End to End Frank: Day 4

Details of Frank's progress were a bit sketchy today, but the first news that arrived was at about 10:30 this morning, announcing that he was leaving Monmouthshire and heading into Herefordshire.

When I texted my congratulations at escaping from Wales, his response was that he hadn't escaped, but had been thrown out of the country for smelling like he'd been sleeping in the corner of a field.

I was in the Stockport branch of PC World when his next meassage arrived, and it was a request to check the distance from Shrewsbury to Biddulph Moor. I made a quick 'phone call home and after a swift bit of Googling, Blight-of-my-life had the information Frank needed.
If he was going to make it home to the luxury of a night's sleep in his own bed, he would need to do about 20 miles to get to Shrewsbury and then a further 50 miles to Biddulph Moor. This seemed like a bit of a tall order to me, but he reckoned that he'd give it try.

Half an hour later, I received another text message that simply said "£3", to inform anyone who is sponsoring him at a penny a mile, that they now owe three quid. (I make that 300 miles, mathematics fans)

The final message of the day was just before 9:00 pm, announcing that he'd run out of steam at Hopton near Stafford and was camping in yet another field.

Sleep well...

End to End Frank: Day 3

First I need to tell you that neither of the alternatives I had given for Frank's fate at the end of yesterday were correct. The good news is that he wasn't eaten by the Beast of Bodmin Moor, but the bad news is that the campsite that I had suggested was so far off his route that it was completely inappropriate.
Rather than traipse off into the wilds of East Worlington, he found a secluded spot in a field somewher near Crediton and did a bit of "stealth camping".

According to his first message of the day, it started raining at about three in the morning, so it was pretty wet until around about eleven o'clock and progress along the A361 was comparatively slow. To make matters worse, all the campsites that he had failed to find the night before seemed to have maliciously re-located themselves.
He passed dozens of them before he'd reached Bridgewater.

At around about four o'clock in the afternoon, he was still close to Weston super Mare, so I fully expected him to find somewhere suitable to camp just South of Bristol.

Yet again I was wrong.
Shortly before nine o'clock, I got a text announcing his arrival at Chepstow, so he has not only blown through Bristol, but he has crossed the mighty Severn Estuary.
I am very impressed.

End to End Frank: Day 2

Well it appears that today has gone rather well.

I've no idea what time it was when Frank set off from his campsite this morning, but his first text message came in at shortly after 9:30 as he passed Camborne.
By 1:30pm, he had made it as far as Bodmin Moor, but the best news was just a couple of hours later, when a text arrived announcing that the first hundred miles had been completed.

As he approached Okehampton, he began looking for a suitable campsite for the night but was thwarted several times by misleading signposts, so he decided that a better approach would be to nip into the Tourist Information Office in the town and see if they could direct him to a suitable site. Rather predictably, he arrived at the Office shortly after it had closed for the day.

Luckily the "Cyberkim Tourist Advisory Service" was still open for business, so he 'phoned me and asked if I could have a quick look on-line for somewhere suitable to stop for the night. I found what looks like a reasonable place in East Worlington, near Crediton and gave him their telephone number. As I've heard nothing else since then, I am assuming that the campsite was suitable and that he is now safely tucked up in his tent, dreaming of the next 900 miles.

...unless he's been eaten by the Beast of Bodmin Moor.

End to End Frank: Day 1

Frank has texted a couple of progress reports today as he started his attempt to ride from Lands End to John O'Groats.
It doesn't sound as if the endeavour has started terribly well.

At some point during the train journey down to Penzance, some kids fell onto the enormous parcel that contained the component parts of his bicycle and some kind of damage was inflicted on the lever that operates the rear gear mechanism.
Although Frank is carrying the tools he expected to need to re-assemble and maintain the bike, it sounds as if the damage would have been easier to sort out with a more comprehensive toolkit.

Nevertheless, it seems that after a couple of hours of bodging, the gear change mechanism "sort of works" and Frank has made it from Penzance down to the tip of the country. Hopefully, he'll be getting a good night's sleep at the campsite somewhere near Sennan.


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On yer bike, Frank!... again.

Around about this time last year Frank, one of our electricians at Jodrell Bank, made an attempt at cycling from Lands End to John O'Groats. Unfortunately, it didn't go well.

At something like a thousand miles, this ride from one end of the country to the other is an ambitious undertaking. It's not for the faint-hearted, the unfit or the under-prepared and even then, things can conspire to make what is already a difficult challenge into an impossible one. I don't know what the final straw was that ultimately made Frank admit defeat somewhere near Bristol, but he was clearly pretty dejected by the experience when he returned to work, muttering about rain, wind and achilles tendons.

This year, he's having another crack at it.

Once again, as if it wasn't already a seriously tough proposition, he's doing it solo with no support crew and carrying a tent and camping equipment.

