Vague – where should it go? – Page 8 – Fooyah

August 26 2018August 27 2018

Shaming Farts

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.

August 19 2018

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.

June 24 2018June 24 2018

Busy South East

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

June 18 2018August 6 2019

Bagging A Few More

Over half term I made the journey to the other end of this country to spend some time in the Lake District. While it is quite a drive the views and atmosphere are so worth it.

While in the district of Allerdale I decided to complete a few more of the Wainwrights. There are 214 fells mentioned by Alfred Wainwright in his books and I’ve got a taste for bagging some each time I go to the Lake District. My personal target is to complete the lot by the time I am 60. I’ve got 14 years to go. I need to up my rate a little but the next time I go I am planning some lovely ridge walks that should get quite a few crossed off!

On the first day I went up Walla Crag [number 204 by height].

Walla Crag. pic.twitter.com/yO3PPefTz1

— Ian Parish (@iparish) May 27, 2018

I parked in Great Wood car park and walked up the Cat Gill route and down again via Castlerigg. It was a lovely little jaunt. Now I had a feel for it I wanted to try and get some of the lower stand-alone fells bagged. I was trying to cross off those that would mean a big detour on future longer routes so this would allow me to make as yet unplanned walks easier.

Next was Binsey [number 192 by height]. A little mound of a fell on its own to the north east of the Skiddaw range.

Binsey. pic.twitter.com/lfmmq3CASR

— Ian Parish (@iparish) May 28, 2018

This was too easy. The car was parked about half way up and was really just a little stroll. The views from the top were amazing. It was a lovely warm and sunny day with visibility running at about 25km. The mist was so fine that I couldn’t see the Scottish peaks but could just see Scotland across the Solway.

Another day, another walk. This time up Cat Bells [number 189 by height]. I had already completed this particular fell and so wasn’t too fussed about climbing it but I had planned to meet a work friend there.

Cat Balls. pic.twitter.com/wyjHj1HIeX

— Ian Parish (@iparish) May 29, 2018

It was pretty busy at the top and plenty of people were making this their first Wainwright. I t was nice to see so many people enjoying this countryside. The views are just lovely.

Walking down Catbells and I saw this sheep just standing and staring.

The next day was a rest day and I went on a narrow gauge railway and then visited Muncaster Castle. The walk back took in a short distance by the river Esk. The air was so still that the water looked like a mill pond.

I drove back to Keswick through two mountain passes. One was Harknott pass and this is a most ridiculous road. There are hairpin bends with a gradient of 1:3. There were times I couldn’t see where the road went out the windscreen while turning because the road dropped away so fast. It was a very satisfying drive. Then, there was the Wrynose pass which wasn’t as spectacular but was still very pretty.

Another rest day followed with a lovely time doing various things together with going to watch Solo. The final walk day was spent hanging around Crummock Water after getting to the top of Rannerdale Knotts [number 210 by height] adjacent to the lake.

Rannerdale Knotts. Forgot my hat! pic.twitter.com/qFCKmBtnDj

— Ian Parish (@iparish) June 1, 2018

I’m annoyed that I forgot my hat. I don’t do well in direct sunlight, I have a lack of natural head covering, not that I’m too fussed about that, and I burn easily, even with sun lotion on [SPF 50].

That was it for the week. A journey back to the South East and good broadband bandwidths beckoned the next day. It was good to get back to upload speeds in excess of 0.4Mb/s, it was needed to chuck photos into the cloud.

June 4 2018June 4 2018

EXACTLY

I know I shouldn’t really but I have a few spare moments and thought I should share my thoughts.

I HATE THE DAILY MAIL

I’m not going to justify it. I’m not going to say much apart from moaning about this headline:

Fuck the Daily Mail. EXACTLY. Really. Have you looked at the outfits and seen they are EXACTLY the same. No you haven’t you fuckers because they aren’t EXACTLY the same. Fuck You you racist piece of shit newspaper.

June 4 2018

Backitup

After my return from a trip to the Lake District, to be chronicled here at some point, I powered up the house. There’s quite a bit to do with IoT lights, Google Home, wireless speakers and the NAS Drive.

The NAS drive is where I have stored all my music, movies and photos for just over six years. I’ve replaced the hard disk drives once but never really thought I’d have a problem with it. So, I powered it up and went and did some stuff. When I got back to the black box I noticed there was no power light on. I checked the lead and socket power. It was all on. I pressed buttons but nothing. I then tried taking out the power lead from the box to then plug it back in. This was the second sign of trouble.

