Tag Archives: T223

Saturday 24th November 2018 – WHAT A SHAMBLES!

And, just for a change, we aren’t talking about events on the North Shore of the English Channel either.

Up at the Stade Louis Dior this eveningin the beautiful sunset watching US Granville play US St Malo. Granville came straight out of the traps and missed two complete sitters in the first five minutes.

Granville scored the first goal after about 20 minutes and looked as if they were doing wuite well, but then they started to lapse into the usual lack of concentration and silly, stupid schoolboy mistakes.

Just after half-time they scored a second goal. This new n°10 whom they have just signed and who was playing a blinder, the smallest man on the field, rose highest at the back post to a deep cross and headed in.

But then, an astonishing thing. Granville went to sleep. This new n°10 drifted into anonymity and was later substituted, and St Malo then took the game by the scruff of the neck. They pulled one back after 74 minutes and a second, from a panic-stricken penalty, with five minutes to go.

And as the game drew to a close, it was Sr Malo who looked the most likely.

This bizarre behaviuor by Granville has cost them yet another two points. They’ve signed a whole raft of new players this season with the cup money, but they have still kept the same old habits, and they will cost them dear.

Last night was another reasonable night and I was away on my travels again – although I have absolutely no idea when or where I went.

And up reasonably early too, medicined and breakfasted.

With it being Saturday, it’s my usual practice to go to the shops today. But with my going off tomorrow morning, I decided against it. No point buying food that I don’t need right now.

I did go out, however. A nice walk around the docks.

But first I had something to do. Remember the story the other day of the railway line at the side of the docks?

I followed it a bit further along the docks and found a spot where the two rails merged into one. And so now I’m having third thoughts about my theory of the railway crane.

The tide was well out today so not only were the harbour gates closed and I could walk over them, I could satisfy my curiosity about how the harbour empties.

The harbour would have to slowly lose water over the course of the day as the tide goes out, so that the water inside could go down slowly and the gates could be opened before high tide

And there’s the drain, down there at the foot of the wall.

There are tidal markers too at the side of the wall so we can see the state of the tide. I’ll have to be down there one day as the gates open so that I can see the height of the water when they open the gates.

I carried on with my walk around the quayside to see what else was going on.

And it looks as if whatever has been going on with the Aztec Lady in the ship repairers has now finished because she’s now tied up at the quayside.

There was no-one about on the boat so I was unable to make further enquiries;

I was intrigued by the yacht that was moored next to Aztec Lady.

Closer observation revealed that she’s the Spirit of Conrad and we ought to know about this because she’s actually owned by one of my neighbours and if my memory serves me correctly I’ve been to a birthday party on board.

One of these days, I might even go for a sail on her because she goes off occasionally to the Arctic too.

Leaving the quayside, I off up to the railway station to collect my rail tickets for tomorrow morning. I always like to have them in my hand before the day of departure. There has been more than one occasion when the ticket machine hasn’t worked, and the booking office isn’t open by the time my train leaves.

After lunch, I did a little tidying up and cleaning up in here – not that you would notice the difference. But the microwave has been steam-cleaned and now looks a little more healthy.

And I had a play with the big tower computer too. But that wasn’t very successful – the CMOS battery is flat and the settings are erased. I’ll have to buy a new CMOS battery and reset everything.

Not that it’s any surprise of course. This computer hasn’t run since March 2011.

A little later I went off to the football, as I mentioned earlier.

The other day we had seen them putting up some Christmas lights around the town.

The main shopping street – the rue Campion – would ordinarily be the best place to start, but this is something of a disappointment.

I’m not much of a one for celebrations and festivities but I would have expected the Christmas decorations to be much better than this. I hope that they are going to add some more in early course.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that bad parking is a regular feature of this blog.

Here in the boulevard of the 2éme et 202éme de Ligne there’s yet another example, and while it might not be a BMW it’s a Volvo, and that’s almost as bad.

I don’t know why he needs to take up two parking spaces with his vehicle, but it’s clearly pretty selfish of him.
But what do you expect from a Volvo driver?

