Freesteel

In her efforts to delay the democratic revolution, Becka hauled me off for a weekend of crawling through the lead mines in Nenthead with the North Wales Caving Club (someone has got to add some details to that wikipedia article) — when I had a whole lot of better things to do. “But you had all that fun messing around down in London and Cambridge this week,” she said. The revolution has to be put on hold.

We visited the upper levels of the mine on Saturday and eventually found the calcited ladderways down to the lower levels where there are several kilometres of wading neck deep water just below the dry stone arched ceiling before you come out of another entrance. We did this trip about five years ago with the Red Rose Pothole Club, but Becka had completely forgotten it. Mines are sumped. Who knew? They are not natural drainage formations, like caves are, so they trap the water and fill up when the pumps are stopped.

On Sunday we did the Rampgill sections where a lot of shoring up and redigging by Norpex had occurred, which meant that the old maps photocopied from the mine exploring book were out of date. None of it was drawn. Ordinarily, over the years, the accessible mine area diminishes as the roof collapses. But here a lot of scaffolding had been taken in by enthusiasts to hold back the collapses in places so you could crawl underneath the metal-work. There were dozens of such sections. In some places the roof collapse was not severe enough to block the passage and you could crawl up the spoil heap [pictured] and into the void above, making sure not to touch the loose crumbly shale of the ceiling.

The roof, in most parts, was a spectacular drystone wall arch. The tramlines were mostly taken out. Every ten metres there was a blocked wooden hopper gate connecting a shaft from the upper mining levels down which spoil and ore could be poured into the mine carts. The entry levels of the Rampgill mine near the visitor centre are worth visiting (if you don’t mind getting your feet wet) where the calcite flowstone on the walls appear luminous.

Next weekend is supposed to be more caving. Digging in Ireby and doing Juniper Gulf. I gotta get some work done now. I’m 400 emails behind reading, and I’m trying to get on with some machining work.

Last Saturday we went to the Low Carbon Communities conference in Llangollen, a charming location without any convenient public transport for arriving on the day. Several non-depressing talks were attended. But we’re doomed. And that extends from the bottom of civil society like there, to the top where even today the minister in charge of the new Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) is too cowardly to concede that an 80% reduction in carbon emissions is utterly inconsistent with a 50% expansion of airplane capacity at Heathrow. Even when the entire financial system has exposed itself for trading while bankrupt and the business community should be at its weakest. We have nothing to fear from them. Their threat was always that they were going to pull out of the country and ruin the economy, and they’ve achieved the latter without doing the former.

That night I listened to an episode of the IT Conversations podcast called saving the world at work which included some interesting factoids about the amount of electricity that would be saved globally if google had opted for a shade of grey for their front page instead of pure white.

Also mentioned was greenpdf which is an online application that encourages people to print less paper from their PDF files. People can criticize my on-line projects and point out how their incredible lack of style and useability is the reason no one gives a flying duck, but when I see project like this one getting positive coverage, I feel justified in crying out that it just isn’t fair. If you don’t have time to process one of your PDFs through their on-line interface, try viewing this one to get learn what it is to inject their notice into your document.

Yes, that’s a bad scan of a rubber stamped document, which is the way Liverpool City Council runs its affairs. Read the ongoing FOI request for details.

At 7am Sunday morning we decided that, in spite of intense local flooding in Yorkshire and with hoards of cavers on a sump pumping exercise being trapped overnight in Ireby Fell Cavern, caving was a valid option for the day. I guess it was to make up for the fact that, had it not been for that silly conference, we’d have been there enjoying a damp night underground in a river.

Fortunately, bicycles were included into the car so we could enjoy the glorious sunshine whilst completing a circuit from Leck Fell up past Barbon to Dent for tea and chips, then back via the Ribblehead Viaduct, which only partly made up for the hours of tedious driving on the M6 at both ends of the day. If a place is worth driving to, it’s worth staying for at least 48 hours. That’s what I say. Till next time.

