doof.me.uk

As you may or may not know, I used to live in Winchester while I was doing a placement year at a certain large American mega-corporation. I hadn’t set foot in the place for over four years, so I decided to go back and visit yesterday as it’s only an hour by train from where I currently live.

Of the places I’ve lived in so far, Winchester is easily my favourite: it’s charming, compact, full of history, surrounded by beautiful countryside, and in all respects superior to the drab towns of the Thames Valley commuter belt where I’ve ended up. Even the Stanmore estate, an area with a poor reputation where we lived, is relatively pleasant by the standards of most towns.

The weather wasn’t too great but I managed to hit most of Winchesters major attractions and museums. For the first time I went on a guided tour of Winchester college (a very prestigious public boys school), which was certainly worth the £6 fee. Also noteworthy is the St. Cross almshouse where you can still go to the porter’s lodge and demand your “dole” (ale and bread for the poor). Although I think now you might not get dole without paying the entrance fee.

Anyway, the point of this rambling post is that Winchester is an excellent town which you should most definitely visit if you haven’t already. Here are some photos I took with notes.

What is it? Where does it come from? Where is it going? Here it comes out of the undergrowth!

Seriously, I have no idea what it is! I’m sure I’ve never seen one before.

This is my first foray into macro photography and I don’t think it was wholly successful. Still, this next one is quite good though, probably because the most of the bug is actually in focus. You can see the sucker-things it uses to propel itself along. A bit like a caterpillar. Is it a caterpillar variant?

I’m wondering if using aperture priority mode might have helped, but that sounds a bit advanced. Maybe using the “spot” autofocus mode would be good too? Anyway, here is the bug’s head. (Well, it moves in this direction.)

And this is its bum. Not sure if the blue thing is a fancy-coloured tail or a dangerous stinger.

Speaking of strange creatures, I was reading on the train home about the sad fate of the giant Steller’s Sea Cow.

I’ve been living in Maidenhead for a whole year now but just last weekend I discovered that what I thought was a private island in the Thames is actually open for several months a year. So here’s what I thought was quite a nice picture of Maidenhead taken from the bridge to the island:

Onwards then, along the Thames path! I went for a bit of a wander through London yesterday, and to do some museuming. Unfortunately, the weather was not the bright sun predicted by the met office but overcast with intermittent rain. Oh well. Here are some pictures I took. They’re not particularly interesting but I’d hate to miss a section of my river-blogging.

Raw milk! Fresh, flavoursome, rich and creamy, and straight from the cow! Nothing beats the the wholesome taste of raw milk!

Here’s a glass of that scrumptious substance I had yesterday. Held bravely by my mum, who was inexplicably terrified of it. I’d recommend it to anyone!

I went up north last weekend and visited two historical attractions! York nuclear bunker is an interesting but slightly creepy former fallout monitoring station in Acomb. I also went to to Skipton castle which is a short train ride from york. It’s grand! Compact but well preserved. I would like to congratulate whoever wrote the tour sheet for their wonderful command of English: truly a joy to read.

Here are some pictures, not a particularly great set unfortunately:

I may well have mentioned Station Jim on this blog previously, but I don’t think I have devoted a whole article to him, which he most certainly deserves.

This is Station Jim. He is a dead dog. Very very dead. In fact, he has been dead and on display at Slough train station for over a hundred years. This alone should make him a top tourist attraction, even if he hadn’t lead the incredible life of adventure an selfless charity detailed on the small plaque on his case.

Station Jim was a stray dog found wandering around Slough station in destitution. However the kind people of Slough took pity on him and he was returned to health. At which point he was fitted with a pouch and sent to collect money from passengers for local charities. He raised enormous sums of money and at one point boarded a train and traveled as far as Swindon (or somewhere like that)! After his death at a ripe old age he was stuffed and put in a display case. The end.

(Wikipedia may have a slightly more accurate account.)

I’ve released an updated version of my Lunar Lander game: version 0.6.1. Aside from some minor packaging tweaks, the main new feature of this release is that it queries the system for a list of supported resolutions rather than using a predefined list.

Source version is available here: lander-0.6.1.tar.gz. Windows and perhaps binary .deb to follow later.

I thought this was a wonderful radio documentary on the decline of the steel industry on Teesside: *sniff*

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00t5zp5/Archive_on_4_Redcar_Made_of_Steel/

It’s been ages since I last explored westwards along the Thames, not since last September in fact. So today I walked the nine miles or so from Henley down to Reading. I struggled to find much interesting to take photos of, but here is a picture of the bridge at Henley showing the slightly threatening sky (it didn’t rain though):

I read somewhere that when it’s overcast photos often look better in black and white. So here we are:

Fluffy sky looks good. Finally, on the way to Sonning I came across a cow-based obstruction: