I went to meet my sister and brother-in-law at Castleton today to meet up after the birthday. The weather was pretty grotty so we didn’t go to the Heights Of Abraham as we originally had planned to do. I didn’t think there was much point in spending loads of money to look at the view – of a cloud. Instead we went to Castleton and we went into Speedwell Cavern which was an interesting boat trip inside an old lead mine. The boat trip was about 15 minutes there, with a 5 min stop half way as we waited for the previous boat to pass us – then it was to the bottomless pit (which turns out to be 35ft deep!). Then back in the boat back to the start. It was a very interesting trip and the first time that I can remember for a long time inside a cave (I went to Cheddar Gorge when I was little but don’t remember much about it).
We then had lunch in the Bull’s head (not recommended) although they did give us free parking. That was a relief as parking in the town seemed very expensive with a 3 hours stay costing £3 or more and whats more, the on-road parking is only charged on weekends and bank holidays – so not only do they rip the visitors off, they are blatantly obvious about it!
After lunch we nipped into a couple of outdoor shops and I ended up buying two walking poles (thanks Mum and Dad, Ruth and Tim!) for my birthday and we immediately put them to good use when we walked up a VERY steep hill – past Peveril Castle (although we only saw the Norman Lavatory) along the Limestone way, braving the snow and hail on the top of the hill to find we’d walked along a one way system and we had to go back down again. We all enjoyed the walk (I think) and hopefully Tim will have some good pictures to post here soon. pictures by Tim are online at Castleton Gallery
Yesterday was my birthday so I took a much deserved day off work. The only problem is that today feels like Monday again 🙁
In the morning we went and did a nice cache in the Delamere forest which was a very busy walk meeting loads of dog walkers. We found the cache fairly quickly, despite walking in the wrong direction a few times. Whilst we were signing the logs a dog came up to us to give a sniff to see if we had any food for it. The owner apologised and explained that is what the dog was doing, thinking that the cache container was actually a food container!
The afternoon was spent watching Lord of the Rings as I hadn’t seen it yet. I wasn’t very impressed as it was so long and certain sequences really really dragged. The fight sequences were so shaky and blurry I was wondering if the cameraman had had a shaking fit. I did really like the scenery shots and wished that I could go to some of those locations on holiday.
The evening was going to be spent at a restaurant with some friends of ours, but they got lost coming to our house, so we ended up having KFC with them instead which was still a good laugh. Overall a good day, especially as I didn’t have to spend it in the office.
There’s been a new version of Popfile released which has some pretty major enhancements. Make sure you read the documentation before installing. I’ll be doing that in the next few days I hope.
Got the above error message on the mail server this afternoon which was a new one on me. Apparently it is caused by the lack of available memory on the server. We have 1.5GB of physical memory, the STORE.exe process was taking 900MB of that and there was a console message (not much use when I’m sitting at my desk!) mentioning that it had increased the virtual memory used. The eventlog had various error messages such as the one in the extended entry which explained the above. I had scheduled a reboot for 10pm tonight but then customers started ringing to say they couldn’t get into our web front end so I had to reboot. This is the first time I’ve had this so I hope it doesn’t start to become a regular problem.
Simply Stu blogs about his experience at a really bad Wetherspoons where they had no spoons to eat the puddings (such as sponge pudding with custard) because the spoons had all been stolen a couple of weeks previously!
There was a photoshop contest for Farside pictures….Top 30 pictures are here and I love the bee one!
I was suprised to hear my computer making some noise when checking some links from a blog and discovered the culprit was about.com which is using java ad’s in the browser. Identical in the way to flash ads, but using java. Seeing as though I have the click to view plugin, I don’t see the flash ad’s but I saw heard this one. I really hope this is not the start of a new trend.
I wondered why going to http://localhost would often take me to a site in Australia. Apparently its due to Bug 184433 – Internet Keywords triggered by “connection refused” errors (hostname not running server on requested port). Really looking forward for this one to be fixed! I’m still not sure why it ends up there as I don’t think I had keywords configured and I was running a server on localhost (although not necessarily on port 80) Thanks to Neil’s whats new in Firebird post for the link that led me to this.
AIX Command Crib sheet has a useful quick reference guide for AIX – not sure what version of aix though.
Hope you all enjoy the extra day this year – don’t think we’ll be doing anything special.