He's travelling to Penzance by train this Monday, carrying a large parcel that is absolutely not a bicycle and he expects to arrive at about tea time.
Once he's assembled his bike from the kit of parts that are in the large cardboard box, he'll head down to the starting point at Lands End, take the obligatory photograph and then get back onto the A30 and begin the long trek northwards.
Once he leaves Cornwall, his planned route is as follows:

• A30 to Tedburn St Mary (just shy of Exeter)
• North to Crediton
• Tiverton
• Taunton
• Bridgewater
• Bristol
• M48 Severn Bridge
• Chepstow
• Monmouth
• Hereford
• Leominster
• Ludlow
• Shrewsbury
• Market Drayton
• Newcastle under Lyme
• Biddulph Moor - for night at home and reorganise luggage in preparation for long days in Scottish mountains without supplies.
• Congleton
• Jodrell Bank - to allow work colleagues to make encouraging and supportive comments (unlikely) or to make tasteless remarks about his lycra shorts and attempt to hide bricks in his saddle-bag (much more likely) 
• Knutsford
• Warrington
• Wigan
• Preston
• Lancaster
• Kendal
• Penrith
• Carlisle
• Lockerbie
• Moffat
• Biggar
• Penicuik
• Edinburgh
• A90 Forth Road Bridge
• Dunfermline
• Kinross
• Perth
• Pitlochry (unless he's feeling really good in which case Blaigowrie and A93 through Caingorms)
• A9 Inverness
• Tain
• A9 to John O'Groats

Just to apply a bit more pressure, Frank is off on this jaunt to raise money through sponsorship, for the Douglas Macmillan Hospice; a local, independent, registered charity who care for people (and their families) suffering from cancer and other terminal illnesses.
You can learn more about them at www.dmhospice.org.uk

So, if you should see him as he wends his way up the country, please give him a cheery wave and try not to knock him off his bike.

 I'm going to suggest that if he want's to make it even more difficult he could try doing it on this bike.

Western Digital Passport: Let's really annoy our customers

It's very tempting to go off into a massive rant about this, but I'll do my best to stay calm...

I've just bought an external hard drive to use as a backup for data files.
I decided to get a Western Digital Passport.
It looked like it would be ideal. At 640Gb, it has a reasonable capacity for our requirements and it simply plugs into a USB socket on the PC. As far as the PC is concerned, it just looks like another hard disc drive, so you can just transfer the files you want to back up across to it with Explorer.
So far so good.

I plugged it in, the PC did all the "looking for suitable driver" business and everything was proceeding swimmingly.
Then it installed the "WD Smartware"...

WD Smartware is the Western Digital software that manages the backing up of files and, as such, it is a fine concept. As far as I can tell, it monitors the files on your PC and backs up any that have changed since they were last backed up. Even if the Passport isn't plugged into the PC, the software lurks in the background somehow and carries on looking for stuff that is overdue for saving.
Unfortunately, there is a downside to this seemingly sensible data security scheme. The WD Smartware appears to have clobbered the performance of my PC.
Bearing in mind that I didn't want a foolproof backup regime, simply needing an external drive where I could save data independent of the main computer, this is really very annoying.
If I'd wanted to have software on my computer that slows everything down and prevents me from getting the performance I expect, I'm sure there are hordes of miscreants who would be only too happy to infect my machine with a helpful virus or other malware. I didn't need to pay Western Digital for the privelege of having them cripple my PC.

I'm not the only person that is suffering with this.
The Western Digital Community Forum is seething with posts from angry customers demanding that there should be a way of removing the offending software. Whether anybody at WD will be inclined to give the customers what they want rather than what WD think is good for them remains to be seen.
Until that time (should it ever happen) I'm stuck with what is undoubtedly an excellent bit of hardware that I cannot use thanks to software that crushes the performance of the very machine that said hardware was bought to protect.

...yes, this is just how I'm feeling

What lies beneath

I reckon that there's always something intriguing about the stuff that lurks behind the scenes at any workplace. I suppose that this may be one of the reasons why fly-on-the-wall documentaries are so popular.
What self-respecting nosey so-and-so wouldn't want to get a sneaky peek at the inner workings of an aircraft carrier or the back-stage business at a major theatre.

When I was a very small boy I was fascinated by those small doors that could be seen in wooden hoardings that surrounded building sites. Trailing along behind my Mum on a trip to the shops, I always wanted to linger in the hope of catching a glimpse of the exciting things that were going on behind those blank plywood facades. Occasionally these doors would be tantalisingly open and the wonderland could be seen. Cement mixers, piles of bricks, pneumatic drills and all the other paraphernalia of construction were briefly fully revealed.

I hadn't realized just how much I had been captivated by the mystery of what lay behind the door to the World of The Building Site until one day, nearly twenty years later, I actually stepped through one such door.
I was working on the redevelopment of the shopping centre in the middle of Stratford on Avon and my mates and I had just been for breakfast at "The Hatch" Cafe. As we clumped along Wood Street in our cement-crusted boots, up to the blank blue door, I noticed that we were being watched by a small boy, as his mother hurried him along the pavement. It was like travelling back in time and seeing myself. I could imagine him thinking, "I wish I could go through that door..."
I've never really had any grand scheme or a life plan, but at that moment I knew that I'd fulfilled some kind of ambition.

It's probably just as well that I've never had a Life Plan, because there is no way that I would have ended up doing my present job if I'd tried to follow any sensible career strategy. I think I just got very lucky
So here's a special behind the scenes picture of a part of Jodrell Bank that not too many people get to see.

This is the tunnel that runs from the Basement of the Main Building to the Annular Lab, under the Lovell Telescope. It lies beneath the concrete path you can see leading away from the foreground of the picture at the top of this post.

This tunnel is the main service duct for cables that supply electrical power for the telescope motors and the many control and data feeds that run from the receivers to the instrument racks in the Observing Room. It also provides a convenient subterranean route for our staff to get to the telescope structure.

One of the best things about this tunnel is that it wouldn't look out of place in many computer games.
Anybody who has played "Half Life 2" or "Deus Ex" will know what I'm on about.
It's also the kind of location that you find in the sort of film where someone always says, "I'll just go down and check the tunnel...", shortly before dying horribly.

If zombies ever invade Jodrell Bank, I know where they'll be coming in...