Stormsail

That’s right, another year later and it’s time to go camping with the boys in the New Forest again. It’s pretty much the same format as most years….beer, beer and more beer. In addition to drinking beer Rob and I started the camp boules championship with a surprising winning streak for me! Anyhow, we had a usual trip to the beach and starting problems with my car….whoops….least it’s fixed now…

Ah, a good break but too much beer. Still I’ve got a little while to recover before we go camping again for Dave’s stag do.

Finally the dining room looks better than it’s done for a while. Although it not finished by a long way yet its a dramatic improvement from what it was like before. Rick has done a fantastic job (again), of boarding and plastering the ceiling and a couple of the walls. He’s also knocked out the dining room window and installed the french doors which have now been cemented in and the base bonding coat applied. All that’s now required is the final skim and the finishing touches….

I’m soooo looking forward to the day that the entire room is finished….. probably looking like it’ll be complete by the end of July.

With the fact that I couldn’t get anymore storage into my V100 and that it was limited to 120gb IDE disks I thought it was time to upgrade. I’m still awaiting to find out if I can get a work discount on a Sun X2100 but whilst I await some internal politics I thought I’d make use of an old donated PC. However, as I wanted to utilize a couple of SATA II 750Gb drives I needed to get a motherboard that had 1) a sata II interface on, 2) one that worked with Solaris 3) that could use my old P4 CPU and 4) use my old memory. Hey, if I’m gonna get a X2100 then I don’t want to spend lots on a new PC now do I! Luckily I ordered an AsRock P4VM900-SATA2 which could meet all my requirements! I then installed Solaris Nevada build 91 which then allowed me to use ZFS boot and use ZFS for all!

Well, that was interesting….. I finally got round to using my birthday present from Phoebe last year which was a 20 minute micro-light flying experience (thanks babe). Now, I thought a micro-light was a hang-glider with a motor on the end of it but I was pleasantly surprised to find it was in a mini plane! We didn’t have to go too far down to Popham airfield and were well looked after by the FlyMac management there. Steve my instructor did a fantastic job of looking after me in the air and even let me have a go on the controls. I must admit, I was a little apprehensive in the air as you can feel every single bump of the thermals but I soon got used to it. I think I’m going to have to have another go and see if I’ve got a new hobby in the making……and no I won’t be buying a plane (after owning a boat for 8 years, I think I’ve learnt my lesson of expensive toys!).

Pictures from the afternoon are here.