Regular blogging has been delayed due to a lack of pictures. Becka keeps swiping the camera, downloading the files onto her computer because mine is full, and stashing everything away in her own office. But plenty has been happening.

The North Wales Caving Club scheduled a rescue practice in Parys Mountain, Anglesey for Sunday 21 September. The weather was sunny and flat calm, so we got in gear and got out there on Saturday for a paddle out of Amlwch harbour

We dived on a very silty wreck of a barge just outside the harbour. As usual, Chris Holden’s guidebook was spot on, and the anchor dropped right directly onto the metal. Once down, I wrapped it round a post and, because the wreck was small, we left the anchor for a tour round the sea floor and in and over the wreckage. The tide was ebbing and running west towards the Irish Sea, but creating a strong back-eddy that swept north across the wreck. We had to pull ourselves back over the top all the way to the stern where I realized I had no idea where the anchor was. Becka heard me huff. What a screw-up. I always knew that losing contact with the anchor when kayak diving was a bad idea. If we swam we’d have quite a hard climb along the rocky shore. But we found it in the end, which was a relief in an otherwise murky dive.

We paddled along the coast back to the campsite, Becka climbed out, while I carried on to Porth Eilian and carried everything out across the stinky mud while Becka cycled with my caving wetsocks for shoes to fetch the car.

The next day I sent her up to Parys Mountain by bike, while I explored the closed footpaths for a couple of miles between the campsite and the hill, arriving half an hour late. Unfortunately, this delay got upgraded to a dire emergency, and Becka had gone all round the hill twice in a fluster (not finding me, because I was on a footpath), and then gone back to fetch the car. Meanwhile I listened to the rescue scenario briefing waiting for her to show up.

I think we need to get a mobile phone. Or two. Hopefully this will eliminate unnecessary self-inflicted stress situations such as this. Mobile phones don’t improve things, because all of their advantages are adapted away.

We then wasted the afternoon sitting in on a very long Caving Club AGM, instead of making use of the continuing fine weather, because it was windy from the north the next day.

After an hour of dithering, and watching the wind get heavier, we retreated to the shelter of the Menai Strait. Having not looked at the tide tables, it was hard to know what to expect. We paddled from the Menai Bridge up to Bangor Pier, the current flowing with us for part of the way. The book said something about the point of slack water moving down the Strait from Beaumaris over a period of hours. With the wind and tide flow, the anchored boats were in all different directions and it was hard to tell what was going on.

Becka kindly looked after the top-side while I had a quick dive on Perch Rock to the north of the Menai Suspension Bridge. It wasn’t bad, but the visibility wasn’t as excellent as I’d hoped after all that settled weather. It was just at the level where you could see the fish. Normally they stay just beyond the average visibility distance in that water.

We headed back under the bridge to the south side of the bridge into the Swellies. The current was still flowing north. I had another little solo dive near that point where it was all whirlpooly-like. I went down here:

and came up here:

It was a pretty pleasant drift dive along the jagged rock floor while holding the anchor of the canoe. I’d always wanted to do this. Becka said the boat didn’t seem to move until the very end of the dive when I swam a long way looking for some shallower water to do a safety stop. Also, lots of sailboats went motoring through, so it was lucky that there was someone top-side to keep them off. (Two empty canoes always looks a bit suspicious, if you don’t know what the A-flag means.)

And that was perhaps the last sensible diving weekend of the year.

The following were intended to be included in last months blog post, but we had a bad version of wordpress installed that couldn’t upload photos.

I put two lights under the suspended floor of ice at the bottom of Tunnockschaft and used a 4 second exposure.

Have been at CUCC expo 2008 in Austria for the past three weeks. Apart from the caving, the carries up to top camp, the carries back from top camp, efforts to find an easy surface route down to 161 entrance h (failed), I did quite a bit on Tunnel as half the user-base was there.

