The Young Master wanted to go and see the cars again. I was happy to oblige. Mrs Woolforbrains has gone out ‘wooling’. Rather that fill this posting out with lots of car photos (again), if you want to see more, they’re in the gallery, added to the ‘Wombwell car racing’ gallery.
We’re all off to see the Scimitars playing tonight. No doubt Daniel will be telling Mrs Woolforbrains the rules… :-)
Somewhere different again today, this time though, just me and the young Master.
Wombwell is near Barnsley, 10 minutes from the M1 Junction 36. The model car circuit has been there years – I can remember it from the days I was playing with Woodhouse Band doing Sunday lunchtime concerts at the nearby club, and that has to be 20 years ago.
Today was a ‘club day’ where 1/5 and 1/12 scale models were being raced. The larger 1/5 scale were two-stroke 21cc engined cars (and a truck); the 1/12 scale were small electric and nitro-powered demons. You should have seen Daniel’s ears prick up when he heard they were nitro powered!
On the strength of the last post about how to create a URL for Google Maps with a pushpin, here’s the circuit from the air. It’s also used for go-cart racing; the model car circuit uses part of the same home straight and then loops around in the middle.
Photographing the cars wasn’t easy for someone relatively inexperienced. They’re small and go at 40mph (which equates to a scale speed of around 200mph). The big 21cc-engined ones also have front and rear hydraulic disc brakes and you wouldn’t get a lot of change out of £1300 for a new one (excluding radio gear but including engine). There weren’t too many zeroes on there either, that was one thousand three hundred pounds sterling.I think we’ll be watching for a bit longer yet!
Anyway, I daresay you’d like to see some photos? Here’s a couple and there are a few more in the gallery. (Look for the appropriate album). It’s that 300mm lens again, and around 1/1250 second shutter. A wide aperture leads to a short depth of field so focusing becomes critical as you can see…
Mrs Woolforbrains has just correctly pointed out that there’s no idea of scale with these pictures, so to give you a better idea, this picture is taken from a race with the same cars as the ones shown above…
The club has all the events listed on their web site. There are certainly race meetings on the next two Sundays… I can sense another trip in the offing…
Entry is free and there was a reasonably priced snack van on site which did nice burgers etc as well as hot and cold drinks, crisps etc.
I don’t normally blog at work, but this is work-related in a way. I’ve been looking for a suitable way of carbon-offsetting a recent flight to France, plus trying to find a way of offsetting on-going repeated flights. Whilst looking around for various options and quite frankly feeling uninspired by any of them, it dawned on me that I already make a regular monthly contribution to a sustainable transport group : Sustrans. That donation is as a cyclist wanting to support the aims of Sustrans and further the cycling cause though. I have more faith in where the money’s going than with some of the carbon offsetting groups websites I’ve just been looking at, so I’m now committing to an additional ad-hoc donation to Sustrans every time I fly anywhere. I reckon £10/flight should do for starters.
My first £10 is winging its electronic way to them now.
It makes me feel better in myself and I know I’m doing my bit for the environment in some way.
I was working on a job this morning where I wanted to put a link on a web site to show prospective visitors to a company where the company was in the world. These days, the obvious answer is to use Google Maps. I’ve done it before, but could I hell as like remember how to do it again?
What I wanted to do was to get a map displayed with a pushpin on top of the location of the site. I wasn’t that bothered what displayed in the info box; the most important thing was that the box and pin were in the correct place.
After spending the best part of an hour diddling around with various URLs, I cracked it and decided I’d better document it for future reference, so here goes… how to get a Google map displayed with a pushpin in the location of your choice in a single URL.
Before I get too carried away, the Scimitars won 6-1 last night, a great game with three short-handed goals for the home team and a couple of scraps. What more could you want?!
It was one of those days today where we really needed to be out of the house. The sun was shining; true it was windy, but it was warm enough. Mrs Woolforbrains wanted to make a quick trip to Wingham Wool Works at Wentworth, and knowing there were a few geocaches in the area, decided to try and pay one of them a visit with Daniel. My searches went a bit astray though and I ended up finding some at Elsecar. I know there’s a nice Heritage Centre there, and it’s not far from Wentworth, so one geocache location downloaded into the GPS and we were off.
Once at Elsecar, we parked in the Heritage Centre car park, across the road from a very nice looking public park complete with (unoccupied) Bandstand.
