I went with my parents to a café at North Weald airfield. The place was called Rosey Lea café, part of a chain of four cafes in the Hertfordshire borders area. It was a pretty neat place which meant driving around the entire airfield to get to it. I’ve driven on airfields before, most notably at RAF Brize Norton where I was chased down by a C130 Hercules, and this place felt similar except for the lack of giant transporters. The food was nice and there were a few things flying around so at least there was stuff to see. I did see a Jet Provost and also this beast:
The Legend and I have spent some time away adventuring and generally enjoying being away from things. We stayed in Crowborough initially and investigated things around there. I had to do some car “repairs” as I broke part of the bottom of the car being slightly impatient. We visited Pooh Sticks Bridge on a rainy day, which did keep the riff-raff away. Then we also tried to find the source of the river Medway. This wasn’t that easy. I knew where the source was and it is a spring on some farmer’s land. We walked to the spot but then could only really see the bushes and ferns covering the spring. We could hear running water but could only make it out a little further downstream where there was a small bridge. It was all rather overgrown but it was pretty cool to be in that spot.
Source Of The River Medway – Trust Me
The Crowborough campsite was below part of the approach pattern for Gatwick airport. Many aircraft flew overhead and it was great tracking them on the phone. There was also an amazing sound some of them made when flying over. It was a strange howling sound that I think is something to do with their engines spooling down or flaps extending. I’m not sure but it was gorgeous.
We then travelled down to the New Forest. The campsite was positioned on an old RAF Base and we were set up at one of the aircraft dispersal points along the perry track. The campsite was busy but after a couple of days most people went home so it became quieter and calmer.
Geeses – The New Forest
We visited the Bovington Tank museum and had a ride in a tracked vehicle, watched a tank battle show and saw plenty of tin cans that burn soldiers alive if hit. Later that day we drove around collecting new supplies for our camp. We had a day of cycling which was lovely. I had never really explored the New Forest and it was great just pootling along enjoying the experience.
Sea Rex – The World’s Largest Pliosaur
I think possibly the best adventure was travelling the Kimmeridge to see the Sea-Rex. This is a skull of a pliosaur which was discovered in the cliff face of the Jurassic Coast. There is a BBC programme about it and this was most of the reason we visited this place. The display was really nice and we even got to see the Steve Etches at work in the lab. We had lunch at the pub opposite and then drove to Tyneham. This village was suggested as a place to visit by one of the workers in the Etches Collection.
Tyneham is an abandoned village. Everyone was relocated during the second world war and have never been allowed back to live. There’s a big local campaign but it hasn’t got anywhere so far. It was interesting to see. My most interesting piece of information was that when the village was compulsory purchased all the money went to the “squire” as he owned all the property. The villagers were given only the value of the vegetables in their gardens. I see most of the world in terms of a class struggle between the poor and the wealthy. This classically highlights this struggle that is a very long way from being resolved.
Kimmeridge
On the return from Kimmeridge and the Jurassic Coast we drove past a shop selling pretty cool outdoors and biking stuff. So we hung a quick u-ey and visited that place. I would recommend Guardhouse Sports to you. I bought the Legend her birthday present. While packing away and getting ready to return I saw some nice aircraft heading to Bournemouth airport ready for their airshow. There were a couple of RAF Tutors and then, the most gorgeous Saab Draken and Viggen of the historical flight. I’m not sure I’d seen these flying before so it was great to see them.
I’ve recently had to deal with Razer and get a keyboard replaced. This started when one of the children complained about some of the keys not responding all the time. I quickly ignored this as I hadn’t noticed this and sometimes kids moan about things when really it’s a “them,” problem. However, later I noticed the same effect and one of the keys didn’t always respond. So I got in touch with Razer and went through their returns process. This was easy and annoying at the same time.
Initial contact was good but I did get an email saying that if I didn’t respond within 48 hours they would close my case. This was frustrating as I was away from my PC and I don’t really like using my phone to do work/typing stuff. But I did respond. Then they wanted a video of the problem, which was irritating as filming keypresses and the PC response to them was not the easiest, also trying to make the problem happen when it is intermittent meant a few tries recording.
Then, once the video was approved as showing a problem, I had to show that the keyboard did not work by cutting the USB cable. This would seem strange if I hadn’t experienced the same thing when returning a PlayStation steering wheel many years ago. Rather than spend money returning the product the company just want to make sure you can’t use your product so cutting the cable is the easiest and cheapest for them. I sent a photograph of the keyboard and cut cable. Did I think about how to do this to keep the keyboard operational? Of course. Did I think of a way to do that? No.
Next, the return was approved and I got an email telling me that a new keyboard will be sent to me. I do not know when that will be. Also, they said I might get a different type of keyboard depending on stock levels. All I can say is that if I get a different one it had better be more expensive than the one I am returning.
So, the delivery has occurred and it was quite painless. I had a DHL notification and I had that sent to a DHL centre as I’m never in my house when delivery people arrive. I would add that I didn’t get a “you can pick your parcel up” notification which was inconvenient as I had to keep checking their tracking website. Collecting the parcel was easy and quite local.
