterday’s warmth, the weather has been ‘traditional’ and quite quite damp, windy and generally a bit nasty. This is more like the Wales I know Me and Amy braved the murk and went into Carmarthen for some greasy takeaway goodness earlier, and are now off down to the pub with Jeff & Giles.

Playing GTA4 on Jeff’s giant telly was an amusing and eye-bleeding experience. All those photons.

When not writing eye-melting games for popular home consoles those crazy Llamasoft people like to try and out-geek the rest of us. To quote from the forum:

.. and finally, after LOT of work and a lot of week ends spent ..

The Llamasoft weather station is up.

As you may remember or not more than 1 year ago we got “caught” in
all this thing about weather satellite images, it all started because our
instructor at the Ham Club told us “once I managed to pick up a satellite
with my hand held scanner close to the window”.

Whereas most people are content to watch the weather reports on radio or TV, Giles and Jeff took it upon themselves to grab the images directly from the satellites orbiting the earth. And no, they didn’t just stick a mast on their roof, this setup is much more interesting, involving bringing ethernet to a tree and installing a webserver in a field. Maybe it’s some sort of rural broadband initiative to bring the Internet to farmyard animals, who knows.

Follow this link to read about how it was done, and then click here to see the images that they’ve pulled down. Beats the usual things involving webservers and kitchen appliances, anyway

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

I’ve spent the past week in Cardiff helping to get the new Cotswold store ready. It’s not actually in Cardiff, it’s off Junction 34 of the M4 in a retail park that contains a massive Tesco (all your beans are belong to us ). I somehow managed to get on this little trip down to South Wales by standing in our store at the right time and location - that being just before closing time, in the Women’s fashion section. Nobody else wanted to go and there was a free space, so I was asked and having nothing better to do except sleep and go to work, I decided doing that in Wales for a week would be more fun.

The journey down was a tad boring. There was me and Mike (who’s job it seems is to go around the stores making them look pretty) trundling down the motorway to Manchester in his little red car. Manchester because we were collecting KT, a member of staff from the Manchester store who was also helping with the shop fitting. Our Manchester store is about two minutes from Manchester Met Uni, and it wasn’t until I began working in Cotswold that I noticed it! Strange how you can walk down a street for four years and not really notice the shops.

It took us six hours, £4.90 in bridge tolls and one wrong turning on a roundabout to get to the Travelodge we were staying in. As usual bookings had gone completely wrong - each visiting staff member from the various stores around the country had a bed, eleven breakfasts each every day but no other meals and no food that night. Something must have been worked out since later that evening small blue “corporate” cards were produced that were linked to someone’s credit card. The best part being in the box on the back where our spending limit was written was “No Limit”. I made it my mission to see just how much food I could eat in a week. The answer being quite a lot! The 10oz steak was quite nice, as was the mixed grill. The seafood mornay was a bit weird though, but £5 worth of profiteroles went down very nicely I’m on beans and simple food for a while now, the desire to eat lots of stodge and filling food has left me for the moment - as has the desire to drink lots of alcohol.

In total there were 10 or so of us, from different stores throughout the country. Me and Mike from Keswick being the most Northerly, and people from Southampton being the most Southerly. It was interesting hearing about the different kinds of things each shop has to deal with - Mancunian smack-heads, the burberry wearing gentlemen of Saaf Landan, mate and the curious people who buy crampons in areas of the country where there’s nothing steeper than a disabled-access ramp. The real art of conversation though was to find something to talk about other than work.

The shop-fit itself was nothing too special, being pretty much the same as a massive, massive delivery. Instead of having to unpack and put away two palettes of stock there were about 50 palettes (each palette holding 16 large cardboard boxes). The shop was empty, it needed enough stock to put out on the shop floor, plus enough spare stock to fill the stock rooms. It’s really nice doing this in a building that has been purposefully built for the task of being a shop - there’s three store rooms of ample size, an area to unpack deliveries, and space behind the tills to move around. The most satisfying part was seeing an empty building full of builders and dust (so much dust! on the first day it was like a cloud floating about the shop) gradually turn into a shop. Boxes would be piled up on any available bit of floor, then slowly unpacked, tagged, hung and put out on rails and stands. Bit of a contrast to the Manchester store where the locals help remove excess stock (chasing people down the street seems to be the Manchester store staff’s way of keeping fit), or Keswick where other stores asking for our stock keeps ours at a manageable level.

Sunday was our day off, so naturally we all went out Saturday night to the joyless hole known as Bridge End. My god there were some rough pubs in there. The Weatherspoon’s was good and cheap, and the one that’s been converted from a church wasn’t that bad (apart from the nasty loud music emanating from the “dance floor” - a bit of floor in the corner that’d been cleared of tables), but the last place was just awful. A dark, crowded room with a central bar and then as many people as possible rammed into it. The bouncers on the door were doing a “one in, one out” system which was helping to keep the place packed to the walls. Really, you couldn’t do much apart from stand and shout at each other. Five minutes to queue to get in, two minutes to find everyone and escape. The alley across the road with broken glass and spew that I commandeered as an emergency toilet was more pleasant.

There’s another shopfit happening in a few months, but I’m not sure if I’ll still be working in the shop to be able to go along.

Oh, my staff account is working and I’ve found a new way to miss-spell my last name! Silly buggers have written it wrong, which is a bit confusing given it’s correct on my payslips. Time to go shopping

Today we went up Snowdon via the Pyg Track, and then down the Tourist Track.

Once again it was really icy and slippy, but the path is slightly more worn going up the Pyg Track so we were OK. There was one point though where the track disappears at the bottom of a steep bit of rock. We went around it and started climbing up towards some metal pegs poking out the rock. Don’t go that way, there’s a deep mineshaft right below you!

Arrived on the top, staggered to the trig point then huddled behind the cafe trying to eat sandwiches with frozen fingers. After a short stop it was off down the railway and then onto the tourist track.

The tourist track is so long and boring! It’s like walking down a flat road! It takes twices as long as going any other way. Did bring us out next to the car though, which was alright (we caught the bus from Llanberis to the Snowdon Carpark at the beginning) since there’s nothing worse than having to trudge miles along the road.

If you’re ever going up the tourist track, stand at the bottom. See Snowdon way off in the distance? That’s where you’re going.

Tried going up the Watkin Path to the top of Snowdon today. Were beaten back by ice and snow. No snow falling from the sky, just slippy stuff on the ground that I fell over on. We decided the final climb was too dangerous and came back.

There’s a weird bit on the path where some miners used to live. Across the river is an old railway (that if you follow it goes through a swamp and down the side of the mountain straight) which leads to some derelict miner’s buildings. Just outside one building is a strange area of land with loads of slate stuck in it.