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I do like the Scarface soundtrack, and it’s so long since I’ve played it. On it goes.

In other news, at 16:29 today, the Revo Dalek which had been salvaged from Lancaster Road, received its first power in its new home, with help from a gear tray supplied by Andy The Iridium Fan. This is also the first time in my entire life that I’d lit a SOX (low pressure sodium) lantern. I took a photo at the immediate time of switch-on, but the floor in the living room was a mess so none of you will ever get to see it. To me, however, it was a groundbreaking moment.

Technorati Tags: advert, drench, low pressure sodium, Music, revo dalek, scarface, sox, streetlight

The Revo Dalek, is not a pretty lantern. In fact, as a child, I always thought there was something wrong with it. I have distinct memories of travelling down Lancaster Road as a mere infant, looking up at these oddly shaped lanterns, and saying to my late mother that “its chips are hanging out”. Chips, referring to integrated circuits, as I assumed that a streetlight consists of more than a bulb, ballast, ignitor and switch. Clearly, my childhood presumption was wrong, as they survived for around another 25 years.

But seriously, these particular lanterns remained a bit of a mystery. Even as a child, I could tell they were absolutely ancient, and as I learned more about streetlighting, I learned more about them. I’m sure I photographed an example, and posted the images to the StreetlightingUK mailing list, where the lantern was identified.

The Revo Dalek, isn’t its official name. In fact, it got the name “Dalek” because of the dimples on the side of its bowl resembling those of a Dalek from Dr. Who. As I’ve only ever seen one episode of the afore mentioned televisual presentation in its entirety, I’ve never seen the connection. Either way, the official model numbers were C13720 to C13723, though there are no markings on any of the lanterns to tell which model is which. There are at least 3 variations that I know of. Later models adjusted the cast iron moulding to accomodate top-entry variations, and no doubt this could also be used for photocell mounting. These particular examples preceded the recasting, and so don’t have a circular point on top…

Now, there’s a particular reason why I chose that image. You see that post that’s being cut down? Well, I now own that particular lantern, thanks to Andy The Iridium Fan delivering it to Mercuryvapour Towers.

As you can imagine, after roughly 50 years lighting a small patch of Hartlepool, it’s in a sorry state. The bowl is cracked, complete with a bullet-hole, but it’s a complete example. The weather has been disgusting since I received the lantern (and so is the bird shite on top of it), so I’ve not had chance to photograph it properly yet.

One thing I always assumed, due to the lantern’s size, is that it was gear-in-head (as in, the “chips”, as I referred to them as a child) were stored in the lanterns canopy. This wasn’t the case, and is the reason why lanterns of its age still survive. Most, if not all modern lanterns now, include their workings in the lantern, which means if one part fails (other than the bulb), the whole unit is switched out. This is why, these days, you never see a full row of streetlights that look exactly the same. Something fails, they replace the entire thing instead of repairing it.

However, Andrew has promised the electrickery bits to get it working again. Before that, however, it’ll need a hell of a clean. We’ll need some decent weather before that happens.

Thanks to a night out that went wrong (that deserves a whole blog post on its own), I ended up walking down Lancaster Road, and caught the last time these Revo Daleks were lit, as they were disconnected the following morning…

EDITl Balls! I pressed “publish” accidentally. Still, it’s close enough.

Technorati Tags: dalek, lamp post, revo, streetlight, Streetlighting

While I remember on, unfortunately, it’s bad news for the webcam on this site, I’m afraid. You may remember that it used to catalogue my entire life for many years. Unfortunately, since I have now upgraded to Windows 7, my Logitech Quickcam 4000 simply will not function on it, which means even though it’s not actually done so for many years, it’s never going to return. And considering that I rarely use this site now for anything remotely “recent”, I can’t see me investing in a Windows 7 compatible model. It’s a bit of a shame. I always trusted Logitech and their “futureproofing”. Unfortunately, it seems that I was wrong to do so. I can’t even get the driver to begin installation, although I did get the “setup” screen by changing a command in the setup.ini file.

