David Morris – brassedoff.net

I’ll freely admin I’ve become an intermittent blogger since I discovered Twitter. I’m more likely to tweet several times a day than I am to update my blog which is sad, but some things really need a blog post.

After the car got stolen recently, it was a relatively easy decision to go for another Mini. I know some will probably throw their hands up in horror, but it’s me that’s driving it…

The last Mini was an 06 Cooper S. There’s no doubting that the MCS is a cracking car, fun to drive and goes live the brown stuff off a shovel, but to my cost I’ve also found out it’s quite nickable. After much reflection, I decided that something less nickable was probably in order, so I decided to go for a S Clubman. It’s still fun to drive and being that little bit bigger (it really does have boot space!) it’s a bit more practical.

There wasn’t anything I fancied in the second-hand market so I was nearly ready to bite the bullet and go for a brand new build. Unfortunately, the lead time was two months for a new factory build. As I’ve been driving Mrs Woolforbrain’s car for the last three weeks and she woudl need it once the school holidays were over, I had to come up with an alternative solution. Fortunately, the nice people at Sytner Mini Sheffield had an ex-demonstrator, registered less than four months ago in black. It nearly met my ideal spec, but was missing the bi-xenon headlights that my previous MCS had and were on my shopping list, but did have the MFSW (multi-function steering wheel) which incorporates the cruise control and radio remote which was also on the shopping list. The car also had the sports Chili pack. The dealers kindly agreed to fit the Mini approved iPod interface kit free of charge, so we shook on it. I’m now the proud owner of a 09 plate Cooper Clubman and it’s fun again! The bi-xenon headlights would have been nice, but they’re a £420 option. The iPod interface is around £250 and will probably get used more, so we’ll put it down as a result!

I seem to be getting more and more involved with activities centred around the Canal Trust, but even so, it was a pleasant surprise to receive an email from the Chairman inviting me to become a member of Trust board with pretty much immediate effect. Needless to say, I will be accepting. It’s a great honour to be involved in such a campaign I feel so strongly about. The Trust has brought me into contact with some really nice dedicated people and has given me the opportunity to play with some great toys! After all, I get to play with a nice narrowboat taking people out on trips, and today, I’ve been talking to members of the public about the work that the Trust has put in to an 80-year-old ex British Waterway working boat. It’s great for me as well. Most of the time I spend doing volunteer work for the Trust gets me out in the fresh air which is a major departure from my day job, and I get all the positive vibes that result from being involved with a charitable organisation that does so much for the community and the environment. Plus, I get chance to put something back from an IT perspective.

I did promise some more pictures from my canal trip last weekend when the sun was shining, so here goes.

This one is of the Seth Ellis exiting Limekiln lock. The two Petes are standing guard on either side of the gates waiting for Chris and  Georgina to bring the boat out. I’m down on the next lock getting it ready complete with windlass and camera. If you want to read an alternate take on what life’s like on the Chesterfield Canal, read my friend Boatie Pete’s blog. He’s the one on the left in the above picture.

Ever wanted to know how to ascend a true treble staircase? Well, there’s the instructions.The Chesterfield Canal was opened in 1777 and these staircase locks are some of the earliest in existence. The flight from Shireoaks to Kiveton, the so-called Giant’s Staircase, has two double staircases and two treble staircases. Thorpe Top Treble is the the first lock you hit on leaving Kiveton. You think that’s bad? When Norwood Tunnel was open, the top lock was a quadruple staircase and there were doubles and trebles as well… and that was after having legged or poled the fully laden boat through the tunnel. No rest for the wicked eh?

Mrs Woolforbrains has had a long birthday celebration this year, for no other reason that I’d booked the Seth Ellis for a birthday trip for her and some of her knitting companions… and did we have a nice day for it? The crew was myself and Kath and Pete Whitehead and we headed up towards Forest Locks from Retford.The trip looked like being replanned before we got under way because there was something blocking the lower gates from closing properly in Retford Town Lock, but after about 45 minutes fishing with the grappling hooks with the help of Jake and some of the guys from the Retford Mariners, we managed to get the gate so it would close and off we set.

The rest of the trip was fairly uneventful, notable for the superb weather and giving me the chance to try out my new 18-200mm Tamron XR DI-II lens (late birthday pressie to me, second hand from Harrison Cameras a couple of weeks ago).

