Orthodonty :+(

Had to go to Orthodonty today... (|-(

The orthodontist tightened my braces really hard and they've been really sore for hours!

:EDIT: The pain actually lasted for over a week :-(

Anyway, after that ordeal, we went and had lunch at Decks restaurant, which does lovely bangers and mash. Then we continued on to the Foyleside (as usual!). We were going to try and get on one of the Foyle cruises (boats that go up and down Lough Foyle), but they weren't doing any more sailings today...

Another view from the top of the Foyleside!

Having done the Foyleside, we went into Ireland and took the ferry from Greencastle to Magilligan, because it was a nice day and we fancied the scenic route! It's actually a nicer looking voyage from Greencastle>Magilligan, as you get to see the beautiful landscape of Ireland when you're leaving (if you're going the other way, by the time you get close enough to appreciate it, you have to be in the car ready to go).

That's one hell of an anchor!

Another extremely large anchor!

A large freighter

When I saw this, I thought, "Oh look! It's a boat coming in!" Then I realised it was the ferry. At which point I had to go very fast to the other end of the harbour and just made it!

Leaving Greencastle behind.

Magilligan (and Northern Ireland) ahoy!

When we arrived back on Northern Irish soil, we headed for the Bishops Road to get some shots over the Magilligan peninsula. The weather was glorious and the light was brilliant. Unfortunately, my camera seems to have corrupted a tonne of shots from that batch, so I can't show you! :@

On the way to the Bishops Road viewing point, we got a bit lost and made a slightly unintentional detour down a nice country road. On the way down it, we discovered the site of St Aidan's Well. Naturally, this chipmunk took a good look, taking lots of photographs while I was there...but the damn camera ate those too...

After that, we went to an Italian restaurant called Zio. It was fairly crap. Even though it has an excellent position on the coast, it was empty. Probably partially due to the fact that the waitresses aren't exactly charm-school graduates.

There are some excellent views from the balcony, but my camera b*gg*red those as well. *sigh*

Oh well - you'll just have to use your imagination!

David

Portstewart

I was dragged out to Portstewart today. It was just a standard walk/have an ice-cream/visit library/go back home again afair, but I took some (semi) decent photos while I was there, so I decided to post them.

The sea...and the sun....but you didn't need me to tell you that...

Portstewart from under the Convent

Erm...more sea...

You can see Donegal in the distance.

Some of those might make good wallpapers!

David

Caravans, drilling rigs and a landy.

Today I was dragged out for a walk along the promenade in Portrush. I actually quite enjoyed it, just don't tell anyone I did! As you have probably come to expect from the House of Chipmunk, the camera was going constantly. We're talking upwards of fifty photos! I have selected the best and posted them below:

The Skerries (off the coast of Portrush)
Some beautiful rock formations. (taken from the picnic site on the Bushmills<>Portrush road)

The picnic site had...er...how can I put this so it's even vaguely politically correct? Gypsies is the only thing I can really think of! Anyway, the picnic site had gypsies camping in it and they were scaring all the other people off. Three of them came over and started checking our car. My and Dad were not happy - we chased them off and departed quickly.

Portrush in all its...er...glory...

Across the water...

The Harbour

The Harbour and the opposite coast

The local lifeboat in all its glory.
The small Harbour beyond the bridge. The Ramore Wine Bar and the Harbour bar are just to the left in this picture.

That damn rig again!

I'll be doing research into Seacore and I'll see if I can work out what's going on...

This seems to be a crane that has been bolted on (i.e. not part of the original rig design)

This is especially for CMOT... ;-)

We parked in the West Strand car park and walked along the promenade, going along the seafront. We then ate ice-cream at the harbour and I nearly dropped mine when I realised the smaller (although still massive) drilling rig was sitting there in the harbour right in front of me! I discovered that it's run by a company called Seacore, so I'll have to do a bit of research about them....

David

Chipmunks on your desktop!

I have created some Chipmunk branded wallpaper!

Here are the links to my photobucket album, where you can download the appropriate size:

Chipmunk Wallpaper (1024 x 768)

Chipmunk Wallpaper (1280 x 1024)

Let me know what you think by posting a comment below.

Thanks for reading!