While I’m geeking about computers, I might as well make a mention of the newest hard drive in my 1TB commection. I have 4 drives at 1TB. 2 internal ones in daily use, and 2 external ones to back up the internal ones. Buying a new drive was an easy decision for me to make, especially as someone I know lost pretty much his entire life when his hard drive died in his laptop. The trip to Maplin also involved the first trip to the store formally known as the Euro Trade Warehouse, now called usave. Those of you who followed the blog before the mass purge earlier this year will remember some of the classic things that has been purchased by the Percivals, such as the radio toilet roll holder…

You’ll not be surprised to find this still gets regular use, as a toilet roll holder, clock, and radio when somebody is in the bath. Altogether, this was a worthwhile purchase, and one that we have had for over 6 years now. This means, however, that the plastic’s started to turn yellow, which means it doesn’t look as fresh as it once did…

Anyway, back to the other days’ Euro Trade Warehouse usave purchases. I didn’t get that much, to be honest. Instead of coming out with a black binbag full of tat, I came out with a few huge crates to store my tat in, for you see, next week will see the 2010 edition of “Life Laundry”, where I go through the stuff which I’ve hoarded over the years, and bin as much of it as humanly possible. I’ve got plenty of stuff to chose from, and after only an hour at it, I already had a load of stuff landfill-bound. There’s also the fun prospect of actually cataloguing what I’ve got, and which box it’s in for future reference, should I actually need any of it again.

One thing I did avoid buying in Euro Trade Warehouse usave, were these “specialist” knives…

Oh, and while I remember, yes, yes, I know I haven’t updated much. That beast of a thing called “a life” is keeping me away from the computer. You may find I’m a little silent on everything at the moment, even flickr. In fact, that image you see above is only the 6th image (5th photo) I’ve published on there in 2010. In fact, let me know you a little league table of what I’ve done over the years. Here’s a quick rundown on previous years stats…

Jan/Feb 2007, 176 photos.
Jan/Feb 2008, 612.
Jan/Feb 2009, 68.
Jan/Feb 2010, 5.

I blame the weather, I really do.

Technorati Tags: ass knives, backup, hard drive, usave

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“HEXHAM M.A.G.S ON TOUR + ERIC + LIL” (Whoever wrote this must have aching arms, as they held it up for most of the night)

“HI EVE” (written on a paper plate)

“UP THE PHILLI I.P.F RED LION WHO ARE YOU?”

Some guy i constantly holding uo a sign with “PETE” written on it, and an arrow pointing down to PETE.

“LESTERS YOU OWE ME BEER”

“REAGN” (Could this be Regan spelled badly?)

“SHABBA”. How very 1994.

“HELLO MRS KINIEVEL” (Wonder if her first name is Fu?)

“MORE BLING THAN BOBBY GEORGE”

“KAREN FEED THE CATS”

“HELLO WOODHORN I LOVE IAN COOK ALWAYS AND FOREVER”. (I can’t read the rest of this one because it’s upside down)

“HOPE YOUR ASLEEP MIKEY & BAILEY” (I am aware of the you’re / your error in their writing)

“WILL THERE BE A POWER CUT OR DOES PHIL HAVE THE POWER?”

“IM THE ONLY SOBER 1 HERE!” (Seems like someone could do with a lesson from Bob The Angry Flower)

“LOVE CONTRACT”

“MOUSE AND BAZZA FEEL THE POWER” (Oh, I don’t know where to start with that one)

“IM WITH JESUS”

“HELLO UNCLE BILL” (Hello from me too!)

“GAYNOR” (written on what looks like a napkin – the stocks of cards must be running lowl)

“SOLAR POWER” (complete with a news article of someone catching a large fish… er, righto. This appeared before Phil Taylor lost in the Semi Final, obviously)

“HELLO KATE + JP” (The fudge? Someone knows I’m watching? Hello! I don’t know who Kate is, by the way)

“PROPER DARTS CORPORATION” (No, dear. The P in PDC stands for “Professional”)

“LOVEMAN N.D.F NO 1 ! !” (Note the exclamation marks on this one were huge. Maybe the writer just liked the smell of the marker pen)

“WE’VE FINISHED WORK AT LAST!” (Golly, I’m so proud of you.)

