Seasonal Area

Seasonal area

August 2009

The Seasonal Area has recently been trying to select pictures based on a series of guidelines which suggest that railways and the Wye Valley are already over-featured and that the Founder and his current relatives and property shouldn't feature too much. The only photographic trip this August was in the Wye Valley photographing a certain railway and upon examination of last August's pictures they turned out to mostly feature railways or stuff around the Founder, who is rather fussy about his privacy. The only image which passed the guidelines showed a country lane at around 11pm and had been taken on a short exposure. The guidelines are now being reviewed.

It was consequently decided to dig around in archive for a picture from August 1999 to celebrate our 10th birthday. Several of these pictures featured historic views of trains and so were dropped while a number featured a small boy with a big grin and blonde hair and were mysteriously found to be missing after the Founder had checked on what there was. The result was this picture, taken with a rather basic camera at Nash Point, near Bridgend in South Wales, around August Bank Holiday 1999. A wind surfer can be seen in the distance. The picture has been blown up to something rather larger than the print was, so apologies for the quality.

We decided to include a rather poignant picture of the family fish as the animal image. When it was taken last August the fish and the pond were about 8 years old and seemed to be prospering. Unfortuately this proved to be their last summer as all the fish were eaten by Heron in May 2009 - much to everyone's surprise since the garden was thought to be far too small and overgrown for him to fit in. The frogs (of which there are considerably more than normal this year) don't seem to be grumbling and Heron seems to be healthy, so the fish have been written off as a charitable donation to the RSPB and more will be acquired once the rather large heron population (there are at least three in the vicinity) vacates the neighbourhood.

Alongside is a picture of our pet Atari ST, which was the OB's main computer until 2006 (when it was deemed that a 21-year-old computer did not exactly count as up-to-the-minute technology). Several webpages began their lives on this machine - most notably some of the writing and the diagrams for first four plans for the Wye Valley Railway section (pages 3, 4, 5 and 6) [the diagrams have been removed and the text rewritten since this page was originally compiled]. It was recovered from store a year ago this month (hence the picture) and is currently used as the spare computer; it is particularly popular for getting work done without the distraction of the Internet, which it doesn't believe in. It remains convinced that it is currently mid-November 1985 and we see no reason to argue. It will finally be replaced when Atari bring out a new computer. No further diagrams will be produced on it for the foreseeable future since it hasn't been given its printer back and its picture file formats (.pic) are incompatible with modern PC software (Apple thinks they're music files). Note the "B" drive (when did you last seen a computer with one of those?) and the external transformers for the floppy drive and the computer, which is located in the back of the keyboard.

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08/08/09