"Nothing but the rain"
Where vague stuff is placed for filing
Although these weren’t taken on Newtonmass Day they were taken in the 2018 season and in the area of the Medway Valley. Not sure what they say about this area though.
Actually, two of them do point to the idea that the Medway valley area is rough as fuck.
A couple of nights ago I was watching television in the evening when I could hear the sound of a large or low helicopter. I didn’t move but consulted 360 Radar and observed that it was a Royal Navy Merlin helicopter flying over. It struck me as a little odd but not enough to make me move. I see Apaches and Chinooks a couple of times a year and given there are DIO training areas in east Kent there’s reason for the activity.
Turns out I was rather wrong.
The next day there was quite a bit of news about the Special Boat Service or maybe the Royal Marines on social media although most of the mainstream press kept away from it. I probably should have followed the Merlin on 360 Radar a little longer, but my television show was deemed more worthy.
What is going on here? If you look at these stairs there doesn’t seem to a whole lot going on. They are down the side of a bridge over the river Medway. You can’t see that to actually get to this point you have to climb over some armco from the path but that’s not my biggest issue with them.
If you look more closely you will see that there isn’t a route to the left at the bottom of the stairs. There is just a slope. No flat path for walking on. Just slope. I don’t understand what the intentions of the designer were. The fence implies there should be a wlakway. The reality is there isn’t one. Maybe I’m just not meant to be there.
Well, that was a weekend! For some reason I decided to have a go at running my website [this one] from my own NAS drive. I figured this will save me money in the long run? won’t have to rely on GoDaddy who have hosted my website since its inception. I’ve not had any problems with GoDaddy but it’s a bit like car tax. When it comes around to paying for the hosting I just find I’d rather not.
So, I spent many hours staring at my computer screen. The first thing was getting the NAS to run as a web server and get the data out to the world. This took a little while to configure, especially the port forwarding and stuff, but I had done this for my Raspberry Pi and it’s web server so I did have some experience. I installed Webstation on the black box and got it working.
The next thing to do was trying to migrate my website from the GoDaddy servers to the NAS. However, this means running WordPress and that means the following have to be installed on the NAS drive:
WordPress configured everything to run well and then I followed a web guide which had explained it should be easy to transfer the data with a little knowledge. I have a little knowledge and I think that makes me more dangerous than most! I FTP’d my site to my PC ready for uploading to the NAS drive.
I then tried importing the SQL database and setting up WordPress to read that database and work properly.
I failed at this about three times.
I failed terribly. To the point of uninstalling WordPress and deleting all the data and trying again. Each attempt took about an hour. It was quite frustrating because I do think I was close and only needed to change a “space” or “comma” in one of the php files and it would have worked wonders. But I started to despair.
So, I paid for some migration software. I already use UpdraftPlus and this automatically backs up my site to the cloud and they offered a migration package for about £20. Considering how much time I had spent doing all this it would have made more sense to spend that in the first place. But, you know, I wanted the experience. I do know a lot more about SQL and stuff now so it wasn’t a complete waste.
UpdraftPlus migration was easy to use and it even sent the files straight to my webserver. I thought that was quite impressive. It did take a long time though and I left it running overnight. I checked on it this morning.
The local version of WordPress was asking me to locate the backup files and then import them. As I was running a very basic and unmodified version of WordPress I hoped the import file would write all data to the SQL database and also import all the settings.
It did and quite quickly.
However, it did come up with an error reading one of the “upload” zip files. I think there must’ve been an error. Most of the website was working well and the WordPress dashboard was looking good. I think the database thought all these media files existed but Updraft couldn’t remove them from the zip file and so stopped working.
I FTP’d into the existing site and downloaded all the media files, about 5GB and FTP’d them to the NAS and hey presto. It all seems to work quite well. I am quite pleased.
I now have to go through and change the odd link here and there which won’t work because of the directory structure, but generally I am very happy with everything. I have a plugin which will crawl through and check links for me. I could also get Google to do a crawl for me, it worked really well last time to indicate some issues on the site.