I eventually returned home and set about making tea. Something out of a tin as usual on a Saturday when there’s football, and then some more tidying up, including cleaning the coffee machine.

Now it’s bed-time, having had a very pleasant hour or so reprogramming the CMOS on the tower computer. It’s amazing how much I have remembered from my T223 course all those years ago, and it’s running along quite happily. Although for some reason or other I’ve programmed in the wrong settings for the video card. I’ll have to look at that when I come back from Belgium next week.

But now it’s an early night. There’s an alarm call in the morning.

Friday 16th November 2018 – THIS WAS A …

… really bad day today.

Mind you, this was only to be expected considering that I was still awake at 02:30 this morning working.

It takes quite a while to extract the data files from the failed hard drive on the other laptop and to make sure that absolutely everything was saved onto the external back-up drive.

In fact by the time that 02:30 came round and I was seeing double or even treble and there was still a long way to go, I created a little batch program to do it automatically. It’s amazing how much I can remember of T223 when I put my mind to it.

The net result of all of this was that when I awoke at 06:00 it was all done.

And then I had the job of configuring the other laptop.

This is one that I bought a few years ago when I was living on the farm. I wanted a cheap laptop to work the auto-diagnostic kit. It had to have a CD-ROM but not much else, and someone produced one in which the on-board mouse wasn’t working. And an external mouse is no big deal.

But going back to the issues of the UK’s engagement with the EU, I decided that I ought to go back to having a desktop computer as a main set-up. There’s a company in Stoke-on-Trent that is well-known for making bespoke computers and they would do whatever it was that I needed.

So I sent them a mail and the reply was “we don’t sell our products abroad”. Yes, the UK has never ever got to grips with the idea of the European Union. After all, it’s not the first time that this has happened. Far from it, in fact.

And the Rosemary rang me up and we had a good chat for an hour and a half. We were laughing at the clueless rabble who are running the UK right now, where the guy who negotiated a deal with the European Union then resigned because he didn’t agree with the deal that he had just negotiated. Does it get any more clueless than this?

Finally I could get down to dealing with the High Arctic, only to be immediately interrupted by the pompiers. You can tell that it’s getting close to Christmas – they are now collecting their funds for the annual p155-up, selling their calendars.

This was the cue to have a little doze – hardly surprising – and when I awoke it was almost 13:30 so another late lunch.

This afternoon, I really did attack the High Arctic Day Three and spent a good deal of time on it.

That was despite an interruption to join the crowds milling around the Pointe du Roc in the glorious late-autumn weather.

It really was a beautiful afternoon and I spent quite some considerable time watching the waves come crashing down on the rocks just offshore.

It was a typical late autumn scene out there today

Walking around the headland to the point overlooking the harbour, I noticed that we seem to have a new arrival in port.

I don’t recall having seen this boat before so I can’t tell you very much about it right now.

What I’ll have to do one of these days is to have a wander around down to the harbour one day if she’s still there and see what I can find out about her.

Despite these interruptione, I’d finished all of the meta tags for the photos on Day Three of the High Arctic, split the page into four (or is it five?) and started the meta tags for the pages, when I was overwhelmed.

Not just slumping with my head on the desk either, but on the bed under the covers flat out for well over two hours. And you’ve no idea just how painful it was to awaken. It took me a good 20 minutes to gather up my wits which is a surprise seeing how few I have these days.

Tea was pasta and falafel and then a walk around the walls of the medieval town.

Now provided that nothing else goes wrong, I’ll have an early night and catch up with my beauty sleep. You have no idea just how much I need these days.

Tide on the rocks

Diving platform on the beach at Plat Gousset

The beach at the Plat Gousset

The tide coming in at the Plat Gousset

View across the town of Granville to the Port de Plaisance

Restaurants down on the port de plaisance.

Thursday 15th November 2018 – I’M FEELING …

… a little better right now.

After having a couple of really good days, it was odds-on that sooner or later I would have a bad one. And yesterday evening I could feel myself sliding down into the abyss.

By the time that I had finished writing my blog from last night, at about 22:00, I was feeling so miserable that I went straight to bed.

