14 July 2011 (Thursday) - Google Plus

I woke up feeling refreshed and raring to go. As I bounced out of bed I looked at the clock: 3.20am (!) I tried to go back to sleep, dozed a little, and felt like death warmed up when I was actually supposed to get up.

To work, which was rather productive for a change. And then home again to find two separate invitations to join Google Plus. I say “to find” – I saw a good friend talking about Google Plus on Facebook, and I sulked until he sent me a request to join. So I followed that request to find I’d been invited by another friend already.

At the moment you can only join Google Plus by invitation only. And so now I’m part of the elite. Having said that, if they will take me they will take anyone.

So – what is Google Plus like? In principle it’s much the same as Facebook or Yahoo Messenger or MySpace, really. You tell the world whatever banal pettiness you want to tell them, and you read about the mundane trivialities of your friends’ lives.

It has a feature in that you can arrange your friends and contacts in “circles” and so you can lump together all your friends from one part of your life into a separate circle from your friends from another part of your life. Rather than sharing every bit of triviality with everyone, you get to choose who sees what particular bit of drivel you’re spouting. Effectively it’s a partitioned version of Facebook.

This is a “feature”, and is clearly using the I.T. definition of the word. Personally I’d rather hear more from someone than only about that which we initially think we have in common. If all I spoke about was kites, I’d never know that my mate was also keen on astronomy, reptiles and poker.

I suppose with less than a dozen “friends” on Google Plus (as opposed to hundreds on Facebook) it’s rather early for me to dismiss Google Plus out of hand…. But …

The other day two good friends independently told me they had no idea that next Friday is Canterbury Beer Festival. I take a lot of time and put in a lot of effort to make sure my Google Calendar (accessible through this blog) is up to date and is visible to the world. And the very people for whom this calendar is intended don’t even look at it.

I have sent people messages via Facebook over the last few weeks. Despite their constantly posting stuff on Facebook, they insist they’ve not logged on to the thing for months.

People tell me they’ve sent me emails and texts that I’ve never received. Skype, Yahoo messenger, ICQ, MySpace have all come and gone. Trying to contact people via email and mobile phone is an ultimately frustrating pursuit as everyone changes mobile phone number and email address so often.

So here we are – Google Plus. Yet another way to try to keep in touch. Will it be any more effective that that which has gone before? To be fair to Google Plus it is still very early days. But I really don’t see what advantages it has over what is already available. Having said that, currently communications don’t work so it can’t hurt to give the thing a fair trial. If any of my loyal readers would like to join the elite over on Google Plus, just drop me a line.

Having said that, the first person I attempted to induct into the elite has told me she’s just had a reply back saying “Exceeded Field Trial Capacity”…..

13 July 2011 (Wednesday) - Back to Work

After a long weekend it was back to work for me. And within half an hour of being back, it was as though I’d never been off. I don’t dislike my job: I’m bored with it. Over the last thirty years I’ve left home and subsequently moved house three times. I got religion, found Jesus, got confirmed, realised it was all a load of old tosh, renounced the lot and become a minister in the Church of the Apathetic Agnostic. I’ve got married and had children. I’ve obtained a degree, and post-graduate qualifications. Hobbies have come and gone; and in many cases come again and gone again.

But the job remains constant, day in, day out. Year in, year out. I suppose I shouldn’t complain – in these uncertain times there are many people who would like the certainty that a job provides. But I’m bored.

Mind you, work isn’t without its little moments. One such happened today when a colleague came in limping. He announced he thought he’d broken his toe, having “dropped a bender” on it. He hastened to add that a “bender” was a metallic implement for bending other lumps of metal, but I didn’t believe him. I know what a bender is (!)

After a rather dull day I came home to find the forecast rain hadn’t happened, so I set about the garden. I strimmed and mowed the lawn, and saw red with next door’s overgrowth. On one side (the neighbours who speak to us) there is a fence. Just a fence. On the other side (the side who hate us) is what I can only describe as a jungle. An assortment of clematises, roses, vines and all manner of climbing plants pour over the fence. Periodically I prune them back, but I hadn’t so far this year. The clematis, blowing in the breeze, was actually half way across our garden. So I got the hedge trimmers and stripped it back to six inches from my side of the fence. He won’t like it, but if he truly wanted to be neighbourly he’d prune back his overgrowth himself….

12 July 2011 (Tuesday) - A Stroll round Teston

I am fast coming to the sad conclusion that sat nav is only any good for telling you directions when you already know the route. Take yesterday’s trip to Downe House for example.

The sat nav was fine all the way to Swanley. In much the same way that my own navigational abilities would have been fine all the way to Swanley. However the point at which I needed the sat nav was the point at which it started losing the GPS signal.

This was not an isolated event. The useless device then went on to get Maidstone and Saudi Arabia mixed up. So I sent a few minutes this morning printing a map of today’s planned ports of call. Maps’ batteries don’t go flat.