Aside from a bunch of user interface issues, some of which got fixed, and some of which just get ignored until the user has gotten used to them and will then complain if it gets changed to something “better”, it became apparent that the cave we’re doing it on has become just too complex, (see the 2006 version here) and so I started work on an atlas feature. A rough estimate suggested that the cave needs to be covered by 140 A3 atlas tiles. This would be a so much work that I came up with a scheme to generate them automatically. Since I want some words on them, I’m extracting the explorers and dates of each section from the survey data. Also, as the survey is in colour, it might as well have a photo on each page. The automatic allocation of these will be done later.

A set of pages so far done is in 204 renderings. Browsers are very bad at showing images zoomed out, so they’ll look terrible. You have to save them to your disk individually to view them in something else, I suspect. At some point we should print a set of these tiles to start finding all the errors.

I can’t seem to upload images on this blog at the moment, so this will have to do.

Now to get back to some machining work.

My long-planned visit to Pembrokeshire to see my old club UBUC on their annual Skomer trip was delayed by going to Mashed -08 on the weekend of Saturday 21 June, a canceled visit by a friend on Wednesday, and Becka’s sudden urge to review a paper throughout all of Thursday, punctuated by five-a-side football at lunchtime and the secretary’s leaving do in the afternoon.

We got away at 6:30pm, so it was no surprise we arrived in Marloes at mid-night completely knackered and cross. There didn’t seem to be anybody at West Hook Farm, the site of UBUC’s Skomer summer encampment for the last 30-odd years, as well as implied by the map on this page of their modern-looking but informationally-challenged website. The farm had changed hands and no longer did camping. But I didn’t know that, so we rolled a further kilometre down the road into East Hook Farm and moved into the late night arrivals field. I ran back along the bumpy Pembrokeshire Coast Path in the dark back to West Hook Farm and into the field just to check my memory wasn’t completely lost. The last time I’d been there was in 2003 — but many formative times before then because it was an annual migration.

I spent the whole of the next day (Friday) looking for where the f*** UBUC had gone. There were at least 20 of them, two boats, and everyone I spoke to recognized who I was looking for. The carpark attendant for Martin’s Haven said they always got here for an early start when they do. Perhaps they were over at Dale the bad weather diving spot in Milford Haven. No one was there either. I’d spotted the UBUC trailer on the beach of Martin’s Haven when I cycled to it in the morning, so they had to be somewhere.

During the day I implemented my own version of the Directionless by phoning up and bothering a friend at his computer on the internet and getting him to check out the dreadful, misinformative, and utterly useless UBUC calender website containing times but No Precise Locations, and he confirmed it was that bad. There were email contacts but no phone numbers. Great. No email reply was forthcoming during the day.

Now, the reason why I urgently needed to see UBUC was that they had their dive kayaks down on site, and it might have been the first time in 6 years of kayak diving that I would get the chance to kayak dive with another pair, apart from me and Becka. Why do I always get hooked on such astonishingly unpopular sports!

Between Marloes and Broad Haven there’s about a dozen campsites on the OS Landranger map. I checked them all.

It’s worth pointing out that the weather was also pretty windy, with a howling southerly gale and belts of rain the day before. Just so we got something done during the day, Becka and I paddled out of St Bride’s Haven round Nabbs Head and into the full force of a localized rain storm. This woke us up a bit and made us appreciate how small our problems really could be made if something went wrong. Especially when we turned around and it got much more difficult to ride on the downwind leg.

Back in Dale we had a cup of coffee in the cafe and the woman said, Yeah, that group of students were in here yesterday, wringing wet from the rain. I closed up at five and they all moved into the pub and sat there drinking pints of water all night trying to keep warm without spending any money. She thought they could be up at a farm called Hillside, which was not signed on the OS map as a campsite. Windmill Farm next door was not signed as a campsite either, yet I found a lovely laid out field with level plots and all. The farmer had seen UBUC on the beach when he took fuel down to the boat that carries tourists to Skomer Island, but didn’t know where they could be.

After dinner back at the campsite of West Hook Farm I cycled across the abandoned air field in the fog to Dale, double checking the fields around Hillside farm. The owner of West Hook Farm was convinced they’d be there, because that’s where he recommended they go after turning them down for his campsite. I had half a pint in the pub in case anybody showed up. To complete my perfect timing, Mr. West Hook Farm decided to phone Mr. Hillside Farm on our behalf and found out that the UBUC had f***ed off from Pembrokeshire that morning. He told Becka this news minutes after I had set off.