It didn’t take me long to go off to sleep either. And apart from one brief awakening, and I’ve no idea when that was, I slept right the way through to the alarm.

The first time for a while that I have had a decent sleep, and as you might expect, when I awoke, I felt even worse. But that’s not really due to the sleep, but due more to the fact that I was having a health crisis.

It took me a considerable while to tear myself out of bed and an even longer time to force my breakfast down.

Eventually I went into the bathroom for a shower and a shave and a good clean-up for it’s shopping day today. In Caliburn too and for several reasons, not the least reason being the fact that on Saturday we might be having a few blockades on the road so I needed to do a big shop today.

LIDL had nothing special, but the next stop – the Leclerc drive-in – certainly did. I’d had an e-mail on Tuesday to say that my printer had arrived and needed picking up. Today was as good a day as any.

At NOZ I swapped the glasses that were broken, and I bought a few other things. Including a 2-foot high Christmas tree complete with 6 silver balls and a set of fairy lights – all for €3:99. I’m really getting into the Christmas spirit, aren’t I?

Leclerc itself came up with nothing special and I was soon back home again, to find that I’d had a power cut while I was out.

However by now I didn’t even have the strength to put away the shopping. There was some coffee in the pot so I poured one out and came to sit down in here – where I promptly crashed out. And I was gone for an hour or so too and it was very uncomfortable.

This meant that I had a rather late lunch. Inside the apartment of course because it was quite misty outside.

This afternoon I had a very pleasant surprise. The people who had organised our voyage to the Hugh Arctic had sent me a promotional video of our journey. And it brought back many happey memories. There was a beautiful shot of Yours Truly and His Nibs on our way to the Brother John Glacier at Etah in Greenland.

And not only that, one of our party was lucky enough to be filming an iceberg when it suddenly capsized in front of her – and she had a beautiful film of it going over. She sent it to the company and they have sent it to us. It is really phenomenal and when I finally manage to organise myself I shall post a link to it.

This afternoon I started to feel a little better and I made some more progress on my third day in the High Arctic

We had the usual afternoon interruption for a walk. I have to keep this up as best as I can.

The tide was slowly going out and there were several people down there on the rocks searching in the rock pools for crustaceans and molluscs and so on.

Which, I imagine, they share with their friends because, as I have said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … that one mustn’t be selfish with one’s shellfish.

They weren’t the only people out there interested in the local marine life.

Out there just offshore close to the old diving platform were two men in a boat. One man and a dog short of Jerome K Jerome’s famous story of his trip up the River Thames.

I’ve no idea what it is that they catch just down there. One of these days I’ll catch a friendly fisherman and make suitable enguiries.

There was much more excitement on the car park round by the lighthouse on the end of the Pointe du Roc.

Parked up there was a pretty rare Triumph Thruxton.

I remember very well the original Thruxtons from the late 1960s – a series of Triumph Bonneville motorbikes specially modified for competition. However the modern reincarnation of the company launched a limited range of sports motorcycles with the same name in 2004

Back here and back on the High Arctic pages, and t won’t be long now, I reckon, until Day Three is finished. Always assuming that I can find it because the laptop has now crashed and it won’t restart at the moment. I’m having to type this on the laptop that I use as the media centre.

All of this took me up to teatime and I had a nice plate of steamed vegetables and vegan sausages. But once again, the vegan cheese sauce failed to thicken. I notice that I’m using a different brand of soya milk to the one that I usually use, and that might account for it.

I went out for my evening walk as usual after tea.

Despite the fact that the moon is a long way from being full, there was plenty of moonlight about. I hadn’t taken the tripod and the zoom/telephone lens with me so I had to make the most of the equipment that I had

Considering that it’s a hand-held shot, it hasn’t come out at all too badly.

Around the corner, I nearly collided with someone lurking away in the darkness. But he was the only person whom I saw, apart from the people loitering around at the bar and the pizza van.

But now I’m off to bed – something of a late night I’m afraid. I’ve managed to get the laptop to fire up but that’s all that it’s doing. Using a technique that I dredged from the back of my mind with good old T223 at the Open University, I’ve been able to force access to the files and I’m now copying them onto a back-up drive.

