Today is Valentines Day. It’s the ninth consecutive one that I’ve had someone to ‘celebrate’ it with, but the first time that I’ve been able to celebrate it with someone that I’m married to.
By the time you read this, I will be whisking my dear wife Christine away on an impromptu trip away. It was literally planned last night, about an hour before I wrote this blog post. It’s not a particularly romantic trip – we’re going on the Megabus – and it’s only for one night. Oh, and we’d have got up at 6:15am to catch it as well.
So, Happy Valentines Day Christine. Hope you enjoyed the surprise!
Our reason for visiting was for the twice-annual Leeds Steampunk Market. It had moved to Armley Mills from its usual venue of Left Bank near Burley Park. Rather than being arranged in one place in a main hall, this time the market was spread out across the museum and over the four floors, including outside. This made it seem less busy, but well over 600 people had come through the door on Saturday, and the numbers were looking similarly healthy on Sunday when we visited. A 50% discount for those who came dressed in costume may well have helped, and indeed Christine and I took advantage of this.
This was our third visit to the Steampunk market and we have now both amassed the basic Steampunk outfit. Sadly we didn’t take any photos this time (bar the Instagram image above) but my spray-painted gold goggles attached to a top hat made an outing. I suppose over time we’ll be able to come closer to some of the outfits that the more committed followers of the Steampunk subculture have. As usual there were some excellent costumes on show by other attendees.
As for the actual museum at Armley Mills, I managed to take a few photos (uploaded to Flickr of course) but to be honest we will need to go back and actually look at the exhibits properly next time. Especially as in some cases it was difficult to tell if something was a museum artefact or a piece of Steampunk art.
The next Steampunk market in Leeds will be at the White Cloth Gallery on November 30th and December 1st. I may be there.
Normally we take a rolling case with us to London. This time we packed lightly and ensured that all of our clothes fitted into a rucksack (for me) and a shoulder bag (for Christine). This meant that we could use lockers and cloakrooms in the various museums that we visited, which were free or cost considerably less than the Left Luggage facilities at stations.
For a nice view of the River Thames, go to Blackfriars station. It has recently been rebuilt, and now spans the Thames with entrances on both the north and south banks, however more importantly big glass windows have been provided. The photo taken above was taken from Platform 1, looking east, and frames Tower Bridge really well.
We saw a pair of urban foxes. They didn’t make any of these noises. It’s not the first time I’ve seen an urban fox but I hadn’t been so close to one before.
On our second night in London we stayed at the Pullman Hotel on Euston Road – roughly halfway between St Pancras and Euston stations. It’s not a hotel we’d normally be able to afford but it was definitely worth staying at (certainly better than our Friday night hotel). You also get brilliant views of London from the upper floors, and you don’t need to have a room there to use the lifts.
We had a mosey out to the Thames Barrier, which as of 2005 is much easier to get to thanks to the Docklands Light Railway. Alight at Pontoon Dock, and then have a nice stroll through Thames Barrier Park which is in itself quite a nice place.
The Museum of London is well worth visiting. It’s free and offers an interesting history of the city, from early settlers to the present day. There’s even a small collection of items from last year’s Olympic Games. We didn’t have chance to visit the Museum of London Docklands this time though.
The Wellcome Collection looked interesting but most of it is closed until the spring, so we didn’t spend much time there. The bookshop is excellent though.
The British Library also has an exhibition of interesting texts in its archives, including two of the four surviving copies of Magna Carta, which will be 800 years old in a couple of years’ time. There’s enough there to kill time for an hour or so.
Christine and I are back from a lovely weekend in London. We decided to try out lastminute.com‘s ‘Top Secret Hotels’ for one of the nights. This is where the web site offers a deep discount at a (usually) four or five star hotel, but it doesn’t show you the name or any specific information about the hotel until you have booked. This means that premium hotels can fill spare rooms without damaging their reputation by lowering prices.
