Freesteel

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

After many days of fruitless hacking on troggle, then losing my mp3 player sometime in the process of canoeing across Toplitzsee, and returning to hoards of very beery Austrians moving in on Base Camp like leiderhausen-clad apes with camper vans, I was seriously pissed off enough to go caving.

Team Tunnocks-string (Steve+Becka) had reportedly found some new horizontal levels at the depth of the ‘Wheres in 204, causing Becka to bounce down to Base Camp in order to type in her notes, only to find that she had forgotten to pack them in her bag. She had returned to Top Camp and tried phoning them down to me so I could type them into the computer, run the calculations, and find out where they were going in relation to the rest of the cave.

All I could see on the screen was a little knot of loops at the bottom of a 100m pitch, because that’s all she had surveyed. Steve complained later about how all they did was survey short loops around phreatic pillars and not actually go anywhere. The wide open leads that were left undone were not part of the numerical data.

Lacking sufficient toll road passes to justify driving up on my own, I was pissed off enough to cycle up the hill (easy after a mental two week Alpine cycling holiday) and walk in to Top Camp without any mp3 audio entertainment to keep my mind from stewing in its own thoughts, just in time to cook for all the returning cavers.

(more…)

I’ve done about 3 days of solid coding for managing the CUCC/Expo cave data to very little effect. What a waste of my time when I should be caving. But I’m too lazy. I did actually get underground last week to visit Satan’s Sitting Room, a section of passage discovered in 1992.

We found a carbide pig that had been left there during previous explorations. This is a length of inner tube stuffed with carbide lumps and sealed by snoopy loops to run your carbide generators for the caving lights on these long remote expeditions when batteries just won’t do.

(more…)

At this moment I am sitting in the park in Bas Aussee borrowing a wifi hotspot which I discovered two years ago, since the town’s one and only internet cafe shut down.

I am supposed to be doing lots of caving, but I am in fact hacking lots of cave software, until I get marched up the hill by Becka into the Loser Plateau.

I successfully avoided caving all of last week because my dad was visiting. We went for a long walk over the the crazy landscape that looks like this:

(more…)

Just to remind myself that I have actually done some caving while out here in rainy Matienzo — not only programming. Some videos will be edited and uploaded another time.

My attempt last weekend to complete a bit of cave surveying and have it uploaded onto an overlay of googlemaps was thwarted by lazy university students who were meant to come with us, and (following our actually doing the survey of part of the sump canal in IrebyFell Cavern) an interruption for beer.

The latter is always going to happen on a caving weekend. I don’t know what we can do about it. Our work (the squiggly white passage) showed up three days late.

Then on Monday we went digging with the Misty Mountain Mud Miners in the Easgill System.

Here’s a little video to prove that it was indeed misty and we were mining mud. The scones we ate for tea were pretty horrible, being the cheapest kind that could be bought at the supermarket. The day ended sooner than expected because we hit a rock. They’re going to have to come back next week with some capping equipment.