After a bit of brekkie we set off on the day’s journey. I had my map, and so there was a backup to the sat nav. I put in the post code of our first destination into the sat nav: it found two places with this post code. One which was ten miles away and one which was in Somerset (!) We went with the local one.

We arrived to find it was what we’ve been looking for. Reasonably priced caravans: the sort of size we are looking for. They provide caravan storage for less than ten quid a week, and being near Maidstone it’s in the right part of the world for us. All I need now is a tow bar on the car and getting a caravan is a practical proposition.

But for all that we thought we’d found the ideal place, we thought we’d carry on with our day’s itinerary. Our next purveyor of caravan turned out not to be so. Advertised on the internet as having touring caravans for sale, it was a static caravan park. I mentioned to the chap in the office about how misleading his website was. It was clear from the blank expression that the poor fellow had never even heard of the internet, but he did mention that a lot of people seem to be under the mistaken impression that he sold touring caravans.

And the third caravan shop turned out to be rather a waste of time as well. The caravans were nice, but so were the prices (for the salesman). With prices starting at about double the price I intend to pay, I’ve taken them off my list.

We then thought we’d eat our pic-nic at St Leonard’s tower – we were driving past a sign to the place and so we thought we’d pop in. So we took the signposted turning and carried on down a lane. And carried on, and on. We never did find the place. So we gave up searching and had our picnic at the site at Teston Bridge.

We’ve camped at Teston Bridge picnic site so many times, and today we thought we’d go for a stroll round the area: one of ‘er indoors ^TM guided tours starts and finishes there, and bearing in mind how easy the first two walks were to follow, we thought we’d try a third.

It has to be said that the directions for this walk weren’t as good as the ones for the walks round Barham and Aldington. Whilst at no point did we actually get lost, some of the paths and stiles on the first part of the walk weren’t as clearly marked as they might have been. Mind you, had we found the correct footpath we wouldn’t have found the Good Intent pub: one person’s wrong turn is another person’s bonus pint. A pint of Larkin’s slipped down very well.

After the first mile (or so) the route became much easier to follow, and we found ourselves walking parallel to the river, looking down on Teston lock and our old campsite and kiting field. It seemed odd to see such familiar places from such a strange angle. Today’s photo is Teston Lock seen from above.

In the past I’ve set off Chinese lanterns without a thought for where they end up. Today we found a crashed one: just lying in a field. I thought about picking it up, but decided against it. After all, it wasn’t my lantern. And there was a worrying five minutes when we saw what looked like Doctor Who’s Tardis by a hedge.

We then made our way along the river to Wateringbury and the bridge, where we crossed and then made our way back to the car. It was a good walk: a shame it started raining on the way home. But we didn’t get too wet.

It was a good stroll – there are some photos here. If the wind is as non-existent as it usually is at Teston, I might go off on this walk at the next kite festival…

11 July 2011 (Monday) - Another Day Off

Following on from Saturday’s English Heritage extravaganza, today we thought we’d have a look round Downe House – home of Charles Darwin. We set the sat-nav, and off we went. And we were doing fine until we got to half a mile from the place where we found ourselves in a traffic jam. After sitting like lemons for twenty minutes I thought I’d go see what the hold-up was.

Some plank had decided to drive a lorry carrying a static caravan along a very narrow lane, and then (for no adequately explored reason) unload the static caravan onto the middle of said very narrow lane. And then to add insult to injury a bus had attempted to overtake the static caravan and had wedged itself into a hedge. The obvious solution to this problem would have been to turn the car around and go back the way we came, but we were hampered in our efforts to do so by locals who were “helping”.

We eventually negotiated our way to Downe House. We parked up, and made our way inside. We started off with a look round the upper floor which had a potted history of Darwin’s life and achievements. I suppose that being a life scientist by trade, Darwin is old hat to me. And what they had on display was dumbed-down old hat.

The ground floor was done out with an audio tour about Darwin’s domestic arrangements. (Apparently he used to play billiards with his butler). The audio tour was at first sight far more high-tech than any of the audio tours we had over the weekend – it was on an iPad. But a crappy iPad. The battery on my one went flat half way round. And they didn’t allow us to continue the audio tour into the garden as the batteries weren’t up to it. Instead they gave us a written transcript to read as we walked about and got ourselves lost.

At the weekend we went to four English Heritage sites – all reasonable priced: I would return to any of them. Downe house was a tenner to get in and wasn’t worth the money. It was a good job that being members of English Heritage we didn’t have to pay: I would have demanded a refund – it was crap.