The hotel we booked was listed as having four stars, four out of five on TripAdvisor, and was located somewhere between Kensington and Fulham. Once the email came through, it was revealed to be the Millennium and Copthorne Hotels, located at Stamford Bridge, the ground for Chelsea Football Club. Apparently, we saved around £45 on the cost of the room.
Note that the hotel pictured above is The Midland Hotel in Morecambe, Lancashire. I didn’t take a picture of the hotel we stayed at this time.
Unfortunately the hotel was a bit disappointing. I’ve gone into more detail on a TripAdvisor review (awaiting moderation) but I would give the hotel three out of five, based on the price we paid; at full price, probably two out of five. There were a few things wrong with the room, but also, when booking a secret hotel, the bed layout cannot be guaranteed. So whilst we were hoping for a double room, we actually got a twin room. It does clearly state that this could happen when you book, but it’s worth knowing about.
Frankly, I’ve stayed at much nicer budget hotels, like Premier Inn and Holiday Inn Express, and paid less for the privilege. Whilst it was interesting to try somewhere a bit mysterious, I think we’ll stick with the hotel brands that we know and feel comfortable with next time.
A few weeks ago Christine and I went to the Calderdale Industrial Museum in Halifax. The museum opened in 1985, but sadly closed only a few years later and has been mothballed ever since. A group of volunteers called CIMA are working to get the museum open again, and the 10th August was one of their regular open days where visitors could have a look around. I’ve uploaded the photos of my visit to Flickr.
Not all of the museum is accessible; the volunteers have been working for a couple of years but some parts are still out of bounds. However, there are three floors of exhibits, which include stationary engines like the one pictured, weaving machines and histories of some of the major companies that were founded in Halifax. These include Percy Shaw’s catseyes company, Mackintosh – maker of Quality Street and now a part of Nestlé, and the Halifax Bank.
A lot of the windows are still boarded up and not all of the light bulbs had been replaced, so the museum is quite dark. The paintwork on the walls needs some attention as well, as shown in some of my photos.
It was my first visit, but Christine had been as a child, back when the museum was open properly in the 1980s. I think she was disappointed at how the museum had been left to rot for so long. The volunteers have done well but will have their work cut out to get the museum back to where it was when it was closed, never mind taking it forward. I also got the feeling that the local council, which still owns the museum, isn’t being 100% co-operative.
There are also question marks hanging over the museum’s future. It backs on to The Piece Hall, which in January will under-go a 15-month modernisation, and it is next to the proposed site for Halifax’s new central library. The plans may see the museum building being cut down somewhat, although the artists’ impressions do at least show it so hopefully it’ll still be around in future.
There are two more open days planned for 2013, on the 14th and 15th September as part of the national Heritage Open Days events. If you’re in the area I would definitely recommend a visit – it’s easy to get to as it’s just around the corner from Halifax station. Entry is free, but I’m sure CIMA would be delighted if you were able to donate some money to help them get the museum open again more often.
We’re a married couple now. It was a bit of an exhausting day, but we both had a really good time, as did our guests – hopefully! I didn’t take any photos myself (the above is lifted from a friend’s Facebook album) so it’ll be a while before we see the rest of them. Christine looked absolutely beautiful.
So we’re Mr and Mrs Turner now, and I have a ring on my finger which is going to take some getting used to. Today we’re having a rest and then tomorrow we’re off to Paris.
Tonight will be the last night that Christine and I spend together as an unmarried couple. Tomorrow night we will spend the traditional night apart – me at my parents, and her with her bridesmaid at the hotel, and then the next time I see her she will be coming down the aisle on Saturday.
We’re pretty much there with preparations. We have the flowers (which are silk), I’ve got my suit, and Christine’s got her dress. We just need to take things to the venue tomorrow, and then wait for everyone to turn up the day after. As such, we’re not too stressed out about things as – touch wood – there aren’t too many big things that could go wrong at this point.