Someone also flashed their tits at the camera. I love you, realtime-pause on Sky+. (EDIT: Someone searched for “paul nicholson darts supporter big tits” on Google and reached this site. This is the proudest moment of my life.

“PLATEFACE” (Hahahahaha!)

“WELL DONE VIPPA” (I prefer my Vippa medium-rare.)

“MARKO THE BEST STAGE MANAGER IN THE WORLD!” (This guy’s been holding this thing all night, but was always too far away from the camera to be legible. For some reason, the cameraman thought it deserved a closeup. I’m a little disappointed, if I’m honest. Dale, Kezia says hi.)

“I LOVE YOU GREAT MATE” (Someone’s pissed?)

“FOR SALE SET OF 3 DARTS, HARDLY USED, 1 CAREFUL OWNER, CONTACT…. PHIL….”

“180″. (Something which I haven’t mentioned is that the cards have a blank area on one side, and a printed “180″ on another, with the sponsors name on, meaning that if a player scores a 180, the sponsors get a load of free advertising when the masses wave it in front of the camera. For some reason, someone decided to scrawl 180 on the blank side, whichmeans they either weren’t aware of the afore-mentioned pre-printed 180, or they didn’t like the sponsor. Or it’s one of the few who really, really couldn’t think of an inane message to scribble).

“140″ (Oh… clever!)

“LET THE DOGS OUT MATT AND STOP PLAYING POOL” (If he’s playing pool, how can he be watching the darts?)

“PHIL MY BOL FOR TEAM LEADER!” (You just know that guy is one of the people who, at a night out such as the darts, will sit there and just talk about work.)

“THERE’S A NASTY SMELL OF “GIT” IN THE VACINATY”. (You should have to pass a spell test before they give you these cards…)

“I’M NOT ILL! SORRY! I LIED!” (And you broadcast this to the nation? On ITV4? Don’t worry, your job’s safe.)

“HELLO MANSFIELD”

“HI DARLING LYN WONT BE HOME 4 DINNER. P.S DONT GIVE TO POPPY” (Wonder if there’s a reward for the safe return of missing apostrophes…)

“GOLF SALE <—-” (Well, someone had to do it!)

“RON JEREMY FAN CLUB”

“I [HEART] TARDS” (How very mature…)

“LESTER CAN YOU PLEASE PICK UP DAD HE’S PI**ED” (I hope Lester gets the message.)

There were probably loads more, but these are the only ones I could be arsed to type. Paul Nicholson won in the end.

Technorati Tags: darts, itv4, messages, paul nicholson, phil taylor, sign

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Anyway, I have been, and still am, incredibly busy with stuff, which is one of the reasons I’ve not been updating this, plus I’ve had writers block up to the eyeballs. My “drafts” folder is, as usual, full of little snippets of posts I started, then never finished.

Music is one of the things which has been seriously influencing the past couple of months, especially an 8-second clip of a Kraftwerk song.

I was at work about six months ago. Ian, who sits behind me, had a bit of a “Kraftwek” night, and was playing some of their tunes. An 8 second piece of music got stuck in my head. It had been used as a sample in another song, and could I hell remember which song it was. I later found that the song he was playing was “The Robots”, but even after an extensive interwebs search, I couldn’t find out where else I’d heard it. I knew it was in a song from the 1990s.

Off to #speccy, nope, nobody had heard it there, not even Marko who is normally good at this type of stuff. I uploaded it to my phone, and played it to everyone I knew, in the vain hope that it would jog the memory. I even set it as my ringtone, thinking that if someone rang me, and I heard it out of the blue, I’d pick up on it straight away.

Sadly not. I joked to Chris (who also didn’t know it) about me hearing it when I least expect it, totally out of the blue.