Go out on a boat trip with knitters and they’ll be discussing the best place to place a half-knitted pair of socks so they can get an atmospheric shot. I think they ended up on the lock balance beam.

Of course, there comes a time when everyone has to stop for lunch and knitting has to temporarily put down in favour of sandwiches, pork pie and tea.

Organising trips is a stressful pastime which takes a lot of communication. Here, you can see two of the crew engaging in such a discussion… and if they read this, I’m probably dead meat at the next crew meeting on Thursday…

One of the winter tasks is maintenance on the Seth Ellis. I had a pass out for the morning so I rang Pete and offered up my services for doing a bit of said maintenance work on the boat. “There’s three of us going to be there already” he said, “how about helping out on the trailer instead?”.

The trailer is the Canal Trust’s new publicity trailer. It had a pitch in Retford market today, so I volunteered to go and help out. Perhaps Pete knew what my DIY skills were like and thought I’d be better off on the trailer than let loose on the Seth Ellis with a paintbrush?

When I got there, the trailer was in the process of being put up. It’s got bits and pieces all over the place so it must have taken the best part of 30 minutes to get all the relevant bits fastened together, requiring several tools and a modicum of cursing. The panels explain all about the restoration projects, both done and to do, and inside there’s an AV presentation, more information panels, maps and somewhere to store leaflets. Sadly, there’s nowhere to mash, but you can’t have everything…. Costa Coffee was only five minutes walk away!

Once assembled and with everything tucked away, it was time to try and convince the Retford locals of the need for canal restoration. Actually, they’re alright because the canal never lapsed into disuse through Retford; most of the restoration work is happening above them around us in Killamarsh, Stavely and Kiveton.

What did surprise me was that nearly all the people I spoke to this morning – a couple of dozen or so, didn’t realise that the Trust had a  trip boat operating out of Retford. Most seemed pleasantly surprised to hear about the Seth Ellis and many went away with tripboat leaflets, so hopefully we’ll get a bit of custom from the event.

The other thing I wanted to do whilst in Retford was get a picture of the Seth Ellis complete with its new magnetic panels. They do look pretty good! I can foresee another set on the run-up to Christmas in red and white. Pete: if you’re reading, remind me later and I may be up for a further donation!

Two things I’m quite proud of (in a sad sort of way).

Firstly, I got my Phidget kit working properly. Phidgets are really cool USB interfaced ‘things’ that can be programmed easily from a variety of languages and OS. I’ve had one kicking around for a while now, but I never really managed to get it working with my language of choice (Java) on Linux because of problems building the latest version of the library. The latest and greatest version uses JNI. The Java class libraries are shim between the Java language and the OS native code. After a concerted effort over the weekend, I cracked the problem and the picture proves it’s all up and working.

For the record, the display is running from a little multi-threaded Java console app that’s displaying a substring from Java’s Date().toString() and a conversion of /proc/uptime showing the uptime of the box that’s hosting this blog: 235 days at the time of photographing. Don’t you just love the reliability of Linux systems? 235 days without a restart. All I have to do is vacuum it out occasionally (being very careful not to disturb anything and crash it!)

My second achievement for the weekend was to create a cartoon character. Now I’m no artist (or at least not with a pen and paper), but I’d got an idea in my mind for a cartoon character that I could use on the Seth Ellis web site, probably as part of a series of articles aimed at providing information for kids about the canal. The idea was pretty much a narrowboat version of Thomas The Tank Engine or similar… you know the idea, take a real-life thing, slap some googley eyes and a smiley face on it and Bob’s your uncle.

This is probably OK if you can draw.

I can’t.

…but I can cheat, and after a bit of digging around, I found an image that I could use as the basis for my cheat, and after a couple of hours with Corel Photopaint, I came up with…

roll of drums…

Seth!

Ok, I know it’s not brilliant. It sits too high out of the water, and the real boat doesn’t have a big smiley mouth painted on the bows. Mrs Woolforbrains also thinks the bow fender (his nose) is in the wrong perspective, but that’s where my artistic skills fell over.

I can also see Seth making an appearance on a few other bits and pieces of boat-related stuff over time, maybe on the run up to Christmas. The next thing I have to do is give him a stern.

What an interesting life we lead here!