This is the very first Fooyah communication on this new hosting. I am happy. If blurry eyed.
This, is I guess, a slightly bizarre communication. I have noticed that while I’m falling asleep and if the air in the room is still I can feel the induced draft of cool air on my face caused by exhaling breath.
When I breathe out of my mouth and my head is facing horizontally the air I breathe out “pulls” air surrounding my head along with it and that gap is filled with air which causes a slight cooling effect on my cheeks.
Chilling The CheeksThis tour-de-force of a diagram shows what I mean. My outgoing breath A induces a current of air over my cheek B causing the cheek to cool a little. For this effect to be felt I think the bedroom air needs to be reasonably still and not too warm.
I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned here how lucky I feel I am being able to live in the North Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and every now and then nature combines in such a way to make the view gorgeous or stunning.
I didn’t really have time in the day to get the best photograph of the above situation. I think it would have been more stunning as fingers of sunlight crept over the horizon but I had other stuff I needed to do. Like get to work.
This photo shows the state of the soil on the Downs Slopes. It’s quite chalky here. I took this while I was trying to run up 5-O steps but I didn’t manage to run it all.
On a recent trip to Surrey I stopped off at Chobham services on the M25. You wouldn’t think I’d find much to comment on while having a quick wee break on a journey but “Oh My!”.
Every advert in the male toilets was for Shreddies and not the breakfast cereal.
Now, I will look at their website shortly and comment after but my initial reaction was:
WHY THE FUCK CAN’T WOMEN FART? WHO CARES?
My immediate next thought was:
We’ve had plenty of period shaming on women and now we shame them into smelling nice and pretty all the time and won’t allow them to perform normal bodily functions.
Well. I hope that the adverts in the ladies’ toilets were all for fart-pants for men, but i am unaware of those facts.
This advert is appalling. Women must remain clean and sweet and smell of roses for men. Women aren’t allowed to fart. Women should be beautiful for men. Farting is bad.
FUCK this company. I found this advert and all the other similar ones in the toilets sexist and shaming of humans for doing NORMAL human things.
Now, I’m off to look at the website and I’ll comment below.
So, they do men’s stuff too. Most of the web page is products aimed at men. It’s still disgusting.
“Fabulous idea, a great quality product with great styling, this could save many a marriage! A much needed product, fantastic innovation.”
Fuck this company.
It does seem that every year I end up driving all around the country and continent. This summer I drove to the Lake District for a few days of mountain walking. It is literally the other end of the country from me. If I travel about 50 miles from where I live I would be in France and my destination in the Lake District is about 25 miles from Scotland.
Then I drove to the middle of Germany. This means crossing the Channel, crossing France, Belgium, Netherlands and then half of Germany to pretty close to where the old border was with East Germany. This is about 400 miles as the crow flies. I have such a great time while there that the driving is perfectly worth it.
The only place not included this summer is a trip to Cornwall, another end of this country and maybe I need to correct that.
The total for these two trips, excluding driving around while there was 1658 miles or 2652km.
So, while travelling to Maldon, of salt fame, in Essex, yesterday I passed two things that amused me. First we should have a picture of Maldon.
More importantly we should have the things that amused me. Here we have Tom Tit Lane:
Now, Tom Tit is also Cockney Rhyming Slang for shit.
The next geographical amusing thing is Butts Green Garden Centre, again in Essex, although over to the east of the county, which is the weird part of the county.
So, as I named this communication, you’re welcome.
A few weeks ago when I was in the Lake District I would occasionally look at 360Radar to see what was flying close by. I found it curious that there was quite a lack of aircraft flying compared to Kent, where I live normally. Now, the south east does have the three London main airports and most air traffic heading to the continent. Have a look at the two following views and decide for yourself. Both are the same area of land and they are taken within a minute of each other. I think the difference is striking.
Of course, this communication could be entitled:
There’s a lot more planes where there’s a lot more airports