Mussenden

St Aidens

Occasionally I get the chance to drive home on a Friday around either the Seacoast otr Biships road, which both provide stunning scenary. Many times I spotted the sign to "St Aidens" and I had heard of it from other sources too, but I had never been.

Tonight on the way back from Benone we took a detour through this idilic countryside, and walked up around the Chapel. The first picture is the ruins of the old Chapel, as far as I can discern from around 1660.

The site apparently dates back a further 1000 years though when it was founded by St Colmcille, although thats a little further than I can remember. I'll ask Susan.

Kiting at Benone - again

Today we spent more time at Benone beach, although by the time we got there it was late, and high tide was approaching. This did mean that there were very few cars on the beach, as only folks with 4wd were welcome on the loose sand. This was proved by some boy in a people carrier who drove about 10 metres onto the beach, and promptly got stuck. It was fun rescuing him.

Anyway, turns out the wife likes the new camera too, when she arrived back from her "run" she merrily shot about 200 photos. Here is a small selection.

Kite!

After lazing around for all the good weather we have had so far I decided to get out with the kite. I had worked a while the other night changing the lengths of a couple of lines, so I wanted to test if it helped the flight.




So I took to the freshly cut field tonight and had a grand time. It was a bit blustery though, where a smooth wind would have been better. However I still managed to try a few settings, and settle on one I was happy with. A beautiful evening.

bash: creating an alias with an argument

This is something I've thought would be useful for a while, but I never got around to figuring out how to do it. We have a command we use frequently at work for configuring the sun one application server, glassfish - asadmin. The asadmin command takes the command and then some arguments eg:
asadmin deploy --target instance1 --user admin --passwordfile /home/whatever/.password dist/application.ear

The bold bits tend to be common with only the italic bits changing. This is how to set up an alias in bash:
edit ~/.bashrc and add the line:
aa () { asadmin $1 --target instance1 --user admin --passwordfile /home/whatever/.password $2 $3 $4 $5; }

After logging out and in, you will have a new command called 'aa' which you can use like:
aa deploy dist/application.ear

Now, that's easier, isn't it?

Terzo No 244

When I got my impreza I knew it was a special edition - the Terzo, meaning third, signifying the third successive win for Subaru in the WRC.

There were 333 made, numbered 1-334 (omitting 13), and each was given a special plate in the interior with the unique number, but unfortunately some time during the 110,000 life of my impreza the number got lost.

I called Subaru's tech help in the UK and spoke to someone who simply asked for the registration plate, and was able to tell me that this impreza was registered number 244. I was hoping for 252, as that is in the number place, but whatever. Finding out the number wasn't nearly as exciting as I had hoped, but its nice to know :)

CDs : A new era

Today marked a new era for our Church, hardly a dogmatic change, but an important step nevertheless.

Instead of being recorded on 90 minute cassette tape, the service was recorded direct to CD with our new CD recorder. Afterwards the old tapd duplicator was pushed to the side to make way for the new CD duplicator.

So to all of those people used to listening to duplicated audio tapes, where 2 services sometimes overlapped, or the voice was wavering, now each copy will be a pure digitial replica. Next step mp3s on the interweb, then streaming....