Freesteel

Mon. 9 August More Tunnel programming and general lack of hassle. Walked up road with Martin to buy a canister of cooking gas when all the drivers were too idle to help fetch it themselves before the shop closed. It’s sunny at last again.

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Becka got a lift up to Yorkshire on Friday night with another caving buddy. Unfortunately he had to go to the Matienzo caving 50th anniversary party in the evening, which meant she was going to be short changed.

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Becka’s cave trips last weekend (I surveyed part of the entrance streamway) was to survey up to the connection and then, on the next day, help dig the connection between Rift Pot and Ireby Fell Cavern. No time to talk about it, so here is the survey:

Oh look, I’ve left off any scale bars. How useless. No time to waste. Back to work.

The data is here. Access to the project is here.

Once again, too much work happening, and all my blogging time is taken up with active activities. Last weekend I was hauled off caving to the Forest of Dean whether I liked it or not.

We picked up two cavers in Manchester and headed down, using their crap-nav stuck to the windscreen. The novelty wore off after much time hurtling down unnecessary single track lanes nowhere near our destination, only to turn back out onto a trunk road. All the campsites had huge barriers and gates, except one which we found at 1am on Miss Grace’s Lane, which was excellent. There was even another caving club staying there.

Saturday was a trip down Slaughter Stream Cave. I have added the photo to that Wikipedia page, and then got incensed to discover that those Yank cavers had deleted the coordinate field from the Infobox Cave template.

On Sunday I had an unusually pleasant morning in Chepstow foraging for breakfast owing to the fact that we were booked into Otter Hole which has a tidal sump part way through. This wasn’t scheduled to drain till 1:40pm, so I couldn’t be rushed to get going, get going, get underground.

The cave was all squalor and sharp rocks. I found it exceptionally hard going. We participated in a session of spray cleaning some of the stalagmites in the Hall of Thirty. And then spray-cleaned ourselves with a secret hosepipe in the woods where someone had dammed a stream to create a head of water. Good thinking.

Here’s a 5 minute video to of the squalor.

A bit of a hybrid video of two weekends in February, beginning with Becka’s idea of a good day out, and then mine. The sea was a lot colder than the cave, which is why Becka paddled away so quickly as soon as we surfaced. We were trying to test out our stuff prior to a diving trip to Scotland (video is coming).

This is Ireby, followed by the wreck of the Hermine near Trearddur Bay.

The survey of Ireby is also coming along, and we’re hoping that it will require substantial amendment once this mud mining is complete and Northeast Inlet is connected to True Grit, the survey errors are distributed around the loop, and the survey drawings are moved using the power of Tunnel.

Slow on the old blog posting these days. The more that happens, the less time there is to report it. I do most of my reporting when there is nothing to report.

The office is gradually filling up.

On Sunday 7 February we abandoned guests at home and went for some mud mining in Northeast Inlet of Ireby, trying to dig the connection to another passage called True Grit. Neither is very roomy, and the squeeze halfway along Northeast Inlet requires you to lie on your side with both hands at your sides and wriggle. You cannot get through with one arm ahead, which is the normal reaction. My fancy Sten light went on the blink with some kind of electronic problem that would reset if I unplugged the cable and plugged it in again: not what you want to be doing with this depth of chocolate sauce mud.

I’ve got some videos of the affair, which I must edit down at some point.

Following weekend (13 Feb) was time to try out the first kayak diving of the year in anticipation of a imminent trip to Scotland (someone else chose the time). We kept it simple, and went to the wreck of the Hermine in Anglesey.

Water was about 7 degrees C, but conditions were calm and even slightly sunny. Nothing much visible on the dusty wreck that is right up against the shoreline. I sprang a nosebleed underwater, which I did my best to ignore while it filled up my mask.

Stayed with Bill at Y Felinheli, that coincidentally contains the house where Sten lights are imported to. That saved the postage. We took a bimble up the Menai Strait while suffering an irritating hangover from just two pints of beer. Grumble.

Nelson has a statue by the water here, for some reason.

Here’s to the summer when it eventually comes.

I can’t keep up. I have some very technical blogposts to put together on important matters such as Total Place, but there’s too many things I should be doing, like machine tool bugs.

So here’s some photos that don’t even cover the half of it.

Our new office in Liverpool Science Park 2. Can you guess what their password on the wireless is going to be?

Going caving on a wet Sunday 17 January to Low Douk again for more surveying.

Here’s the programming team for Scraperwiki down in the Mendips starting another feature that was not on the godamn to do list — to build an igloo (14 January).

Who can blame them? They’d just spent a hard week ganging up on me for trying to do stuff that was not in the to do list while living in this place. But it’s okay, because the igloo was going to be deleted the following week once we’d tried it out.

Previous week over new year involved my first trip to Low Douk on Leck Fell. We had to walk up from the bottom of the hill because it was all too icy.

There was some more mapping of caves. In 8 days, I caved once and Becka caved on 7 days. One of those days I spent in the car because of too horrible a hang-over.

Too much ranting in the blog. Here are some still pics from last three weekends caving.

Sunday 18 October

What a mean thing to put on a horse. This was during our Wheeler ride around St Helens.

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Two days of hard coding on Tunnel Cave Drawer for this piece of crap! The orange tinsel bit on the right going down to the silver hammerhead shark shape is supposed to be Razor Dance.

Back in 1998 when I began this godforsaken Java project, it was to do caves in 3D by modeling by their passage cross-sections joined into tubes, but after a lot of work I concluded that the necessary data wasn’t going to be collected by surveyors who weren’t thinking like CAD designers.

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Getting a little behind in recording my away trips. If I don’t put them here I won’t be able to remember them in ten years time because, unlike wise people like Tony Jarratt, I don’t keep a logbook.

On the 17 September there was a scraperwiki.com development get together in Liverpool. Here’s some of the crew looking like a gritty photo shoot for a band, shuttling their way out the gates with only one pass (we had to keep passing it back through the railings).

The following weekend was the CUCC 60th annual dinner up in Yorkshire where I got to see all my old mates who’d grown up, got married, had kids, and, well … whatever.

Some of these youngsters will live long enough to enjoy the strong economy we saved for them by burning as much coal and oil as we possibly could in our time.

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