Bollocks!

The weather was apparently really good on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. It must have been the sudden shock of a day of rain that drove them away. Had it been drizzly for all that time, they’d have probably suffered it, because evidence suggests it was a very snap decision, possibly taken after I got there, but couldn’t find them.

Why do we bother trying coming out diving when the weather is so bad? Becka asked. Well, I would have preferred to have got out on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday. Anyway, we got on the kayaks on Saturday (without diving gear) and paddled around Wooltack Point and down the length Jack Sound. No I didn’t understand any of the tides, I just pretended I did to give Becka the confidence I knew what I was doing. I was sure it was going to be flowing north — against us — but I didn’t have any idea how strong it would be. Nor could I predict how far we were going to get. Or that Becka’s greatest whinge was that her kayak’s knee straps were the wrong length. There’s always got to be something wrong; at least it wasn’t: Oh my god we’re going to die out here!

We ran into Robert Bailey as we carried our kayaks back up the beach.

Then we headed over to Abercastle for another bit of paddling. Becka had been reading the thoroughly excellent Welsh Sea Kayaking guidebook and decided we should aim for Abereiddy, a mere 8kms along the rugged coast.

Once again I faked it with the currents, but we were going into the howling wind, so I was sure we could just be blown back. It was wind against tide, as they say, so it was a bit of a roller-coaster ride and we got about a kilometre along and decided to turn back at the first corner. The waves are always worst at the corners. Going round the corner further meant we’d be up-wind of some rather rocky cliffs, and anyway I was beginning to appraise the rather brisk current going with us. More concerning to me was the two fully kitted out sea kayakers whom we passed in Abercastle Harbour after they had turned back owing to the weather on their trip to Strumble Head. I was absolutely sure they were going to call out the life-boat having just seen two clowns on sit-on-top kayaks disappear to sea and not come back.

In my experience, sit-on-tops are a lot more seaworthy and robust than anything else. They are the mountain bikes of the kayaking world — not suitable for racing long distances across flat seas, but better for the bumps. We surfed back briskly against the current to the harbour. Becka said she preferred Jack Sound. The sun was out. We camped in Trefin for the night.

We went back to Abercastle in the morning to complete one dive on the Leysian to prove a point. This is a huge silty wreck in 10m and we carried the anchor the whole way. My suit leaks so bad around the wrists I have to do something about it soon. (Un)luckily we won’t do any diving for the next two months because time has run out and we’re now into the caving expedition season.

Oh well.

We cased out a few likely kayaking journeys on the north Pembrokeshire coast from the sea kayak guidebook before declaring the weekend done and heading for home. Becka observed that not one of the photos in the book was of weather as nasty as what we’d been out in. We’ll have to come back at a better time. With whom? I wish.

This blog posting has been marked up with links to geographical articles in Wikipedia. This means that it contains a form of unique-ids common across the world, and could insert this post into a cross-sectional blog sliced up from everybody else’s and recreated timesorted per location as a common heritage. It’s all going to work well unless those stupid students carry on balkanizing the web with their useless Facebook log-in shite pages, and it’s eventually not possible to access anything useful on the internet unless it is produced by (a) a corporation, or (b) a “friend”.

I had to write the Jack Sound article, which someone out there can expand, put some pictures onto and describe other stuff to make it nice. I realized it was legitimate when I discovered an article for an insignificant rocklet south of Ramsey Island. Keener people could try and revive Wikiscuba with some content.

And so another entirely inexplicable hack-day (called mashed) in Alexandra Palace was served. (Last year’s event is written up here.) I had plenty of sleep on the night, lying across three triangular bean bags. It was the night before that was the problem, with the insane plan posted up on their event website of a bus pick-up from Liverpool at 3:15 in the morning, intending to reach London by 9am.

This seemed so incredibly stupid I had to go for it.

