Narrowboat

I am, and have been for a while, a big chap. I’m fairly active in walking a bit and going to the gym a couple of times a week – mainly keeping ticking over, but no big effort. Once you get past 40, as I am, then its time to take things in hand deciding what you want out of life. So since the end of June, I’ve a new eating and gym routine that has meant I’ve lost a whopping 30 pounds. Super pleased with myself, however I have a hurdle now – going away on the boat for 2 weeks!

No gym to go to and usually I’m at the tiller, which isn’t really energetic. I suppose I could run/walk on a morning/evening but that wouldn’t be much fun and feel more like a chore that I’d probably end up giving it a miss. This time out we are taking my 16 year old nephew, so he can steer the boat. So I have an idea, why not walk along side the boat? We are doing the Four Counties plus some extra bits to extend it to 2 weeks, so should be plausible. So that’s what I’m doing – or planning to (keep watch of my twitter account for updates).

My PC is up and running, but I’ve yet to do any new videos. went to Chester in March, so thee is that to upload. We are off out mid August and doing the four counties. So plenty of material to come.

The strange, or is it sad, thing of technology is that you tend to rely on it, or more specific one aspect above others. It’s human nature of course but people rely on things until they go bad. I have a desktop. laptop, and mobile phone, all capable of providing daily internet access, but its my desktop that is my mainstay rock that suddenly puts a spoke in the wheel. My PC went fzzzt and well as it was time to upgrade got a new core, i.e. cpu motherboard memory combo, as googling suggested a motherboard fault The new upgrades didn’t work, which I then found must be the PSU (unplugging everything else meant either one of the components I bought was faulty or the PSU was, and using an old switching PSU that liked to switch itself of at boot time I found my new stuff worked fine, so it was the PSU). I have an OCZ PSU which comes with a 3 year warranty, so I took it back to CCL who are sending it off to get me a replacement. In the meantime I’m down to laptop amd mobile. The problem is that whilst my laptop can do everything my desktop can (one reason my desktop was in need of updating) I tended to only install programs on my laptop that I would want to use whilst away.

So all my programs are safe, all my data similarly, but the next set of video timelapse journeys are all delayed because both the source photos and applications used to produce the videos are on my desktop and not my laptop. There are several other things I am supposed to be doing but a downed desktop is delaying this. They say back up your data, which I do, but they don’t say mirror everything to an identical pc as a back-up, so when something goes wrong your data may be safe, it’ll just take a while before you are back up and running.

Things aren’t so bad as I can blame technology for any delays I have . It’s just twiddle thumbs time in the in between.

With Waterscape changing its map every so often, I’m always on the look out for alternatives. Their new one is fine for route planning but the lines don’t actually follow the route of the canal (straightened/simplified to reduce amount of data points I guess), so I was quite pleased when I found someone had done an overlay for google maps that actually followed the canals. So I aim to use the Google Earth Canal Maps in my next video. Hopefully it’ll be done this month (free time availability dependence you see).

I went away for some winter sun at the beginning of the month on a non-boating holiday – unless you count day trips out to sea! I was planning to spend a couple of spare days on my return (was going away for 10 days but had booked 2 weeks off work) to finish off the next boating video but picked up a spot of food poisoning – luckily (well not sure luckily is the right word in this case, but we’ll stick with it) it was at the end of the holiday, I started feeling ill just before the flight but it took a few extra hours to progress from headache and flu-like symptoms to the normal ones associated with food poisoning. I think spending the flight on the toilet, or severely delaying the trip home would have been far worse a situation.

So, the next video may be in a couple of weeks.