David

UMPCs

It's come to my attention that I haven't really written about technology too much on these pages, so I reckon it's time to have some tech articles along with my other ones! Anyway, on with the show...

UMPC stands for Ultra Mobile Personal Computer. The rather colourful and enticing name brings to mind images of computers sewn into coats and suchlike. Surprisingly, the answer isn't too far off - the UMPC is slightly larger than a PDA, but potentially retains the functionality of a full-fat PC. Notice the word 'potentially'.

The UMPC is, to all intents and purposes, a complete and fairly powerful PC. Obviously it's not going to contain an FX-62 and an NVidia 7900GTX, but it's still a good spec for the size. I'll put it like this - the spec is what you would expect in a decent business laptop, which is good and highly commendable.

The problems arrive when you examine the form factor and, on some models, the price. The form factor is small (obviously), usually with a 7" screen at 800 x 600 res. Some (Avertec's AHI UMPC (pictured left)- clicky) have a 1280 x 1024 res display, which is pretty damn good considering the size of the screen (5" in the AHI's case!). The screen takes up most of the surface area on the device, not leaving much, if any, room for a keyboard.

This means a lot of the UMPCs I've seen have sacrificed the keyboard, which I feel is a very bad move - the lack of a keyboard is what killed off the market for PDAs - the device was aimed at business users, who would want it to enter data into address books and compose letters on the move, but without a serious text-based input device, the PDA was slightly useless. Sure you could write on the screen and the handwriting software would turn that into text, but we all know how well that worked!

The UMPCs have plumped for a similar system, using both stylus input and a program called DialKeys (pictured on the Fujitsu P1510D, left) which is displayed like an onscreen keyboard. This looks promising, especially as it can be used when your holding the device by using your thumbs, but it still doesn't beat a full sized QWERTY keyboard.

As you can see, the Avertec AHI and the Sony Vaio UX50 (pictured above, right) are some UMPCs which do, wisely, include a keyboard for those times when you're sitting down and trying to hammer out an entire letter. The quality of the keyboards still isn't great and the positioning of the screen is also not very desirable (think of how laptops do it), but it's definitely better than nothing!

The devices have integrated graphics - as putting a graphics card in that space is a pipe-dream - meaning that serious gaming is out for the minute. However, old classics like Doom and Counter Strike should be able to run at a pinch and with the integrated wireless, deathmatches on the train are looking pretty good! You don't need cutting edge graphics to have fun, especially if it's a multiplayer match, where having friends to battle is part of the excitement, so the UMPCs can all fulfil that role fairly well at the minute, but undoubtedly someone will pack a decent laptop graphics card into it in the future, meaning that true gaming on the go may be possible with these intriguing devices.

What I would really like to see in the UMPC design, is a decent TV Tuner, with a good aerial built into the chassis - this would really boost the appeal of the system, giving it a unique selling point, putting it above PDAs and portable games consoles such as the PSP.

The prospect of a full XP computer in your hands is certainly a lovely thought and the execution of it seems to be going in the right direction, with devices like the AHI looking better and better, but the current crop are just a bit too high in price with a fairly sparse feature set. Better hold off on buying one right away.

David

Why Filters are a VERY bad idea...

I'm angry. Very angry.

I'm sitting in my local library typing this. Mainly because there isn't a whole lot I can do - even though I'm sitting at a Pentium 4 computer with T1 internet access. The reason?

Filters.

Fascist filters, to be precise. The 'WebMarshal' software installed on this computer won't allow me on to anything! That includes my own forums and sections of my blog. Maybe I'll pick up bad ideas from my own prose? Perhaps the mention of a swear word will be a turning point in my life? Of course, I shouldn't complain - after all, the internet is full of evil men who I would give my address to at the drop of a hat. Not.

I would hack the damn filter, but the fascist time software has just reminded me that I have less than a minute left.

Bugger.

David

Formation Flying...

Just a quick note to say that three Army helicopters have just thundered overhead. I tried to get a picture, but I was too slow. Mind you, I'm writing this on my PSP, so I couldn't have uploaded them until later anyway.

I wonder is there a security alert or are they just on exercises?

David

Rave on thy Holy Fool!