The plan was then to call in at a couple of caravan showrooms on the way home. The sat-nav took us a very scenic route to Hollingbourne. The caravan showground there had some nice caravans, but they weren’t cheap. I programmed my sat nav to our next port of call: ME15 5AU. Now it’s possible that I may have got the post code wrong because both my sat nav and ‘er indoors ^TM ‘s tried to take us to somewhere in Saudi Arabia. It was at this point that I lost the will to live, and we gave up and went to McDonalds. Where the chips were cold.

And so home where I swapped ‘er indoors ^TM for “Daddies Little Angel ^TM ” and “The Crip” and we set off fishing. Yesterday we’d been fishing from midday to mid afternoon, and the fishing wasn’t good. I mentioned yesterday that we fish at the wrong time of day, and so today as an experiment we started fishing about 4.30pm, and stayed to about 9.30pm. After an hour the Rear Admiral joined us, and after a further hour Richard-Father-Of-Lisa came along too.

Richard openly admitted he had no time for tiddler bashing and was going for big stuff, but he had a couple of tiddlers, and one not quite so tiddler-ish. And those of us who were tiddler bashing had eighty-five between us. “The Crip” and me together only amassed just over twenty: this evening was a roaring success for the Folkestone Fish-herds.

Future fishing trips will be, like today, later in the day…

10 July 2011 (Sunday) - Stuff

I was up with the lark and shaved by 6am this morning. Which was daft on a Sunday. I thought I’d go back to bed and see if I couldn’t get a few minutes more sleep. All of a sudden it was 10am.

I checked emails and stuff, and then, leaving ‘er indoors ^TM to do the housework I went fishing. As always I started by popping out a ledger rod. Ledger fishing isn’t my strong point – I think I need to get some pointers on that fishing technique. And then I popped out a rod with a teeny float and a couple of maggots. Tiddler bashing is always fun. Or that is, it’s fun when the tiddlers are biting. In the first hour I only caught five tiddlers, and then once the Folkestonians had arrived the fishing slackened right off. In the next four hours I caught another five.

I have theories as to why I’ve not caught so much the last few times I’ve been going fishing. We did see herons there last year, so they might have cleared the pond out. However we did see a swarm of about a hundred teeny tiddlers today, so fish are breeding.

I think we are going fishing at the wrong time of day. When camping at the farm I get up at cock-croak (!) and fish till 10.30am. I then pootle about until 5pm and then start fishing again. Just lately we’ve been fishing at the time of day when I know that the fishing is traditionally not at its best. The next time I have some spare time we’ll go earlier or later.

I came home and could have mowed the lawn, or cleaned out the fish pond filter. Instead I wasted time by falling asleep in front of the telly. Perhaps a better way to have spent the day would have been to go to the London Film and Comic Con which was on today, and have gone fishing afterwards.

I’m a bit miffed that I missed the comic convention. It might have been a good day out. I would say that I might go next year, but next year it will clash with the kite festival. And if I had gone up to Earls Court, I’d only have spent money that I really shouldn’t have spent.

This evening I did something I’ve not done for three weeks: I went back into NeverWinter. Oh, how I’ve missed that place……

9 July 2011 (Saturday) - English Heritage

Seeing how the kite festival wasn’t taking place this week, we’d arranged to meet up with Simon & Corinne to make use of our English Heritage membership. Having spent a few minutes feeding the Koi we set off to Walmer Castle. Ostensibly the home of the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, the castle was pretty much done up as a shrine to the memory of the Duke of Wellington. The insides were scenic; the outside was raining. But when has rain ever stopped anything in my world?

Having said that, we didn’t get *too* wet, and as we squelched back to the car just as Batty and Clive arrived. We all then drove up to Deal Castle - built by Henry VIII to defend against a French invasion that never happened, and reinforced against a Napoleonic invasion that never happened, the only time the castle saw action was during the Civil War.

We parked up and pic-niced by the beach before going into Deal castle. It was as well we had our lunch at that point: we needed the energy. The audio tour round Walmer Castle had been leisurely; we’d taken our time. We moved from room to room at our own pace. The audio tour at Deal Castle was a tad brisker. In fact not so much a tour as a sprint round.

The tour at Walmer Castle had been arranged so that at each point of interest we typed in the number displayed on the plaque into our gadget and we listened before casually moving on to the next exhibit. The tour at Deal Castle had no numbered plaques; we just pressed go on the gadget, and then charged round the castle as quickly as we could; desperately trying to keep up with the narration.

On the way out, we had a grumble at the nice lady in the shop about the audio tour. She sympathised and told us that the management at Deal Castle had arranged the audio tour in one long rush because they didn’t want numbered plaques all over the place.

Just as we got to the cars to move on to our next port of call, Steve, Natalie and the littluns arrived. Steve then led us to Richborough Fort. Personally I think he took the scenic route, but he got us there which is more than I could have done without sat-nav.

