doof.me.uk

Here’s some photos from my wanderings at the weekend. This week it’s the charming village of Ewelme in Oxfordshire and an equally delightful nearby pig farm. Factoid of the day: the building in photo #19 is apparently the oldest state school in the country.

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Went for a ride on the new Emirates Air Line cable car at the weekend with blodgett and another acquaintance. It’s pretty awesome and heartily recommended. Unfortunately while we there it rained continuously so instead of photos of the amazing view here’s a collection on the theme of rain droplets.

There’s a rather good program on the iplayer at the moment about infrastructure projects by that nice man Evan Davis off the radio:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01nd243/Built_in_Britain_Episode_1

It features the BORING MACHINES Ada and Phyllis (they’re German apparently). Blodgett recently alerted me to this excellent website which plots daily the current location of BORING MACHINES!

On a similar theme to the last post, the sky was quite pretty this evening just before it rained.

Everyone knows Autumn has the best sunsets. Out and about near Henley yesterday evening. It’s lighter than it appears: hard to get the sky and ground to both expose nicely; presumably need some HDR trickery.

It’s been ages since I did much work on my unimaginatively-titled train driving game. Surprisingly some people have actually been trying to build the last release and it turns out anything using Boost bit-rots at an alarming pace. So I’ve bundled up the latest working version as TrainGame-0.2.2.tar.gz.

It’s not all build fixes though. Looking through the log for the past few years I’ve done plenty of optimisation and prettied up the grass as I explained previously.

To build and run after extracting the archive you’ll need to:

cmake .
make
./bin/TrainGame play figure8

You’ll need a recent-ish GCC or Clang and Boost.

Out wandering high up in the Chilterns near Russel’s Water I came across these pretty fluffy things. No idea what they are as usual. Perhaps some sort of dandelion? Blodgett would know.

Daily factoid: perusing the previously linked Wikipedia article, I discovered that these plants are adjacent to a pond featured in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Fascinating, eh?

The protagonist was thrilled to finally meet his long-standing hero, cyclopean freak “Mandeville”, at the Paralympic rowing this weekend.

I went to the Eastbourne Airshow with my mum while I was at home last weekend. Borrowed my Dad’s SLR avec telephoto lens to take some snaps. I think they came out rather well after some judicious cropping.

I spent last weekend visiting some northern acquaintances in Yorkshire. On Saturday we went on an adventure to Richmond Castle via Darlington. And a very pleasant castle it is too! It’s got a nicely preserved keep which you can climb to the top of for some excellent views of the quaint market town and surrounding countryside. By happy coincidence there was some medieval event on featuring people hitting each other with swords and such like. We managed to dodge the storm clouds for the whole day which was a bonus.