Well, we went to Coleraine today, just to do some business and a few errands. One of the things we were doing was trying to find a frame for my painting that I did a while ago - Clicky -but it seems that all the frames are 30cm x 40cm, which fits my painting in width (it's 29cm), but doesn't in height (it's 42cm)...

It maybe looks like we're going to have to shell out for a professional framer...

I called in to the bank today to see if I could set up a PayPal account, because I'm really starting to need one on my forays about the interweb. Looks like I might be able to set one up soon!

Anyway, after the town, we went and ate some sandwiches in a car park overlooking the River Bann - I took these photos while I was there...

A wide-angle image of the River Bann taken with my phone and stitched on my phone

I took four two megapixel pictures with my camera and then stitched them together in a wide-angle image - here's the result: (Dial up users beware clicking on the picture below! It's about 2MB for some reason...but it's worth taking a look at if you can!)

After that, we dropped in to Sainsbury's to get some staple goods. I noticed this a couple of weeks ago, but didn't take a photo. This time I did. Apparently Sainsbury's are now taking pointers from the American supermarkets...

Whoever gets this job is going to feel like a right idiot!

After Sainsbury's, we hightailed it home, listening to In the Garden and Rave on, John Donne (Parts 1 and 2) by Van Morrisson. Excellent. Poetic Genius!

David

Another Country

I went to Donegal today to see if we could find some half-decent pottery as a gift (we're still looking!) and we decided to via the ferry that departs from Magilligan Point and sails to a place just south of Moville, our intended destination for this trip.

When we got to the ferry port, we felt a bit peckish, so we stopped for lunch at a place called the Point Bar, which is about ten metres away from the entrance to the ferry port! They do rather nice burgers and champ and the prices are very reasonable.

The bridge to get on to the ferry

The ferry itself it quite new and gets up to a rather surprising speed! You just drive on and drive off - simple.

Drive on and off...obviously not when the boat's moving...

Disturbingly, there was no one up there for a lot of the trip *gulp*

They put the lorry in a specific position to balance the ferry...

Let's hope we won't be needed those!

Once we'd made it across the water, we went to Moville pottery to cover the gift aspect of the trip...however, it was...well a bit crap really. They didn't have a massive selection, but we found something anyway and we were on our way again very soon.

The Moville pottery sign...sideways...ahem...forgot to change it...

We were thinking of going down and taking the ferry across Lough Sligo, but we decided against it as we thought it would take too long. Also, the info that I was getting from the internet on my phone about the sailing times was sketchy at best!

Notice that the speeds are in kmph!

Instead we went straight down south to Derry and hit the Foyleside. A blitz of M&S and a couple of magazines later, we were on our way once more, yet again heading for the York restaurant, picking my dad up from home first (he'd just finished work).

A view of the Foyleside

A view from the top of the Foyleside (i.e. Derry)

Those rigs again! (Plus I thought it was a nice photo...)

All in all, I think this was a pretty successful trip and that the ferry is pretty cool!

David

More food and views!

I went to a friend's house for a meal tonight, along with the rest of my family (Uncle Richard included). It was a sort of thank you for last night (yes, same friends).

It was a very nice meal and the company was great. It's nice to be able to talk to people over a well made dinner and the conversation never really stopped, especially since there were two other people invited, making a grand total of eight round the dinner table! The wine certainly flowed freely - we polished off two whole bottles of the stuff!

The view that their house enjoys is simply brilliant! They have an unobstructed view of the sea (not counting the boat that was parked there for a while - see below!) and the sun setting on the horizon is a view to behold...

The beach is right in front of their property

The sunset is glorious

Not entirely sure where this fella thinks he is going...

Look how tall I am!!!

David

Cows! (and some lovely views)

Tonight I went to the Water Margin with some friends of the family, as well as my Uncle. We had a brilliant night, and I took enough photos to fill an entire album! Here are some of the best:

What we had to get through to pick my Uncle up! (The white one is a bull - *gulp*)

The Water Margin sign.

The view from where we were sitting...one of the best views from a restaurant I've ever seen!

A nice picture of the sun reflected in the water (taken from the balcony)

Rowers from the boat club, with their support boat, going by (taken from the balcony)

A view of the sunset from outside my Uncle's house

The fastest tractor in the world! :D

A slightly baleful cow...

David