This time, we go on the airbridge. Readers of the blog from old will realize that this topic is one of the top 3 conversation staples in the Falklands. It would not be a good topic to choose on 'Pointless'.

It's a long way. We start with a taxi ride to pick up the hire car from Hertz. Packing the car to the gunwales (I'm pretty sure that the car has them somewhere), and then we are off!
My TomTom sat nav on my iPhone has Monty Burns as the voice … it's a great choice.
The journey to Brize Norton should take 5 hours plus stops to stretch our legs. We book in at 8pm — 3 hours before our departure time.

Ascension

During your stopover, don't forget to get a stamp in your passport — well worth the donation to Help for Heroes — sadly despite looking for this, it seems that the stamps have passed into history — the security seems to be a privatised company.

Air Tanker
This is a change fron the previous HiFly — a Portugese company on hire to MOD. We flew down this time on a new A330 — military looking grey paint job. Sadly, the loan of a personal iPads is no more and the only screens hinge down above the central seats of a 2:4:2 layout. The choice of films is also pathetic by modern standards. There is no head rest, but the plane is quiet, comfortable and most passengers have an empty seat next to them. Did I mention, no alcohol on board.

We are off to the Falklands again. This time, we will take our holidays first and island hop during late summer. The black-browed albatross beckons.

Riding the crest of the wave of new technology is exciting. Perhaps it is like surfing — what I have seen of it. Slow to start, and when you are standing ups it’s perhaps too late to stop.

I can retrace my steps to my start in the quest for the holy grail of data storage. I did not mean to start out on this ride, but now I am up for the journey.
It’s not difficult for me to find my way back to the start; my journey is littered with the breadcrumbs of abandoned technology. It all started a long time ago

1. My first class project in medical school in 1969 involved collecting information and then recording it in longhand on paper. The annotated sheets were whisked away, transcribed onto punch cards and these were fed into the maw of the beast that was called a computer. It lived in its lair somewhere in the university, but we never got to see it. Eventually, we were presented with the answer and it was not 42. The data was stored perhaps forever on paper (more accurately as holes where the paper used to exist).

2. Ten years were to pass before I obeyed the instruction “publish or die” that was to haunt all aspiring surgeons, both then and now. Facts (gleaned at some cost) needed to be analysed.
I became the computer (my wife too). Information was put directly onto cards and we missed out the machine bit.
Was this a regressive step? We were in complete charge of data validity and calculations of sets and subsets and correlations were almost instant. Hunched over (Jolly Cards)[] and then holding sets of these cards up to the light was laborious but a fun thing to do together.

3. By 1981, I had moved on to (Cope Chatterton)[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge-notched_card] cards. I could now study many data sets but for a limited number of patients. I could also write free text onto the card. The answers were only a knitting needle away.

4. By 1982, the age of the computer became personal (or at least accessible). The office (Cromemco Z2H)[http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/voy/museum/pictures/display/3-5-CROMEMCO.html] allowed us to use (dBase)[http://t.eweek.com/eweek/#!/entry/30-years-ago-the-rise-fall-and-survival-of-ashtontates,523b72cd2ce9351e049e837c] to store and analyse our data.
There was however, one problem. The papers we wrote and databases we populated needed to be portable (I am referring to the actual physical storage here and not to the proprietary software format they were stored in).

4. The 8 inch floppy drive. Enormous in every sense except in the amount of data it could store. The drives were huge and slow, and most researchers (for I had moved on to study for my Master’s higher degree in Surgery) were limited to the one disc.

5. The 5 inch floppy was more affordable and most trainee surgeons could afford a box or two. The drives that read the discs were still out of most trainee’s pockets though.
Eventually, the price fell and soon, a dual floppy drive setup enabled easy disc copying and a form of backups

6. The holy grail was soon to come. My first hard drive was a massive 20MB in capacity. Sadly, all disc drives fail; the heads floating just above the spinning platters touch the delicate surface and leave their mark. Bits are lost, never to return.

The quest continues for the holy grail. All my data available for a reasonable cost, anywhere, anytime and no lag.

Next time:
Portable storage
The Cloud
Backup
Gigabytes and Terabytes
RAID
SSD

Perhaps it is a trait, buried in our genome that we become (or indeed, are) short attention span animals. Why bother about what has not eaten us, when the next sabre-tooth is padding over the ridge.
Have you ever had the problem of “upgrades” breaking the app? I have.
The latest miscreant is the Odeon app. You can do all kinds of things still with this window into the Odeon Empire (pun intended) except buy tickets. A sort of a doh! moment. Perhaps, the engineers were too busy adding tracking code or skeuomorphic features to notice the hunting mate of the sabre-tooth circling around and coming from their “6”.
Anyway, the app is no more, it has become a Norwegian Blue (that has not revived unlike the Pythons).
Perhaps too much cola has been gulped?
The only purpose of this app is missing — a bit like the Cheese Shop from Monty Python.

Addendum: ’twas not the app that was broked, but the back shop server. Now fixed.
Now why did it not report an error like the website, rather than just falling over?

