Been a busy week. Vista died, Matt came to visit, and more.

Well it’s been a busy week, and the whole thing kicked off last Friday when we got news at work of an Internet Explorer 6 bug with one of our websites. But that’s an issue for a whole other post, and a mind bender a week later. Fortunately for the flow of this entry, but unfortunately for me, there were a couple of other events on Friday that can act as a starting point for reporting on the business of the last few days.

Windows Vista completely died on me, having gone into hibernation and somehow destroying a vital boot file in the process. The laptop couldn’t boot, and there were no option to restore the corrupted file after putting the Vista DVD, so kindly provided by Samsung, into the drive. So I’ve had to do a complete re-install over the last few days, whilst swearing at Vista for being so unreliable. The clean install also reminded me of how annoying the default behaviour of the OS is. Did you know it takes six clicks to create a new folder in the start menu by default? Four of which are confirmations that yes, I really do want to do that? Grah! Terrible design, awful in every way.

Anyway, I had already partitioned the drive into two, one system partition and another data partition (a trick learned during my time with Ubuntu), so all of my files and documents were safe; I did of course loose all my programs, settings, configurations and such though. It’s taken until today to get everything back more-or-less as it was on Friday afternoon. However that does now mean I can continue my little project that I’m deliberately not telling anyone about for fear of jinxing it.

Matt Ward also popped over for the weekend and landed on my doorstep around 9pm on Friday. It was a great weekend, it’s so rare that I see Matt since my sister kidnapped him all those years ago, and of course I also moved country a couple of years back too, which kind of hinders meet-ups with old college buddies. The plan had been to get up early, meet up with Ben, and go shoot the sunrise at Newborough. However Ben had been drinking and bailed out of that plan, and we also realised that as we had not scouted the area we’d more than likely be in the wrong place to make the most of the situation. It’s a good thing we dropped that idea anyway because it was misty for most of the day, and I think the sunrise would have been every bit as disappointing as the sunset we did stick around for.

Matt and myself made it to Newborough for about 10am. We did not get lost on the way. We did not also manage to not find the place on GPS. We did not sit around at a junction in the middle of Anglesey with a map out.

Shortly after our faultless, smooth, and quick drive we set about wandering the woods in search of good photographic opportunity. The lighting was lovely, though I’m afraid I didn’t get any decent shots at all. I had decided to try using the 18-55mm kit lens because I’d been thinking about getting a replacement for it, however I wasn’t sure if I don’t use it because I hate that lens (hate is an understatement, it’s slow, soft, and irritating) or because I just don’t like that focal range. Well as it turns out I do rather like the focal range, but the quality of the results are woeful. There’s hardly a single image from in the woods that I’d consider sharp enough. And while it’s obviously dimmer in there, it’s hardly what might be considered ‘dark’.

After a snack lunch we sat around and waited for Ben to turn up, but after about 3/4 of an hour gave up and wandered to the beach. Fortunately he was right behind us, having been held up by one of those annoying motorists that drive at half the speed limit on clear roads because they are not in a rush today. Forget that they are a hazard to everyone else.

Anyway, we then spent the entire afternoon walking around the beach and over the ruins, lighthouse, and rocks. It was very picturesque and frankly I’d love to be able to convert the old terrace house into a proper house and workshop and live there. We had a lot of fun chatting, walking, and messing about, though I didn’t get much in the way of photography. I took a load of shots, but none of the results have been what I was after.

After sunset we made it back to Ben’s for an all night party, finally hitting the ground for sleep at 5am.

On Sunday I paid the price for Saturday. I’d walked 9 miles with heavy equipment, stayed up an extra 7hrs, and had no where near enough to eat. I felt like hell and my stomach was in no way going to let me do anything other than sit down and grudgingly accept soup and continual nibbles. We made it back to my flat by 11am or so, and Matt headed off shortly after. I feel pretty bad about that, I had been looking forward to more socializing and photography. Sorry Matt!