Richborough Fort was the site of the first Roman landing in England in 55 B.C., and unfortunately all that remains are a few walls and ditches. But the nice lady in the shop was friendly and helpful. And once we’d had an ice cream, an excellent audio tour brought the place to life: and this was all the better for being an audio tour done in easy stages and not in one big sprint. This time the audio tour even had a setting for the kiddies.

It has to be said that it was a tad windy at Richborough Fort, but such is life.

Time was pressing on, and over half of our number had things to do, places to be, people to see. But Corinne had found the English Heritage Handbook. St Augustine’s Abbey wasn’t far away, and it was (almost) on the way home. So having said goodbye to seven of our number, the hard-core English Heritagers went on to St Augustine’s Abbey.

St Augustine’s Abbey turned out to be (perhaps) the most interesting place we visited today. The castles had been both built and abandoned within three hundred years, and neither had seen action against their intended protagonist. Richborough Fort had been abandoned fifteen hundred years ago and all that is left is walls, ditches and guesswork.

But the history of St Augustine’s Abbey covered over a thousand years. I’d never been there before: I had no idea the place existed. But it was good. And the audio tour was excellent as well.

And so home via the outlet centre for shoes and T-shirts. Simon and Corinne love the outlet centre, and pop in whenever they opportunity arises. I can see the place from our upstairs window, and I don’t go there from one year to the next.

And so home, where I promptly fell asleep in front of the telly. I was worn out: I’d had such a busy day. An excellent day.  And the photos are on-line here.

And in closing I feel I should make a confession. I have to admit that I was wrong. Back in December when we joined English Heritage I begrudged the cost, feeling it would be a waste of time. But in just seven moths we’ve more than got our money’s worth out of the membership. Today’s outings would have cost us over forty quid in admission tickets were we not English Heritage members.

So there is is – don’t be a daft b*stard; join English Heritage. (Do I get a year’s free membership?)….

8 July 2011 (Friday) - Another Day Off

I’d booked today as a day off work because originally the plan was that today would be spent going to Brighton Kite Festival. I wasn’t sure about moving the festival’s date, but I’m glad that they did – it was raining this morning.

No brekkie this morning – instead I went back to Lloyds Pharmacy to have a fasting glucose level done. I again got closeted with the fit bird (woof!), and it turned out that my fasting glucose level was 5.9. For those who know about these things (me!), fasting glucose is a far better measurement of your glucose level that a random (non-fasting) one. Yesterday’s high reading of 6.7 was merely reflective of the sweeties I’d been scoffing.

So the good news is that I don’t have diabetes yet. However it will come eventually, and to that end the fit bird tried to sell me a glucose meter. I didn’t buy it.

To town – back to the bank with the paperwork they wanted. It only took twenty minutes for the nice man to read through the forms. And read through them again. And again. He was so obviously trying to find fault with what I’d done, but eventually he conceded defeat and told me all would be sorted out in a couple of weeks.

I then mooched around town. I had a plan to buy the latest South Park DVDs, but CEX didn’t have it, and I wasn’t paying the prices HMV were asking. I got chatting with a little old man in HMV – this chap must have been in his eighties, and he politely suggested I used the Internet to look up Amazon: he assured me they were really cheap. Good for him!

I then filled the car with petrol (that’s not cheap) and came home via Angling Direct – the new name for Ashford Tackle. From what I can see it’s exactly the same shop, but with a new name. Or so I thought at first sight. On closer inspection there is a subtle difference. They’ve moved the merchandise about. In the past all the floats were together, all the baits were together, all the reels were together…. Which made sense: if you wanted to buy floats then they were all in one place. Now the gear is sorted according to manufacturer: all the Acme products are together, all the Satsuma-Castanet products are together. Which is rubbish because when I wanted to compare bite alarms I had to walk all over the shop to find them all.

I suppose this layout is easier for filling the shelves as deliveries arrive, but I don’t like it. Having whinged at the assistant, I bought some odds and sods for Sunday’s extravaganza, and then went home. Seeing I was on holiday, ironing needed to be done.  

Once ironed, I got my paints out again. Yesterday’s painting turned out good – I was pleased with it. Today’s wasn’t so good. I had a plan for a wintry scene, but there’s no denying it didn’t turn out anything like I was hoping. The original plan had the sky being much redder: the dark blue sky is very cold. I also started to put in a log cabin but scraped it off – it wasn’t working. And the foreground of that painting was originally a lake, rather than small hills.

But as a painting, it’s OK – it’ll do. Does anyone want it?

And then I read the news. A couple of days ago I whinged about the News of the World newspaper. It’s been closed down. Good. But the fact that it is headline news is what bothers me. In a few weeks’ time I predict the “Sunday Sun” will be launched; and today’s news of the News of the World will be forgotten.

The fact that today saw the last ever flight of the Space Shuttle, which is far more important than any tabloid rag, has gone pretty much unnoticed. ..