Anyhow, the next time I blog (apart from any automated posts like Delicious links), I’ll have a shiny ring on my finger. See you all soon.
Recently my Mac Mini has been running very slowly, with some programs freezing for as much as several minutes. I pruned the list of items that were running on startup but this didn’t seem to make much difference.
So I opened Activity Monitor (the OS X equivalent of Task Manager) and found a process called ‘mds’ was consuming huge amounts of RAM and virtual memory. MDS is the process which builds an index of your disks for use by Spotlight, the tool that lets you search your drives, and also by Time Machine for backups. Sometimes MDS requires a fair amount of RAM, but it was using almost 2 gigabytes of virtual memory and almost a gigabyte of RAM in my case. I only have 4 gigabytes of RAM in total, and so this was causing major problems as OS X had to regularly swap data between RAM and the paging file.
I’d tried looking into this before and got nowhere. Most of the results in Google were discussions on Apple’s support forums, which were devoid of any real solutions. But eventually I found this post on iCan’t Internet which actually had a solution.
Firstly you should run Disk Utility. Repair your hard disk, and also repair the disk permissions. This may fix your problem, but it didn’t in my case so I moved on to the next step.
Open up Terminal, and type in the following command: sudo mdutil -avE . This runs a tool called ‘mdutil’, and tells it to completely rebuild Spotlight’s index. It turns out that the index on my hard disk had got corrupted somehow, and this was causing problems with the ‘mds’ process. It took a while for the command to run, but afterwards a huge amount of RAM and virtual memory became free. Unsurprisingly, my Mac ran much more happily after this.
Hopefully if you’ve have the same problem this will help. It has certainly breathed new life into my increasingly sluggish computer.
As I only get to do this once every four years, here’s the obligatory leap day post (see also posts from 2008 and 2004). I’ve not been able to any leaping today, or anything much at all actually as I’ve been ill with gastroenteritis since yesterday. I’m starting to feel better but almost all of yesterday was spent in bed.
The photo for this post is of a Steampunk recreation of K-9 from Doctor Who, called K-1909, currently on show as part of a Steampunk exhibition at the Bradford Industrial Museum. You should go – it’s free to get in, and runs until early May.
When wanting to choose a photo for this post, I found that none of me 2500+ Flickr photos were tagged with ‘coffee’, hence the use of someone else’s photo under license. The reason for this is that I don’t drink coffee.
Or rather, I never used to drink coffee. But now I do. Occasionally.
Until now I’ve been that awkward person who, when asked whether I wanted tea or coffee, wanted something else like water or juice or hot chocolate or anything that wasn’t a hot caffeinated beverage. But as coffee shops have become more and more prevalent I’ve been curious to see if I really do still hate coffee.
In Starbucks, I’d been having their Frappucinos for some time – the non-coffee ones – and on a day when I was feeling particularly tired after an early start I opted for a caramel coffee one, hoping it would perk me up and wouldn’t have the bitterness that I hate about normal coffee (I also don’t like dark chocolate, or bitter ales, incidentally). Thankfully, it didn’t, and so step one of accepting coffee into my life was achieved.
The problem with blended drinks like Frappucinos are that they’re cold drinks. Great in summer, when it’s warm – or some semblance thereof, this is northern England we’re talking about here – but in the cold mid-winter the last thing you want is a thick, ice cold drink when you actually want to warm up. So, again, I decided to experiment – a caramel latte. And, it wasn’t bad.
So far I’ve had a few lattes, although not all of them a success (I won’t name the outlet that gave me a latte that frankly tasted foul, but bleurgh, I had the aftertaste in my mouth for hours afterwards). Next I may push the boat out a little further and try a cappuccino.
For those of you who are hardened coffee drinkers, it may seem bizarre that I’m only now discovering coffee in my late twenties. But sometimes, rather than assuming that just because you didn’t like something 10 years ago, you won’t like it now, it’s worth trying it again.