I can see me having to do this every couple of hours rather than every night. I don’t want to be losing work like this.

Fishermen in a boat near the old diving platform at the Pointe du Roc

Saturday 14th July 2018 – EVERYONE KNOWS …

… that today is a Bank Holiday – or jour ferié in France.

It’s also the day 200 – odd years ago that the French stormed the Bastille – the fortified prison in the centre of Paris. The reason why they did this is probably because with it being a jour ferié all of the shops were closed and they had nothing else to do … “are you sure about this?” – ed.

I celebrated the jour ferié by switching off the alarm last night and having a lie-in. But 07:45 was far too early to leave my stinking pit so I turned over for five minutes. And then it was 08:55.

With the usual morning performance, and then I had a very late breakfast. And having reorganised things a little better in here just recently, I set up the coffee machine – only to find that I’ve almost run out of ground coffee.

That’s right – ground coffee. So if people tell me that my coffee tastes like mud I can tell them that it was ground only half an hour ago.

But with it being a jour ferié, I had a little treat – another fig roll. So I pulled that out – and then forgot to eat it. So I’ll have two tomorrow because although it might not be a jour ferié, it’s a Sunday.

First task today was the photos. 271 from my little adventure and I’d dealt with about half. So all through the rest of the morning and the early afternoon I edited them all and then uploaded them to the internet.

A very late lunch, so I made my butties and went to sit on the wall in the glorious sunshine where I was joined by not one but two lizards. This pear treat is becoming quite the thing, isn’t it? I’ll probably end up with a couple of dinosaurs.

On the way back to here i Went via Caliburn to bring another load of stuff up to the apartment, and was accosted by a weird neighbour who wanted to have a good chat – and not about all that much either but it’s amazing just how some people can spin it out.

When I eventually returned to here, I transferred all of the files from the portable laptop to the one that I use here and made sure that they were all deleted to save space.

It was then I noticed that the portable “Storex” drive that I take on my travels, despite being practically empty according to the File manager, had over 5gb of material on it.

Of course, finding “hidden” files on an “empty” hard drive is only the work of half an hour or so – good old T223, hey? – and they were all revealed. More stuff that I knew that I had and had subsequently lost. So they’ll be reignited and moved in due course too.

With the neighbour outside, I’d missed my afternoon walk, but I carried on with another task. when I was in IKEA in Caen before I went away, I’d bought three little units to store the CDs and DVDs but it wasn’t enough. However it was all that they had.

However at the IKEA in Munich they had two more so I bought those (cheaper than at Caen too!) and assembled them this evening. Yes – working at 20:30, and on a Bank Holiday too!

But I didn’t miss my evening walk though.

It was a beautiful evening and there were crowds and crowds of people about, with a group of people having a party sitting on one of the old World War II gun mounts from the Atlantic Wall here on the Pointe du Roc.

And had I not had all of this work to do, I would have joined them too, so nice was the weather.

You’ll remember the other day just how far out the tide had gone, with all of the people collecting shellfish offshore.

But this evening the tide was right in and you can see from the harbour marker light how far in the tide comes in and how high it reaches when it’s really high.

The tidal ranger here is one of the highest in Europe apparently.

While I was out on my walk I bumped into a friendly neighbourhood policewoman.

She told me that there would be a firework display this evening at about 23:00 or thereabouts down in the docks, so round about 22:30 I went back out again.

There was a huge crowd down on the quayside but not all that many up here.

And so I had a grandstand view of the proceedings, sitting on my wall.

We had to wait until about 23:30 before things got under way, and then the spectacle began.

It’s not usually my kind of thing, but I have to be sociable and take part in the local proceedings. And it was actually quite good – much better than I was thinking that it might be.

The crowds weren’t just on land either.

Just before the event started, a few boats pulled up outside the harbour and dropped anchor so that the people on board could watch the fireworks from offshore.

Nevertheless, I still reckon that I had the best view of the proceedings from up here.

The whole show went on for about half an hour, and the finale was certainly impressive.