Unfortunately, the BBC had contracted out the booking of attendees (for its free 24 hour hacking convention) to a (sub)standard commercial package which didn’t collect people’s emails, mobile phone numbers, or give out reminder notices the day before to confirm to everyone that it really was going forwards on the specified times. According to the strict laws of economics, if the punters don’t show up after they have paid for their ticket, it’s a good thing, so why build helpful features for attendees into a commercial event-booking package?

I identified the bus on Lime Street, Liverpool at around 3:30am (I believe I was the only sober person in the surprisingly busy streets at the time), got on, and tried to make myself comfortable with the limited leg-room while resolutely ignoring the fact that the bus continued to remain parked for another 40 minutes with its engine running. I think I dozed off shortly after it finally moved on.

When I woke up it was daylight and the bus was parked in a back alley somewhere with its engine off — probably for the driver to take his statutory break off work or something, I thought. I tried not to be too concerned that the bus appeared empty, apart from me.

The driver was concerned. He was outside on the pavement complaining on his mobile phone, trying to find out why he only had one party on the bus for a weekend trip all the way down to London.

We were in Manchester behind the Oxford Road BBC building and it was 5:45am.

There was something on his job sheet about changed appointments (which explained why he’d spent so long uselessly parked in Liverpool), and those who were in Manchester at 4am were there when there was no bus. There had been no communication to or from these people — whoever there were — and no attempt to detect or rectify mistakes as they were occurring. The BBC guy, who was on the driver’s phone when he handed it to me, said there should have been about 20 people. Also, nobody could explain how I’d managed to catch the bus. Logically, everyone ought to miss it when there is a cock-up of this scale.

“I’ll catch the train,” I said. The BBC guy said, “You’re free to do so, but you have to understand that you’ll be on your own. We will pay for your ticket when you get here.” — Not.

Though contractually it could have been carried forwards, I considered the option of going all the way down to London on an empty bus more extreme than that taxi offer we once had in Esbjerg.

And I don’t see why the whole transport thing wasn’t being done on the train anyway, instead of a bus, other than as a result of the legendary dire crapness of the UK train fare system. In other places there’s such a thing as a group ticket to overcome the rip-off experienced when more than 5 people travel together on the same route and it becomes 90% cheaper to charter a crappy road vehicle, in spite of the fact that there’s plenty of room on the trains at 5 in the morning. In all other businesses there are hefty discounts for bulk-buying and wholesale. So it goes.

And so, in London, I met Dan, formerly of the CADCAM industry, whom I had insisted come over on the 4am bus from Bristol (which did exist), so I’d have someone to talk to. My plans of distributing a general-purpose, simple-to-use, fit-for-the-job parsing and mash-up database (the metroscope) rapidly deflated due to patent lack of interest, so I spent a day and a night teaching Dan about urllib, regexps, and how to scrape and parse the June 2008 Merseyside Police Helicopter flight page (chosen as an easy exercise), followed by uploading the records into my fit and general feature-complete but too-ugly-for-cool-people-to-be-seen-dead-near metroscope database on which I had suspended development exactly two weeks ago.

RP rolled in late in the afternoon, drank some beer for his hang-over cure, and began to write a screen-scraper for some other source of government data. He decided it was better to upload the structured data to his own version of the metroscope, written in PHP, designed incompatibly, and which he had begun work on exactly two weeks ago but didn’t complete due to time constraints that he had been aware of for at least the past week. As such, it was not possible to mash-up any of his scraped data on a map of the country in the time available, because no one had prepared a downstream webpage to render such images beforehand — as had been done for data in the metroscope. But that’s just the brilliance of building on top other people’s hard efforts and componentized systems, instead of just throwing it all away sight unseen, isn’t it!?

Late in the night I began building my unrolling-titles metroscope-front-end. Dan began work on scraping the missing person’s database, but by the morning there clearly wasn’t anywhere for this to go. I suggested Dan go chat with people at the other tables. Having been so long in the CADCAM industry where the companies are (a) highly secretive about what their programmers are doing, and (b) appear to express bugger-all curiosity for what their competitor’s programmers are doing (thus undermining the reason for (a) other than for the purpose of breeding a culture of sad isolation among their employees), the idea that people on other tables actually wanted you to come over and sit down with them to talk about what they were doing, came as a complete surprise.