It’s been preying on my mind that I’ve not posted anything substantive for some time, excepting the picture of Daniel with his euph on Christmas morning. There’s been a few things happening lately, so I suppose some form of catch-up is in order.

Firstly, a little allotment news. On Christmas Eve, vandals attacked the Society shed on the site and set fire to it. Over £1000 of seed stock was destroyed which probably represents the seed stock for many of the gardeners for 2008. We hadn’t ordered ours, so we’ve not lost out in that respect, but it’s still a big blow and really akes you wonder what goes through the minds of these little thugs.

My last ‘real’ post was about the Seth Ellis web site. I said that we’d been given the go-ahead for development of the site and I was going to write my own content management system (CMS). I’ve backtracked on that in favour of an open-source CMS. After checking out a couple, I’ve settled on Joomla 1.5. I had a look at Drupal as well, but preferred the facilities available in Joomla. It’s taking some getting to grips with, not least because Joomla 1.5 is the latest, greatest version and most of the documentation and reference material out in the wild is related to 1.1 and there have been a few changes. I’m slowly working my way through it, experimenting as I go. I found a template for the site that I liked the look of and made a few changes to it. It still needs some more work, but it’s getting there. I’ve got the general public and boat crew documents separated so you can only get to the crew sections with a valid logon.

Also on the boat front, I’ve been doing some investigation into prices for magnetic sign boards to fit down the side of the boat above the windows. The general principle is that we want to have some advertising on the boat to try and drum up a bit more custom. Magnetic boards mean we can change them easily to suit the season and what we want to push at any time, and  it looks like we can get them for under £50+VAT.

At the ice hockey, it’s been and up and down sort of Christmas break with some good results and some that were, err, not so good. On the plus side, Daniel and myself won the 50/50 draw at iceSheffield last Sunday. The winnings came out at about £40 and it didn’t take a lot of thought what to do with the winnings… I gave them back to the club. After all, their need is probably greater than mine. The end result is that we’ve splashed it around the player sponsorship grid.

Daniel’s coming on like a house on fire with the new euphonium. He’s developing a much better sound, and once the valves have bedded in, I think he’ll do even better. It’s a nice instrument that will keep him going for a few years.

I’ve started working on a new boat. This time, it’s the Sentinel cutter from Model Slipway. I’ll be documenting the fun as I proceed!

Finally for today, I can report that we’ve all been suffering from Wii injuries caused by excessive play on New Years Eve. the main culprit has been Rayman Raving Rabbids 2, and I suspect, the branch sawing and burping games. I’ve also got Guitar Hero 3 which is great fun, but not injury provoking. Absolutely great fun!

Having got the go-ahead last night, I can officially announce that I’m working on a new web site.

This time, it’s www.sethellis.org.uk. We have got the OK from the Canal Trust Chairman, Keith Ayling to set up a web site dedicated to the Seth Ellis, the trip boat that I (amongst others) crew out of Retford.

The idea stems from several thoughts. Firstly, whatever is done must not conflict with any of the Trust aims or ideals, but there’s a lot of paperwork and other associated “stuff” related to the running of the boat that as crew there isn’t necessarily time to take in whilst working on the boat. There’s also crew rotas, details of upcoming trips that could sensibly live on this site. Also, for people that are planning on chartering the boat, there’s information about the local area and the boat itself that we can communicate in a manner that the corporate Trust web site possibly can’t. The example I used when selling the idea was that the Trust web site doesn’t need to have details on it of how to empty the boat toilet, but the boat web site does.

Anyway, we’re off and rolling now, so as well as building content over the coming weeks, I’ve got to build the management interface. This needs to include provision for a suitably secure area for crew-only stuff and a mechanism whereby someone else other than me can maintain content. I might borrow from some of the ideas I used on the Band web site for that where I produced a simple CM (content management) system. I’ve got some ideas about how to improve on that, and I’m also contemplating whether I can make this site predominantly database-driven at the same time incorporating all the secure and non-secure stuff I want to get in. In theory it should be possible.

Before anyone tells me I could probably go out and download an open-source CM system to do all this, yes, I probably could, but I could also learn a hell of a lot by writing one completely from scratch. If I wanted to be suitably challenged, I could write the whole lot in JSP (Java Server Pages). Now, that would be a challenge and a fantastic learning exercise. Whether I will or not, or whether I just go straight for the easier PHP option remains to be seen. For the time being, I’ll content myself with hacking the basic page design around. I’d be interested in receiving comments.

