St. Rumwolds Raft Race at Bonnington
A small hint to anyone taking part next year, don’t pick a fight splashing the opposition if:
The crews of Mamma Mia and the Silver Duck found this out to their cost. The school children enthusiastically water ballooning the rafters. It was great fun to watch.
Attack on the Silver Duck
This sign was at the London Aquarium. Spot the maths mistake.
London Aquarium shark exhibit
A bad start to the Easter weekend was being turned away at the entrance to The Hop Farm at Paddock Wood to see Peppa Pig. Staff told us that it was too crowded inside and we should “come back tomorrow”. That isn’t really an option when you have already driven a long way. When others that were coming out were asking for a refund because they had not even seen the Peppa Pig character when they were at the show, it was clear that a different attraction had to be found to avoid disappointing my 5 year old.
Leeds Castle was the next nearest big attraction for Easter weekend. There was a treasure trail that lead to a chocolate Easter Bunny for the children and a kite display. The children could make their own kites in a big marquee and a kite shop was on site with reasonably priced kites if you wanted to join in. Everyone was having a brilliant time. It is easy to forget how much fun children can have with a kite. Safe to say that being turned away from the Hop Farm gave us a much more involved family trip out at Leeds Castle.
Spent today at the V Festival. Heavy rain was forecast all day, but by the time I got there it stayed dry, much better than some other years.
Tha bands I caught were:
If the people at V really want a decent festival then concentrate on providing a good listening experience instead of squeezing extra stages into the venue. Channel 4 should be livid that the stage they sponsered was pretty much ruined by the bass bleeding over from the Bacardi tent on the right and from the Strongbow tent on the left.
Despite my moans I really enjoyed the day.
Yesterday was the culmination of months of training for the present Mrs. Dogsby – Folkestones contribution to Race for Life.
For those of you who don’t know the Race for Life is a ladies only charity run over a 5km course. The event is in support of Cancer Research. I was impressed with the turn out. There were two races in Folkestone on the 9th July. We were at the afternoon event and there were 2400 participants, the morning session was fully booked with even more people. Each runner had a label on their back with the names of the people they were running for, those who had already lost their lives to cancer. Some of the ladies had four names on their backs, but instead of looking sad they seemed enthusiastic knowing that they were raising money to stop others enduring the same.
Mrs. Dogsby had been training for a couple of months (under my supervision until she told me I ran too fast) and could comfortably run the 5km, but decided to walk the event with her mum and the majority of the others. All sorts took part in the race, from the very young ( 7 months ) to the very old. Some went around as a gang of friends cheering as they went, others went around quietly on their own. The important thing was that they all raised money. So, congratulations to Mrs. D and Mrs D’s Mum, they did extremely well and raised 350 pounds between them.
High points of the afternoon were
A friend of mine has been working on some freeware games and has posted them on his website.
The games play well, are nicely presented and are well worth a look. I really like the attention to detail in the homage to Pac-man called Cac-man. The sound effects are spot on and brought nostalgic memories of the original flooding back.The author, Blitterbug, has even been seen playing Cac-Man himself during lunchtimes. I have suggested that he could add networked highest score table so that we can see how well we perform against other players, but I think this project is considered complete and something new is probably in the pipeline.
The games can be downloaded from here.
Nintendo have announced the name under which they will release their latest console.
It is Wii.
Yep, a rubbish name. I can only imagine it is designed to provoke comment from the English speaking world.
Lets hope the console performs better than it sounds.
Very exciting news is that it looks like my crowd are going to descend on the May Beer Festival at the Halfway House in Brenchley. Mendip is proposing attendance on the Saturday or Sunday, as by Monday the best beer will be gone (and Sunday has the added bonus of a traditional pub roast).
So, I will blending in with the Real Ale stereotype by wearing my Linux guru beard and sandles.
I am shamed to admit it but … I gave up.
I could not get Eternal Lands to work on my machine. I had tried almost every solution I could find on the forums and eventually decided that I was beaten. Whilst researching my problem I came across lots of posts about World of Warcraft and it looked very impressive. So I decided to give that a go, after all the transgaming web site said that this was a supported game. What could go wrong?
I paid my subscription to Cedega and installed without any problems, let the gaming begin!
“Oh no. Why can I only see the sword and eyes of my character?”. Searching the forums showed a number of other people with the issue. A lot of responses were along the lines of “Buy an nVidia card”.
So, that is what I have done. A shiny new PNY 6600 GT runs Eternal Lands at blistering speeds. World of Warcraft certainly taxes the card a lot more but generally I get more than 30 fps, so I am happy. I know that there are further tweaks that can improve things – I have yet to try them out.