My keyboard was replaced with exact same type so I needn’t have worried about that. It also looked brand new in a sealed box so it’s not likely that it’s been refurbished. I want new stuff. It is plugged in and some keys replaced with different colours as specified by others in the household. I think it looks good. I’m back to being happy.
I went to see this film, Borderlands, at the Vue cinema in Thanet. I have no idea of the tide even though I was surrounded on three sides by water but this was an early evening showing of the film. I knew it had been panned in reviews but the trailer still made me want to see it.
It’s rather tricky to embed an IMDb score these days since I left Twitter so I will just tell you that I rated this film a 6/10. There’s a whole communication where I explain the scoring system.
I quite enjoyed the film. I liked the look of it. The story could have been better within the film, the overall plot was good it was just poorly executed. I would not watch it again but I was happy to have seen the film.
So my final camp is now complete. I’ve spent a week at RAF Henlow and it was a great time. I spent the week driving around in the party bus and singing along to all the great tunes we had playing. It was really nice being back with staff who I hadn’t seen for half a year and also meeting new staff from the other CCF unit there.
Bombardier Global Express Undercarriage
Here’s a list of the things we got up to during the week:
Archery, raft building, high ropes.
Shuttleworth Collection – anti aircraft Bofors training, bus ride, searchlight training, camp photo.
Leadership tasks.
Live 5.56mm 25m range at RAF Wittering using L98A2 weapons.
Martin-Baker factory visit.
DeHavilland museum visit and Link Trainer experience.
Harrods Aviation visit.
Voyager Simulations visit.
Elstree Aerodrome visit.
Duxford IWM.
Awards ceremony.
It was a camp worthy of my last CCF adventure and I look forward to seeing the section continue. The boss and I had loads of ideas and some plans fell through but that is how it goes. Overall I think we did a really good job.
You know how it goes. You’re flying along over the Netherlands and then BOOM, there’s a lightning storm in front of you. Fortunately for me I was already planning on landing before the storm but I don’t recall seeing lightning before in X-Plane.
T7 Red Tail Over Netherlands with lightning
You might need to click on the picture to embiggen it and then be able to see the lightning forks.
I went to see a film at the Cineworld cinema in Rochester yesterday. As we drove alongside the river I noticed that the tide was very low. I really should, at some point, learn about spring and neap tides, or at least the timing of them. I understand why they occur I’ve just not investigated when they occur. After the film I rated this on IMDB. You should see the ratings system on within this communication. I can’t get the code to share my rating because it used to be on Twitter and I left that hellhole many years ago. So, below is the average user rating from IMDB. I rated this film 6/10.
I didn’t hate this film. I didn’t really love it either. It kept my interest for its entire 135 minutes runtime. I did find myself constantly thinking why apes were the main characters and whether this film would be any different had all the cast been “human”. If it was set as ginger haired people against the rest of the world would it have made a difference? Is it ok to watch this as the apes being lead characters makes it ok rather than problematic. I do get that the whole premise is apes rule the world. That makes sense. But this was just a film with characters and their development. Maybe people wouldn’t see it if this was a human based story.
I quite liked it I guess. I am still thinking about it and I guess that makes it a good thing. However, I am thinking more about an episode of Dr Who, 73 yards, and trying to get my head around that more than I am this film. Like, why was the name of that episode in imperial units? Couldn’t they have made it 73 metres. There are bigger issues with that episode and so I will have a look online to see if there are answers.
I have and have not wanted a PlayStation Portal since I saw they were released. There was a period of time that I had a notification from a stock checking site to try and buy one but I was always too late to the party. I nearly managed to order one from Currys but then the order got cancelled as they had run out of stock. So, I gave up on stock checking sites and just thought I’d be ok without one.
So, I had settled myself to not owning a Portal, I can always use remote play on my iPhone if I wanted to even though I really hate using screens as controllers. Then, one day, EE sent me a text message saying they were selling Portals in their shop. Even though I had mentally settled on not owning one, I somehow went through the entire order process and ended up having a Portal delivered to my home.
PlayStation Portal
The above image is a poor photograph because you can’t see the main features of the Portal which would be the controller part of it. But you can see that I am logged into Fortnite. I have found that the Portal works really well on my home network. I haven’t tested it fully on another Wi-Fi network yet, but I am going to do so this weekend. So far it seems a great little device, as long as you have connectivity. If you don’t then it’s just a lump of plastic and electronics.
One of my main methods of connecting to my PS5 will be via my phone’s hotspot. I figured that I pay for quite a bit of data so I might as well start to use the allocation. However, when I first tried to connect to my iPhone the Portal said it couldn’t connect. I tried again and I still got an error message. I spent a little while using Google and I found a number of pages where they said it was not possible as iPhone doesn’t support the particular NATs or whatever. I was somewhat upset at this.
Then, through a random Reddit post I saw that someone had connected to an iPhone using manual settings in the Portal and so I tried that. It worked!!! I now have the best of all worlds. I am a happy chappy.