Saved by the skin of its teeth. A remarkable story of a leaking seive of a ship. Worn out by too many passages around the Horn. Rusting from years as a storeship for the FIC. Beached in Sparrow Cove just outside the narrows off Stanley in 1933, her days were numbered. Falkland Islanders tried to save her, but the cost in treasure for this impoverished community (in the 1930’s) was too great.
Finally, just in the nick of time, this grand old lady was patched, refloated and secured on a barge.
The hull was a colander and it looked all too likely that she might break her back. Running repairs in Monty, then the long tow home.
Avonmouth, and nearly at her journey’s end. Refloated again to pass up the narrow gorge beneath the Clifton suspension bridge for the first time — I bet she thought to herself — gosh, I have been gone a long time — that was not here when I left my birthplace in 1845.
Finally, she was reversed into the dock where she had been built oh so long ago and she was home. To the exact day and month of her launch into Bristol harbour, 127 years had passed.

Now, with the injection of a lot of cash and expertise and love, she is once again magnificent. She might be mostly rust below the waterline, but it is beautiful rust.

You can walk on the bottom of the dry dock, and gaze on the beauty of her hull. A glass floor at the plumb line keeps the salt saturated steel hull inside a warm and dry atmosphere so no rust can form anymore (humidity less than 20%).
Salt saturated wood should be kept moist. Bristol takes care of that without help from man.

Put this visit on your bucket list and then tick the check box as soon as you can.

Such a staple of life in Bath. Sally Lunn’s is the place to go. You can look a the restaurant and imbibe the history of Georgian Bath while on a walking tour, or queue with Japanese tourists to actually imbibe the bun.
Linda is pointing out the perils of not making the Bath Bun part of your daily 5.

The tranquility of the canal system in England is astounding. Everything goes above the canal system (unless you are on a viaduct in which case, you have fresh air below).
The canal surface is perfectly flat and unless you are using the lock system, there is no flow. Stop and moor up and by the time the last knot on the mooring rope is threaded, the ripples of your journey will have faded. The JPEG jaggies of the smooth edge of the bridge parapet reflection in the mirror image in the water have smoothed out — never to return unless by cranking the compression in your photos too high.
This is “the fastest way to unwind”.
The wind may sough above, but the trees and bushes along each bank cancel this out. Fruit — elder berries, brambles and sloes amongst the myriad berries that are more suited to birds, hangs heavily and drags the branches down to the water. This harvest seems not to be appreciated by the passer-by. To be truthful, on most towpaths, there are few walkers. On busy parts of the systems Lycra clad cyclists spurt past, oblivious to what in my nana’s time was an indispensable part of living in the country. Elder berry wine followed elder flower wine and fingers were stained from picking the blackberries.

The first of the Kennet & Avon Sloe Gin has been bottled — we are doing our best to redress the balanced

Day 4

Bristol to Bath

SS Gt Britain today. Strong currents in Feeder canal so leaving delayed until 15.00
Still further delays due to grounding of excursion boat in Netham lock. There was not sufficient water in the canal as the lower lock had been opened beyond Bristol to flush the mud away from the river (this mud has a memory and returns within a few days, so the whole process has to be repeated)
Eventually, given the ok, we motored against the current, but with the wind, up the feeder canal to moor up and await closure of the overflow. Moving into an enormous lock, we tied up to a buried cannon — just about 50cm of the muzzle visible. A rapid journey back to Hanham lock and then to the Lock & Weir for a pint of Gem. Wilson (a retriever) and Jasper (a black lab) were in attendance. Jasper was ever hopeful for a crisp or two — as with all labradors, but hope proved in vain. Back to the boat and the ducks. They must have a bit of labrador in them as they were expecting food in the form of stale bread!
The TV is up an running — a minor miracle as the aerial is just a copper loop stuck to the top of the narrowboat by rubber sucker.
A chance to review the day and our visit to SS Gt Britain. Very emotional — she returned to her birthplace 127 years after she left. Abandoned in the Falklands and after a failed attempt by the Falkland islanders to get her restored, in 1967 after the vital initial moves had been made (letters to The Times), a salvage team went out and with the help of mattresses donated by the people of Stanley, the colander was plugged and she floated. A perilous voyage home and she was in Avonmouth. Refloated from the barge, she was towed under the Clifton bridge (for the first time) and arrived back in the dry dock in which she had been built on 19 July 1970

At the end of her journey, the biggest risk had been Bristol City Council who wanted to concrete over the floating harbour and cover it with flyovers and through roads. Here we can thank a lack of money that saved Bristol from the fate that overcame Coventry and Portsmouth.

Today, a safe dry berth sustains the GB (15% humidity to stop the rust below the waterline) and above, fresh paint and new wood.
Good to visit and you must seek help from the guides — so keen to help
Tomorrow, Bath and boar cheeks

Slightly hairy journey down the Avon into Bristol Floating harbour. This craft, which looks so large and strong on a canal, metamorphoses into a tiny tin can with a pitifully weak engine; the leeway is something to behold and only topped by Ena’s response to wind. She is a fickle creature, and will rapidly move in the direction of the prevailing wind.
SS Gt Britain tomorrow am; we have seen the original mizzen mast on Ross Road in Stanley and now for the real restored item