I didn’t really finish writing up the holiday, hmm but even though It’s only been 10 odd days since coming back the memories have already become an incoherent mess inside my head. I’m such a scatterbrain. All mushed up. Lemmie see.

North Devon has lovely country walks and such but it doesn’t tend to have those charming cobbled harbour towns that you get a lot of in south devon and cornwell. Still, the nicest town we visited was Ilfracombe, really pretty town, lots of pensioners about and its really well kept and has some kind of homely quality. Strange claim to fame there, they have a restaurant called The Quay owned by Damien Hurst, we did happen to pass it but there wasn’t anything in formaldehyde on the menu so we didn’t bother, plus it wasn’t dinner time. Nope a more incredible thing was, we bumped into a PBGV!!! The first fellow PBGV Eddie has seen since the kennel and he couldn’t give two hoots lol. It was a bitch and was the colours we actually wanted originally (sorry eddie lol), it was white + blonde/going on ginger. Ack it had a really adorable coat. But OMG, her folks had a heartbreaking story to tell us! When she was 4 they discovered she’d developed glaucoma and it was too far gone to save and at 6 she had to have her eyes taken out! The gits got us all round up as well, they actually said to us, (paraphrasing) “You know, with this breed still being quite uncommon we’ve always wondered if the risk of glaucoma is in the breed but hasn’t been publicised”, Well thanks! What a thing to say to get us all worried about Eddie’s future. LOL, also they kind of implied to us that Eddie’s over-weight, just cos their’s was quite svelte. Hey, its a chubby breed I swear, theres was just freakishly thin!

Stupid car on that photo.

Well I’ve had a downright annoying week, so I let myself have a week off blogging duty. Last Saturday was the main culprit, I think i’ll put it in a list in order of events.

1. It was always going to be a sucky day because it was the day we had to return from our little holiday. You know what, even though it was only devon, not the most exotic of locations and not even abroad, it barely seems a holiday if it isn’t abroad in this day and age of cheap travel. But d’ya know what it was one of the most enjoyable weeks i’ve had and its all because of Eddie. Holidays with dogs are soooo gooood! It’s worth getting a dog just to go on holiday with them. So yeah, I was quite down at having to leave.
2. Being in the car for such a length of time isn’t much fun for a dog so we made stops at every service station on the way to give him a potty break and stretch our weary legs. At one such break I noticed something in the fur on Eddies forehead, it was sort of a faint orange small pea sized thing and when I took a closer look found it to actually be attached to him. Then I noticed it had legs! I was horrified! I didn’t know at the time but it turns out it was a tick, would you believe I’ve never seen a tick before? You don’t tend to see them in this country and what with the the heatwave at the time. I almost died though, I was shaking and all sorts was racing through my head of what diseases it might have passed to him and it was quite close to his eyes so I was all OMG what if it makes him blind?! Eddie was no use at all, he hadn’t brought it to our attention, no whimpering or anything, it could have been there for days. I cursed nature and all her evil insects.
3. We made an early start so that we would get home in time for the england game, we only just made it, immediately having to grab a beer and jump on the sofa, no time to unpack. Oh and wasn’t I so glad to have made the effort? Yeah. Never liked rooney. Twat.
4. I’d missed my wholesome iMac, and straight after the long long punishment. 120 minutes + penalties of slow torture I figured I’d say hello to him (lol most people call their mac’s her’s, not me I guess). I knew that during holiday apple released 10.4.7 and some other paraphernalia so the first thing I did on logging in was to check for software updates and tthere was a ton of the bleeders. They downloaded quite swiftly thanks to 10Mbit cable and installed one by one, but half way through the actual 10.4.7 (intel) update it failed, telling me its kept the update so I could try again later and would I like to restart for the others to complete. Sure I guess, and it did and it sadly passed away.

