Vivo en Bizkaia (y otros sitios tambien)

Thinking of taken some photographs of Christmas lights being switched on in Suffolk? Well best you don't as some of our girls in blue consider it a crime.

No doubt if there was some genuine crime going - street robbery, rape, burglary, tractor rustling - then the officer in question would be at the forefront of the queue in the police canteen for a nice bacon sarnie and a cup of tea.

Even if it is not the Bay of Biscay....

Went for a walk along the seafront today, it was a trifle windy but then this is England, no?

This was my first outing of my new super duper North Face McMurdo parka. Although I was only wearing a t-shirt underneath I was actually hot! And dry of course.

Spent the afternoon sawing 10cm off my desk much to the disgust of Cowfold Chica.  

I am sooooooooo gone from Hidden Dip! :)

I have spent the last week packing and as I have spent many hours here sorting stuff out and throwing a lot of stuff away it is not too bad. And not too good either.

I have come to the conculsion that it is impossible for me to travel light due to the amount of cameras and computers I need to earn a living, but I am certainly travelling lighter than I have done in the past.

I hope to be using Brighton as a base for some time - well at least until I have the money to have a base somewhere else!

For the moment I am not worrying about it too much. 

I am moving to Brighton again, and will be living there from Saturday 1st December.

No idea how long for of course :) 

After a lot of geeky faffing around I have fixed the JunkBook.

As the problem with this one and all the previous JunkBooks has been the computer not properly seeing the memory I decided to take the two memory chips out, give them a good soak in a bath of hot soapy water and some swarfega and then a scrub with a Brillo pad, swap them around and put them back.

This worked.

Oh and I was joking about the bath and the Brillo pad.

So. My laptop. Wont. Work. Again.

Now I have been using my JunkBook Pro for work these last few months, but of late i have experience the Single Beep of Death a couple of times. This, if your memory stretches back that far, was the signal that there was a problem with the previous one.

Or was it the one before that?

Yes it was!

OH AND THE ONE BEFORE THAT.

AND THE ONE BEFORE THAT. 

But hey, at least Apple manufacturer their stuff to a consistently low standard.

Anyway, whichever one it was (actually it was ALL OF THEM) this one is the same.

So normally i cant afford to be without it (what? how can you not afford to be without something that might not work?) but i am having a rest week (aka dossing) this week and next and maybe the next contract I get will provide me with my own computer.

So i thought its best time to reinstall all the software on the JunkBook as various other nasty things were starting to happen. Now this is a reasonably routine procedure which i have done lots of times, it just takes a long time because you have to backup everything, zap the hard drive, reinstall everything. Its weary but worth it.

So I carefully backed up the hard drive using an ace piece of software called SuperDuper! and then zapped the hard drive.  Now when you zap (aka format) a hard drive thats it. Whatever was on there is gone. (Notice to geeks reading this, yeah I know what you are going to say but let's just leave it, huh? Go get yourself a girlfriend).

You can see where this is going can't you?

Yes, after an afternoon of backing up to a Firewire drive and zapping the JunkBook hard drive and being every so careful I started a new installation of the Mac OS X software from the original DVDs.

And guess what?

It won't install on the hard drive.

Which actually I am not that surprised about.

For some reason. 

And if you cant install the OS on a computer then (a) its really fundamental and (b) nothing else is going to happen.

So.

Anyone got a chainsaw I can borrow? I have the makings of a great YouTube video. 

I have had nothing to report on here recently as you will no doubt have noticed.

At the moment all my efforts are concentrated on being able to wander abroad again, camera in hand, to take photographs without so much as a backward glance at UK.

I have a variety of options - probably too many - for doing this which are, in completely random order:

1. Live in Pais Vasco permanently.
2. Live in Spain permanently.
3. Live in either (1) or (2) above and make occasional trips back here to top up my bank balance with my other career.
4. Stay here. NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
5. Move to London. Expensive.
6. Move back to Brighton. Possible
7. Something I haven't thought of yet.
8. Work like a lunatic in London for a year and save up to buy somewhere abroad outright.
   

Have been having various hassles with this blog recently, mainly stupid Silly Small Boys aka geeks posting spam on the comments and guestbook sections.

So to try and resolve / remove this problem i have disabled comments and the guestbook and will have to do the same to any other blog sections which seem to be attracting the wrong sort of attention.

Apologies. 

My last journey back from Euskadi put paid to the larger of my two Samsonite suitcases.  On clambering aboard the bus to the long term car park at Stanstead the pull out handle broke, and then when I came to open the case back here in Hidden Dip two of the three locks had shattered. Seeing as I have only used this case for about three or four trips abroad and regular trips to Ascot this is not exactly a good advert for them.

Anyway I had another issue. OK I have many issues but this one is fundamental.

How much baggage is my baggage?

Being a SleazyJet traveller I am always fighting - and specatacularly failing - to keep within their 20kg hold baggage allowance. Usually my excess baggage costs exceed my ticket costs, but its still a good deal.

But although my Samsonites look tough they are quite heavy.

So this evening I have been weighing my suitcases in the garage. Seriously. Well there is nothing else to do here. OK there is but i have fed the ducks today.

So. The weigh in.

• The bigger Samsonite (wheeled) = 5kg
• The slightly smaller Samsonite (wheeled) = 4.5kg
• Eagle Creek wheely thing which I first took to Bilbao with me = 3.8kg
• Berghaus Shadow (now called a Jalan) rucksack + daysack combination = 3kg

So if I took the bigger Samsonite with me on EasyJet completely empty I would have already have used up 25% of my hold allowance.

Now obviously you have to put your stuff in something, unless you have a Harry Potter Incredible Invisible Suitcase, but the more i travel the more i become aware of the fact that the old adage 'travel light' is soooooooooooo true.

So next trip I am going to take the Berghaus (good enough for the Marines, good enough for me) and see how i get along with that. So far it has only been to Bilbao and back by boat. It is 60 L capacity with the daysack being 15 L and a fab harness system.

I have a baggage plan for future trips which is completely dependent on the stupid one piece of cabin baggage rule being disposed of. This will be:

• Domke F804 Super Satchel as my laptop and carry around all day camera bag (cabin)
  
• T560 AIRPORT™ INTERNATIONAL - thinkTANKphoto for all the rest of my camera gear (cabin)
  
• Berghaus Jalan 60+15 for my other stuff like, oh, clothes I suppose (hold)
• My tripod in a bag of some sort. That also broke last trip! (hold)

Now you may think that this not travelling light but I can assure you that for me - it is.

Oh and in the Domke will be going a smaller Mac notebook. Maybe one that works, but then how do you know when you buy these things?  

I came back to England today.

Unfortunately it was still here.