The direct route to the cache was across a recently harrowed field (via a public right of way), but the actual route wasn’t immediately obvious, so we detoured around until we managed to pick up the path. When we started, we were 0.25 miles from the cache. We ended up around 1 mile from it at one point, but quickly homed in on it again. It was easy enough to find. We didn’t swap anything in or out because we’d brought nothing with us, but as is customary, we signed the log book and since getting home, I’ve updated the log on the site as well.
Back to the Heritage Centre…
The last time we were there, Daniel was only tiny, just walking, and it was heaving; Thomas the Tank Engine was in town. Today, it was very quiet. We hadn’t had lunch, so sandwiches were taken at the little cafe just inside the door, and very nice they were too. Excellent value. The only little thing that let it down was that it wasn’t fresh milk for the tea – UHT, but the freshly made sandwiches made up for that.
There’s a full programme of events at the Centre, including in October a Dog Show. As Dan’s quite interested in dogs and we may just end up with one one day, we might just be giving it a visit next month.
We still had Wentworth to attend to, and it’s only a five minute drive bewteen the two villages. Wentworth is a curious place. the history of the village is tied up with local landowners and landed gentry, the Fitzwilliam family, and can be traced back to Doomsday book times (much like Killamarsh). However, Wentworth has retained some of it’s unique identity, not least the compulsory green paint on all the houses. The photo shown is of a row of cottages adjacent to the main road through the village. Just look at those tiles on the roofs. It’s a good job the UK isn’t prone to hurricanes!
One of the things that intriuges me about Wentworth is the houses. If you look closely at the picture for instance, some of the houses have conventional stone lintels, but the one nearest the camera has a wooden one. If you are in the area, take a look at the number of houses that have clearly had windows and / or doors moved at some point in the past, but had the resulting holes blocked up with almost identical stone. It’s a fascinating place and worthy of further exploration (and there are several geocaches in the area!)
I don’t normally get colds, due in part to the cycling in all weathers, but I ended up with a stinker when I returned from Paris a couple of weeks ago. It was so bad, I had to abandon the bike for several days and rely on four wheels to get me to work and back.
Anyway, I’d got over it and was back on the bike. Blow me if I haven’t come down with another one over the last couple of days. I’m sat here posting this surrounded by used and unused toilet roll (not, it’s not a pretty thought), firing on only one nostril and I’m annoyed!
Things to look forward to…
1) We have a new Garden Centre opening today. Dobbies opens at Barlborough, about 5 minutes from us. I think we might just have to go for a look around.
2) The Scimitars are playing Peterborough Phantoms tonight at iceSheffield (web site down at time of writing), 7:30 faceoff. Although I’ve been to a Steelers pre-season friendly against Manchester Phoenix, this will be the first competitive league game I’ve attended. Daniel will be going too. I’m looking forward to it. If you want to see a good (in my opinion) web site, check out the Scimitars one. It puts the professional Steelers one to shame in terms of the clear uncluttered layout and accessibility. It’s a clear case of “just because you can doesn’t
mean you should”. I’ve also promised Daniel a Scimitars replica this season after I won Shudra’s game-worn shirt last year. (The photo clearly isn’t one of mine. I’m the one on the left! For any Sheffield hockey aficionados out there, that’s a #10 Nemeth shirt over my shoulders which I thought it prudent to not flash on ice)
3) I should get my high speed roaming datacard activated for the laptop. This means that whilst I’m helping out on 24×7 support for the next few months, I wont be stuck to the house.
We’ve got Gottlieb Pinball for the Wii console, but one of my all-time favourite pinball games on PC was Pinball Fantasies. Unfortunately, it needs a ‘proper’ DOS machine to run. It won’t run on XP, and I’d resigned myself to never seeing it again.
I was looking through some Linux stuff recently though and came across dosbox. It isn’t a command prompt. It’s a fully-fledged DOS emulator for Windows and Linux including support for Sound Blaster, SB16, Gravis Ultrasound cards etc. If you remember those and the games of the era, you might just like to give dosbox a try.
If you have a google around, you might also come across a number of sites offering old Dos ‘abandonware’ games for download. Five minutes later, I’d got Pinball Fantasies pumping out a rhythmical beat on my surround sound system on the PC and I was flipping away to my heart’s content.
You can run games windowed or full-screen (Alt-Enter toggles). Just to prove it, here’s the thing up and running on my Linux server. If the blog is slow to respond, you know why :-)
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 th
e 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.