It’s been my first day out on the Seth Ellis running Santa Specials today. I spent the afternoon out on the boat; next Saturday, I’m out for the day. Here’s a couple of pictures just to give you a flavour of the sort of fun we have…

Saturday 17th November was a special day in Retford. It was the day Santa made a special appearance as guest of the Chesterfield Canal Trust to help them publicise their forthcoming Santa canal boat trips in which the well-loved man in red will obviously be playing a central part. Accompanied by his helpers and crew of the Retford-based Seth Ellis Trust trip boat, Santa met with local VIPs and gave some of the local children an early treat as well as taking a short trip up the canal to spread the word.

Members of the local press were also on hand to record the event and other Trust members were around to distribute leaflets letting the local poeple know how they could book places to see Santa when he comes back later in December.

The last picture in the set is the Young Master modelling his Christmas Tree Hat knitted by Mrs Woolforbrains.

These photos are also available in my gallery. If anyone wants high resolution versions, please contact me.

I spent the day out on the canal yesterday, again, breaking new ground for me as we headed up towards Ranby. I’d only previously been up through the first two locks from Retford: Town Lock and West Retford lock. this time we had not only those but the Forest Bottom flight of another four.

Forest Top Middle lock is generally known as Charlies’ Lock. Charlie was the name of the old guy that was the lock keeper here for many years. During his tenure, you weren’t allowed to operate the locks yourself! When he retired, the house was boarded up and has remained in that state since. It’s ripe for someone taking on the restoration project and creating a beautiful waterside residence. For the record, there are toilet, shower and rubbish disposal amenities here as well.

Whilst we were chugging our way up to Ranby, I was admiring some the magnificent trees next to the canal. I don’t know what sort of trees they are – I’m sure someone reading this might know, but they looked very photogenic against the blue and lightly clouded sky.

Little did we know that a little further up the cut, we would get to see some timber a little closer than we really wanted to.

There are some huge willow trees overhanging the canal. They look great but do cause problems. Usually it’s fear of losing any planters or pots off the roof of the boat as you go underneath them. This time the problem was a little more serious. One of the big boughs had broken off and dropped in to the cut, right in the middle. The canal up here is also very shallow away from the centre channel. It would have been impossible for instance to moor up against the towpath side: it’s scarcely more than 15cm deep. After trying for some time to move the obstruction, we decided to go fo rthe brute force approach with the help of some new friends on board the pictured “Mistress” from Kings Langley. They helped by reversing and hauling through by our bows. Terry and Pete were doing their bit on the bank with our other ropes and the proverbial barge pole. We cleared the obstruction after about an hour during which time we contacted British Waterways’ emergency contact number to report the blockage. I took the opportunity to point out to BW that we were a working boat with a full charter complement on board and would be returning similarly loaded some time later.

After fun and games at Ranby (ask me how many places there are to turn a boat around… one… not much use if you’re doing short trips and need to turn twice in a very shallow canal – Pete and myself probably both have backache), we headed back towards Retford with the sun setting. A call to BW established that the obstruction hadn’t been moved. A couple of phone calls later and we found out that the local BW lengthsman had been given the wrong directions despite me giving a clear location to the call centre, and they’d also managed to pass on the wrong phone number so he couldn’t get back in touch with me. When we eventually found him, he’d gone out with a small pair of tree loppers and a regular hacksaw. What he really needed was lifting gear and a chainsaw. Fortunately, someone had managed to move some of the tree and we managed to spot a way through the jungle that didn’t involve bow-hauling or any further significant delays. BW rang back soon afterwards to report that it would be moved today (Sunday).

Of course, by now, the sun was really going down leading to some interesting lighting effects with the sun setting behind us as we headed towards Retford. Here, the light can be seen picking out the Retford skyline with the boat in deep shadow.

With the crew on the back of the boat, there was an opportunity to catch one of the gallant crew of the day, Pete Whitehead, in almost silhouette against the setting sun with a bit of artistic lens flare thrown in for good measure. By the time we’d got the boat moored up back in Retford, we’d been on the go some nine hours and were all tire, but we had to agree it had been an interesting day.