The power cable didn’t really want to leave the black box. When, after some good tugging, I got the lead out there followed a small spark, some smoke and general bad things that happen to electrical goods. Bugger.

After a quick check to see that it was definitely dead I panicked about getting the data off the HDDs. So, I ordered a USB Sata connection to join the drive to the PC. This seemed reasonable. When finally connected the PC didn’t want to read the HDD drive the drive was formatted in Linux and also had a RAID configuration. I was now starting to feel sick. The most recent photos are backed up in the cloud. But I have loads which are only on the NAS Drive. I thought I was protected because the HDD were in RAID1 configuration so the data should have been backed up in case of HDD failure.

More importantly I think was that my entire music library, along with the 100s of hours of organising it, was on the NAS. This has been a labour of love and the SONOS system uses the NAS as the music library along with iTunes [which I hate passionately].

The whole point of the RAID configuration was to make sure my data was safe. I hadn’t really considered the black box was going to be my downfall. It has died.

So, I now have some data recovery software and it has found 250GB of data but the file names are gone. I have those files transferred to the PC at the moment but my main hope is that I win a NAS enclosure the same as the one I did have. I will use this to get the data from the HDD assuming I can just plug the drives into the enclosure and it will be happy to let me read the data from them.

Reading online there are people who keep three or four copies of their data. This is something I am going to do in the future. I will have copies in the following locations:

PC
NAS Drive
Large capacity USB
Cloud

This will take a little organising but seeing as I was only at around half a terabyte on the old NAS I think I’ll be ok for a while. One of the disks I have taken out the old enclosure will be fitted into the PC and be used as the PC backup disk. I will use a USB stick plugged into the NAS to back that up and I will generally transfer stuff to the cloud as often as possible. I am currently a little sad about it all and I’m hoping that in a week’s time I’ll be fixed, up and running and generally a lot more cheery. There will be updates.

April 24 2018April 24 2018

Alternate Views

There’s a competition where I work involving the still image. I have entered with one of the following photographs. I have been meaning to take a collection of photos of the place for a number of years. There are certain aspects of the buildings that I find curious and interesting. I think they would make good images if taken from the correct angle. Sneaking in to take these photos has been on my “holiday to-do list” for a number of years but I’ve never got around to it.

Anyway. Here are four shots I took this week. No explanation, just interesting images IMHO.

April 22 2018June 20 2018

Noteworthy

A couple of random things in this communication [aren’t they always? I hear you cry].

firstly, a while ago there was some lovely helicopter noise over my house late at night. I looked it up on my flight tracker and discovered the Army Air Corps had passed exactly over my house.

The Army Air Corps just flew over my house!
Well, not all of it, just two people. pic.twitter.com/T2itJDcKkh

— Ian Parish (@iparish) April 16, 2018

Then, last night, while looking for the rain storms that were meant to be hitting the UK I noticed a Royal Moroccan Air Force Gulstream circling above the Essex – Hertfordshire border.

I followed this for a while wondering where it was heading, eventually it turned towards Stansted airport and I didn’t follow it all the way.

My suspicion is that this flight had some dignitary on board heading for medical treatment in London. The Saudis do this quite often and you can see their planes land at Stansted. The rail links are pretty quick as are road ways and even helicopter flights. The security is top-notch there too as it is where Air Force One lands with POTUS.

The above picture shows the thunderstorms heading over the UK along with the RMAF Gulfstream track.

February 28 2018February 28 2018

Winter Views

The weather over the last few days has been stunning. There’s a load of snow around and the whole of the county looks stunning. It has rather messed with my professional plans but, hey ho, I’m sure I’ll figure it out. The opportunity of being at home in daylight has meant that I have been for a couple of tentative runs since fucking my right Achilles. I am still walking and the Achilles seems intact. Not sure when I’ll next have a run but I’m pleased with the results so far.

So, these are the details of one of my runs. While I have been out I’ve taken many photos. I think they are gorgeous:

The countryside is stunning and I think that a couple of sub-zero temperature runs is just the way to celebrate the gloriousness of the whole thing. Ever wanted to know what snow does to trainers? The trainers are old, but waterproof and actually reasonably warm. I did notice today though that the sole is coming away so once they are dry I am going to glue them (again)!

I’m not too happy with having the heating on full time but it is the only way to keep my house warm. I guess I’ll have to pay for it over the rest of the year.

I also took some photos with the DSLR. This morning there was mist over the valley and it all looked just bloody gorgeous.

There was a dog walker out in the chill.

This concludes my winter pictures, until next time!

Category: Vague – where should it go?

A Long Way

Busy South East

Bagging A Few More

EXACTLY

Noteworthy