A guy with a microphone, who claimed to be a radio reporter, approached me and asked what I was working on. At the time I didn’t really want to talk. I would have wanted to show him undemocracy.com, because it’s still important and still no one is interested in it, but I knew he wouldn’t be interested in it. So I made up something about mashing-up the locations of all these poxy police helicopter rides in the middle of the night, and letting people know where they had occurred.

I called Dan back and said we had to make a presentation. We got scheduled in for our 90 seconds of fame in slot 22. My computer broke down the moment I unplugged it. And anyway its 24 hour internet connection had predictably expired and refreshed the lovely dynamic Open Streetmap web-page with a Virgin logo. Luckily, we had prepared some static slides on Dan’s computer. But it was an Ubunto machine and unable to access its external monitor socket. The back-up back-up plan on-stage was for the camerawoman to direct her lens over our shoulders at the computer screen so that the text showed up in blur-o-vision on the big stage projection.

I let out a good healthy rant with a lot of genuine emotion about being kept awake by that f***ing police helicopter above my house at 4 in the morning. To sort this out I was going to run a screen scraper to read the log of pathetic excuses good reasons for being in the sky at that time of night. Our system was going to email everyone in the neighbourhoods affected automatically with a quote of their excuse and include a link to the police force web-page for making complaints.

It didn’t win a prize, or even an honourable mention. All of those freebies and respect went to incomprehensible word-soup TV subtitle unnecessary-OCR translating Lonely Fling-it find-your-favourite-music sound-tracks, again.

Meanwhile, the government has promised to produce a crime map, channel 4 has goes on about its £50 million to spend on things like on-line innovative public tools, and who knows what talent the BBC will report that they have painstakingly discovered and nurtured from across the country?

What all these nutty media corporations don’t see is that what we really need more than anything else is some engaged publicity — preferably in the form of a TV program where the stories are explained to the audience about what is happening in such a way that inspired more people that they could do it. You don’t have to waste your talent programming only what your boss tells you to. There are better things which you know you can do.

The fact that not one radio, TV or newspaper outlet has deemed it worth considering so much as a 10 minute broadcast on — for example — the development of the Open Street Map project is outrageous and completely inexcusable.

Same goes for other unique developments, like mySociety and TheyWorkForYou, whose segment, if ever made, will consist entirely without mentioning Public Whip.

Did I say I was horribly grumpy right now?

Must be the lack of sleep.

Meanwhile, Becka got flooded into the cave she was exploring on Saturday, and didn’t get out till seven hours late, missing the club dinner. I’m glad I wasn’t there to have worried about it.

I’ve done a full photographic write-up for last weekend receiving intromediate instruction over in Anglesey.

Below is a video of my failed attempt at rolling.

Some pictures and notes from three weekends that didn’t make it onto the blog on time.

At the end of April, Becka and I headed down to Babbacombe beach near Tor Bay on the invitation to teach a couple of divers how to dive from kayaks. As usual, they had bought the inflatable kind, probably because it was once advertised (and reviewed) in the national diving magazine. There has been never been coverage (since eight years ago) of the proper type of dive kayak, made from hard plastic and somewhat more sea-worthy, so few people know to get it instead. Ah, that corporate money-driven journalism attitude gets everywhere and prevents things getting reported on its merits. One day the world will catch up.

We had hoped it was the season for spring cuttlefish mating. Unfortunately, we missed seeing any, but we did find a patch of bivalves up to something or other.

In between discovering just how extraordinarily unfit divers can be at paddling kayaks, we ticked off a couple of dives in the bay, such as Morris Rogue. The guide writer for that site begins his description:

If I was a fish, and quite often I wish I was, I would want to live here.

No he wouldn’t. It’s wall-to-wall fat dalia anemonies. They sting.

