A misty or even foggy day. Wind still howling around the hut and the Caracaras are nowhere to be seen. It seems that they do not like the bad weather. Generator now fired up for its morning hour of recharging our batteries and we have run out of staples of washing up liquid, and bleach.

300 photos taken and will be sorted on our return to the Macbook Air.

The fog lifts so we set out towards Elephant Point. Perhaps, the elephant seals will be there again. The Gentoos scatter as we thhread our way between the colonies. Tight knots of Magellanic penguins rush around in a boiling huddle as we pass. Individuals scatter to left and right, but not usually in the direction furthest away from us. They seem to have little sense. Striated Caracara spy us and run pell-mell to stop near our feet. Has their behaviour been changed by the use of food lures so that their ring numbers can be read and noted?

Onward, skirting between the beach and Mt Harston, we smell the Rock Cormorant colony before we espy them around the headland. No seals, just sheep and wet grass glistening with drops of moisture. No tussock grass either — it seems that the sheep have grazed it to extinction. It might come back if the sheep were to go. It seems that the restoration of this environment depends on the removal of that animal that is also implicated in floods caused by the rapid runoff of rainwater from the hills of Cumbria and other upland areas. Tussock does survive, but only in those small cracks in the cliffs, where the Black-browed Albatross nest and sheep cannot reach. The solution is obvious — the material cost is not.

Onwards, we trudge, regretting our choice of dry weather footwear. My toes squelch in tepid water, filtering through the permeable uppers. At last, one more headland and the fog comes down in earnest. The picnic is laid out, consumed and we retrace our steps.

Ghostly sheep loom out of the mist like a Conan Doyle novel, and they point our way to the beach. Sheep are not a species that I expect to see ambling along the beach. Nothing much for them to destroy here though and so back to the Gentoos returning from the sea. Krill seems to be a favourite food, judging by the red colour of their scat (is this the right term for penguin droppings?) As we hoover up the animal life in the oceans (I nearly wrote our oceans — but they are not just ours to use and despoil as we have the land) how much food will be left for the birds and mammals who live here?

Global warming is not a consequence of human activity, but of too many humans on this planet.

Wonderful birds. They do not belong around your neck, but riding the winds of the great southern ocean

The Queen's baton arrived in the Falklands today. It had come from Capetown by ship to St Helena and then onto Ascension Island.
It joined our flight on the 2nd leg of our journey. The baton was brought around the cabin by a very nice lady. It was off to the Carribean after the Falklands, but another team would take over for that next section.
When we arrived at Mount Pleasant, the cameras were out in force (though normally photography is forbidden). Primary schoolchildren lined our route into the terminal and flags had been issued. All were keen to be involved. Perhaps my case had been caught up in the excitement and wanted to stay for the event.

This journey's end was much like many of our recent flights. Staring at the conveyor belt in desperate hope, but despite willing the next bag that came through the plastic curtain strip to morph into my case, nothing happened. I sort of realised that the game was up, when the sniffer dog was taken away for his dinner, and then the shutters came down. My fears were realised.

A very nice air movements officer explained that he would do his best to locate the bag but as for compensation, the explanation to my wife was that the RAF was not that kind of airline.

Off we went on the dusty road to Stanley; me in a huff and Linda trying to sooth me.

We arrived at the Surgeon's house and the house was empty. The doors were open and like Goldilocks, we entered. Our host soon arrived — bringing good news that the case had been found at the airhead, and it was not on the way to Camp Bastion.

That was a relief — I had been puzzling out what were the contents of that case, and could I get them replaced in Stanley before we flew by FIGAS on Monday to Saunders Island.

The simple answer to this question was that replacement was either very unlikely, or impossible.

The bag was delivered on the regular medical stores delivery to the hospital and once retrieved, I found a stowaway — Algy.

(This bear has been kidnapped and held for ransom on many occasions). He seems to bear a charmed life.

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.