All that suckiness in one day can’t be good for ones health, surely suckiness should be spread a bit more thinly, not all thrown at you in one go. Regarding the mac thing, what happened was that it would boot to the login screen fine but afterward only part of the menu bar appeared and that was all, no dock or clock or even most of the menu. And the beach ball span indefinitely. Even the force quit menu wouldn’t appear when doing its keyboard shortcut. As luck would have it (the only luck of the day) enough of OS X was working for File Sharing to have started in the background and I was able to log in via the iBook and get my files off. It took me the rest of the day and most of the next to get all my stuff off though, I’ve just way too much stuff. And with the spare 240GB HD still out of action I haven’t got 1 big storage device to backup onto. I had to do it piecemeal style onto a spare 60GB HD (doesn’t even cover my MP3 Collection) and what’s left on the iBook, neither being quite enough and so had to resort to a load of cdr’s as well. Took freaking forever and its so messy having to do it bits like that I’m always worried I’ll have missed something.

It’s inconclusive but I’m 75% sure the update failed and fucked the os up because of my Vista misadventure, that is, having deleted the EFI partition and causing a little confusion to the partition tables. I knew it would come back to bite me, but I was hoping it would happen after my 240GB Backup HD had been fixed.

Oh yeah here’s a little warning. After erasing my drive and re-installing the OS I wasted about 6 or 7 hours because I had chosen to format the drive as case-sensitive. As seen as all Unix based OSs that I know of use a case-sensitive FS I figured it would be best and a no-brainer option. Well it turns out that Case-Sensitive was only introduced with Tiger and is incompatible with some software. Thing is most of my software worked fine, it was only after installing Adobe CS2 that problems started, none of the Adobe apps would load, they’d just bounced in the dock a split second and buggered off. I had not a single clue what was going on and it was only after trying out a million different things, reinstalling the OS another time and spending what felt like hours staring at google not getting anywhere when I discovered the Case-Sensitive FS issue.

Reinstalled yet again without caseness and everything was fine. So, thanks apple for not being arsed to put some kind of warning into the install dvd. Humph. Actually I was quite surprised to discover that OSX hadn’t been sitting on a case-sensitive FS all this time. I’d always just presumed it was, I figured only windows was crap enough not to be.

Still here in North Devon for one more day after tonight and then off back to sheffield saturday morning in a mad dash to catch the footie.

I think I’ll run through some of the towns and wot not we’ve visited. After Westwood Ho! came Appledore, which wasn’t much better frankly but becomes interesting slightly when you weigh in the bizarre factor, i really was quite weirded out. It’s a small harbour town, and most of it is all bunched up like a rabbit warren on a slope going up from the harbour. The streets were so narrow that all the inhabitants seem have given up trying park cars up them and so they’re all running along the harbour, and some homes seem to be wedged between the back of others. The people who live there are rather odd too. One home had the recipe to fish stew attached to the door all decorated with some painted pottery of fish on a plate and something like “Gary’s Fish Stew” in huge lettering above it. We looked for somewhere to drink but the only pub was empty but for a folk trio who had set up and were waiting for a least one person to play to, because we gawped at the window and carried on walking someone pocked their head out and shouted something at us, obviously frustrated. “Save our library” had been plastered on every spare window, so many that anyone would think it was insanely popular, but ifs its closing that cannot be the case. Strangest of all the place seemed abandoned, no one at all were out that night.

Clovelly is a real curiosity. It’s a village, sort of built on the side of a coast, the whole thing being quite steep down to the beach, its very isolated but the really nice thing is that the whole village is now owned by a family and they’ve kept it as it’s always been, so to be totally unspoit and in good condition. In a way it’s a little like Portmerrion, but different because it wasn’t purpose built and there are people actually living there, although I can’t imagine how they cope with all the tourists gushing past every day. Cars can’t get around it and in a odd twist they have donkeys to cart things on sledges (why sledges and not carts i dunno).

Oooh, whilst leaving clovelly an Australian couple approached to take a look at Eddie, they said they wanted a PBGV but couldn’t get hold of a single breeder in Australia. Hehe, i dunno why but that made me feel quite chuffed.

