Very lucky free-faller & Ok ok that's enough rain!

Here's a story from the BBC about one very lucky free-faller

Exit-ing the aircraft (not the one in the pic) he is knocked unconscious by a collision with another parachutist.  The situation was spotted by a couple of his colleagues and one deploys his chute for him - - - a must watch video is in the article!




Another pretty cool video is the arrival at a scrap yard in Turkey of an old UK ferry The Pride Of Calais

The obvious idea is to get it as much "on land" as possible for the dismantling.
Neat bit of steering between 2 other ships which look to be holding it upright as it stops.  There's an amusing sideshow of a bloke with a camera who is in the shot for a short while!



This story covers what could have been a deadly encounter if any people were around at the time.

 A number of huge! rocks detached themselves from a rock face in Tramin Northern Italy and rolled down a slope before coming to rest.
One ploughed through a building while another stops just before it.  The blogger writing the story notes that where one rock stops in the vineyard there's another even larger rock from an earlier event
Once again another cool "aerial" video

Most people in the UK have had enough of our winter weather which this year has been decidedly wet!

Countless often distressing tales of flooded homes and businesses and a number of deaths have been invading our news media since the weather "turned nasty" just before the Christmas break

The Sun Newspaper though is leaning to a more spiritual resolution in its appeal to St Medard to stop the bad weather!
Its interesting to note that the Saint can also be invoked to end "tooth ache!"  Maybe our "pain" has some way to go before we see the green shoots of spring!  Having said that though the daffodil bulbs are appearing in the garden and the snowdrops look all ready to flower - - - hang in there!

One thing will never change though! and the express promises us another miracle cure for some ill or other.  This time they are trumpeting that a "cure" for Diabetes sufferers is "Within Reach" - - -
Nice to see Nigella smiling out form the front page again though!








Closer to home
I was working through the last of my set of shift patterns the other day and noticed that 2 of my website pics had stopped updating during the night.  The 2 black squares on the site with time stamps around 0250 kind of gave it away that something was amiss.
I texted Sally to ask her to reboot the PC but she reported that the "Netbook had lights but a black screen!"
Sure enough when I returned home the little machine was dead, well and truly.  No sign of a the hard drive making any attempt to surge into life when the "On" button was pressed.
I had bought the machine some years ago on a trip to Hong Kong it only cost me $700 HK about £70 but it has never crashed or given problems before

The Chinese symbols on the keys have always amused me!  Anyway, here's hoping its only the hard drive, I have bought a replacement on E bay and have a bit of software I'm hoping I can load! - - -

In the meantime I am using a really old desktop to keep the birdfeeder webcam and weather cam shots going.  I have always used the free version of Webcam XP5

but it is too CPU intensive for the old machine and makes it run at 100% for most of the time.  (great bit of kit though!)








 I played around yesterday with another freebie called Yawcam (Yet Another Webcam)

Such a simple interface and although the resolution is not quite as clear as XP5 I'm going to stick with this one.  CPU use is around 25% of the other model.  - - -

Enjoy the day

Follow this link to see  our weather website

Or this one just to see  the streaming birdfeeder cam