It was an excellent dive.

We tried to find it using the transits, before giving up and heading for the pot buoy that marked it in the current.

That was a successful weekend.

The weekend before was a Becka’s choice. We went to Snailbeach mine in Shropshire, which was cold and full of loose rock. As you can see, the way to the next level is down a rope between the ore-cart rails. There was probably a solid floor there when they put in the tracks originally.

The week after Babbacombe and Tor Bay we visited Anglesey where a friend of ours was over from Ireland to attend the Sea Kayak Symposium. No one paid any attention to us, or asked us for tickets, probably because we had the wrong kind of kayaks.

The weather was less than ideal and there was an unimpressive upset in a big wave as we tried to get off the beach. We got by with our stumpy dive kayaks, but the proper sea kayak back-flipped and was sent towards the rocks in danger of a good scraping.

On Sunday the whole island was covered with a bitterly cold dense sea fog, which wasn’t very fun. We’d had enough of winter conditions for one year, so Becka and I departed and drove all the way round the north coast of Anglesey in and out of blazing sunshine searching for a break in the coastal cloud.

We found the cut-off point at Puffin Island, parked near Beaumaris, and paddled along the boring sandy beach, and around the corner on the wrong side of the light-house where the misty cliffs were spooky. Across the strait, just out of sight in the fog, sea kayakers playing in the over-falls like ghosts.

We pulled up for lunch by a small stream that dribbled on a huge slab of rock and made it slippery with moss. The tide had gone out significantly by the time we turned back, so we had to go round the light-house on the correct side, and then discovered this big ship-wreck near the beach where we had launched.

Many things are hidden under the sea. Next weekend we’ll go for a course to learn about this proper sea kayaking. Might take our dive kayaks for a play on Friday if the weather is good.

After heaving into Plymouth following an extremely rough crossing from Santander last week (parts of the restaurant area were in freefall on the waves, as was my stomach), I discovered I lacked any alacrity to get back onto the net.

Becka headed off to Cambridge for a conference, and I caught the train and carried most of the smelly caving gear across town, arriving home at around 8pm. As I began clearing out hundreds of emails (mostly error messages from scripts I don’t control), Martin and Aidan hassled me on the Skype video about their woes over the past two days at BBC NW labs in an all expenses paid 4 star hotel on the shore of Lake Windermere six miles north of the nearest train station.

I caught the 6:05am train from Liverpool the following morning with my bike and was told you can’t make bike reservations on Virgin trains on the day. I managed to make one with the more helpful ticket window in Wigan with about 30seconds to spare, and was able to cycle down to the hotel by about 8am.

I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. Maybe it was because I’d missed the two days of management exercises by the “facilitators” so the BS was thinning out. But to be honest if you get a comfortable bed and good food, what in the world could possibly matter? Maybe coming to it direct from a caving expedition had something to do with it; two days beforehand Becka and I had visited a newly discovered cave that had been used as a disposal hole for dead cows and household waste, and got scarily lost in a part of the lower streamway aptly named “Squality Street”.

We’ll see if something comes of it. I did nothing over the weekend except clean the garage and scrub the kitchen floor. Then in the afternoon after wasting time on the wikipedia entry about Korean reunification (why?) I discovered that the high tide the following day would possibly precipitate a tidal bore up the Dee.

It’s been a while since I’ve been out on the canoes, so Becka and I paid a visit to the place, paddled, and saw it come and go past, and were completely unable to surf on it. Have placed some details about it on wikipedia. One theory is that the goddamn airplane manufacturer there has dredged the river bed for the benefit of its wing carrying barges and disrupted the flow of the bore. The sooner the aviation industry shuts down for good the better.

While in Spain I made a minor breakthrough in the design of Tunnel (as I was programming half the time instead of caving).

Yesterday I discovered dbpedia (/cave), which is a database generated from the fields in wikipedia infoboxes. I’ve been calling for something like this to be made for some time, so now I am pleased to see it. Soon we’ll be able to list the top ten deepest caves in mendip and make other queries.