I created a diagram to accompany todays post, I hope you find it useful and it should also serve to summarise the post’s information in a quick manor.

For the long trip down here and any other passages of isolated boredom that may strike I figured some movies may come in handy. Playing DVD’s is quite a battery drain, partly because of the power being used by the optical drive, and I think also because the low compression of a dvd’s video is a fair amount of data that has to be wizzed around the machine’s guts. So I downloaded Handbrake which is a really easy to use dvd compression/converter app, its easier and more straight forward than I think any of the free ones on the pc were, that i had used before.

I first tried converting the dvd’s to 1000kbit H.264, but unexpectedly when I tried it later on the iBook, even with the standard definition of a DVD movie it struggled to play it back, pausing here and there to take a breath. Which is a shame because they really did look almost identical to the original. So I did them in xvid instead, which isn’t too shabby anyway, except in the odd fast moving scene where xvids tend to look grubby.

I encoded them on the iMac and it really is silly fast, came as quite a shock actually. Handbrake does the whole thing in one pass, it doesn’t even have to dump the dvd’s contents on the HD first, does it all in one go. And managed to encode xvids at an average of 34 FPS, with PAL films being 25FPS thats much higher than real time! Probably even more incredible it encoded h.264 at about 24FPS. Crikey.

This place is Abbotsham, i dunno why I had forgotten that last night. Hmm, I dunno if the Abbot is a sham or if Abbot’s like ham. I don’t suppose it matters.

So after failing to get Eddie into the sea yesterday we thought we’d try again today. There’s a beachy town just along the coast called Westward Ho!, how can you resist a place called Westward Ho!? So we followed the sign posts along the public footpath which follows the contours of the coast. The first sign we came across pointing to Westward Ho! said 2 miles. Well thats not too long a walk now is it, especially with such pretty scenery. Thing is though, after about an hour and half of walking along the coast in Westward Ho!’s direction we came across another sign pointing there, this one said… well we’d been walking all that time so what would you expect? Half a mile left to go? probably even less actually, well this sign said 2 miles… still. So I figure that Westward Ho! is a magical place that is always 2 miles from where you are. Even if you live in say California, Westwood Ho! will be 2 miles from you. I reckon to actually reach the place you need a magic pendent which emanates a glorious glow in Ho!’s direction.

We decided to walk back, watch England make it to the quarter finals and then drive to this hooker town… which wouldn’t be surprising as it was an absolute dump lol. Yeah, great name but don’t bother going there.

This silly boy is called kevin and he hates to be hit on the head with celery. He’ll be honest, he’s quite shallow and that is just about his only peccadillo.

What a strange day, gone on holiday to Devon. Just about the only reason for this holiday is Eddie the PBGV with a big heart, because there’s plenty of countryside around here for him to walk, and he hasn’t seen the sea before! Aww. We’ve rented a cottage in the middle of nowhere, I can’t even remember what the village is called its so remote, and the road its on hasn’t even got a name. But its near Bideford, or some such place. I can’t link to it on google maps because i’m having to write this offline.

Eddie has been such a good boy! Including service station stops the trip down here took about 6 hours and he was totally patient and restful. Sure he was a little hot and bothered and showed the odd signs of stress but he never made a big fuss. Bless!

First thing we did when we got here was find a pub… of course. And OMG its the most darling pub ever! It’s called the Thatched Inn, and it really is thatched. Not pretend thatched, but proper and recently done by the looks. If I ever made a good pub guide I’d definitely include it. It’s dog friendly… as long as its a nice day. haha.

We found a public footpath beside a farm that took us to the coast, unfortunately although it did take us there the path down to the actual beach had kind of eroded away, leaving a quite hefty jump, which may be ok if you’re on your own but with a portly but short legged dog wasn’t very convenient and we headed back instead.

Internet issues. There’s no wifi signal to hop onto announced. The cottage has a phone socket, but it isn’t connected.. as in there’s no dial tone. Which leaves just GPRS, ouch. So, I lets see if this gets posted shall we.