That was months ago, fast forward to yesterday. After looking for a few things, I happened to spy my old video recorder in a box. It hadn’t been used for about 6 years, not since my TV card died. I hooked it up to the telly downstairs, and played some old tapes with the intention of transferring them to DVD. There was one particular tape I was after saving. A non-descript looking tape, with a ripped label. Amongst hours of me playing in the garden as a kid, with our old black and white camera, was the very last edition of “Northern Life”. Halfway through, they had an “outtake reel”, with music dubbed over it.

The track was a song I liked, instantly recognisable to me anyway. All of a sudden, 32 seconds into it, there it was. THAT BLOODY KRAFTWERK SAMPLE! I was delighted. And unsurprised that my prediction was right.

The Kraftwerk tune was “The Robots, and the sing I remembered was “I Can’t Stand It by Twenty 4 Seven. Chris shuld be bitterly disappointed that he didn’t get it, but then he doesn’t read here anymore!

Speaking of which, it was Wayne’s 30th the other day. I sent him an email, but it looks as if he’s gone AWOL again.

Technorati Tags: kraftwerk, Music, northern life, twenty 4 seven, tyne tees, videotape

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I’d just like to wish both of my readers all the best for 2010, and that the next 364 days, 23 hours and 59 minutes brings you everything you wish for!

2010, for me, brings a new start. A new emphasis on life, perhaps. The beginning of the end of blogging, definitely. All of the blog posts pre 2008 have now been removed from the site. There have been many things happening over the past 9 years, which I have documented in great detail, and although they have been a good reference over the years, there’s no point keeping hold of the past, and there’s certainly no need to publish it for the world to see.

I no longer enjoy blogging. It’s a chore. I’ve not enjoyed it for a good while now. It’s fine when I have something to type about, like a day out, but when it involves some of the cack I’ve typed about in the past 6 months, it just seems altogether pointless, especially when I look at myself in the mirror and see myself growing older by the minute. Life, as Ronan Keating would say, is a rollercoaster. Maybe it’s time I started sharing the rollercoaster with just the people I care about.

Technorati Tags: 2010, happy new year, hny

JULY 2009

I’ll try to keep this short, and I’ll probably fail miserably. Following on from my earlier sunburn issues, I thought I’d make the situaltion worse by going back out in the sun and attending the Hartlepool dockfest, in order to get some photos. The photos were successfully obtained, but after waiting in a queue for at least an hour for what I thought was goingto be an action packed opening ceremony, it turned out to be the worst thing I’ve waited for in the whole history of anything ever. Infortunately, the damage was done, and I spent the rest of the two days walking around like an embarrased lobster. the fact I was wearing a bright white t-shirt never really helped matters.

Mid July was next, and I happened to be pointing the camera out of the window, to record the black clouds on the horizon, as shown in this photo, the first time it’s been shown.

OK, technically, those clouds aren’t on the horizon, neither were the clouds directly above my head. I was personally depressed about the fact that I hadn’t gone abroad this year. There were a few reasons behind this that couldn’t be changed, but I still felt that it was something to do with me, and spent a good few days moping about it. Obviously this was infinitely insignificant compred to what was about to happen.

Maybe there is such a thing such as fate? The day that we were “due” to go away (as in, the day that we’d gone away on the previous two years, and originally planned to this year), my dad suffered a heart attack. At this point, I went into “offline mode”, meaning that the rest of July was totally written off.

The Google car did visit Hartlepool too.

AUGUST 2009

Computer problems dominated August, with Beastbits constantly switching off. I thought I’d found the cause of the problem after inspecting the video card in Beastbits, and its broken fan. In this never-before-seen photo, you can see that the lead on the graphics card had became disconnected.

Actually, you can’t. That’s a really shit photo.

I didn’t do much in August. I was still off work for the first few weeks. I had only been back at work a few days, when we all learned about the sudden death of Stu, the security guard, of a heart attack. After what had happened in the weeks previous to that, it hit home. Hard.

On a lighter note, I met up with Chad the prolific troller who haunts this site with witty anecdotes (sarcasm), and long forgotten, often embarrasing memories of our childhood. Saying that, it was nice to see him after all of these years.

SEPTEMBER 2009

Quite literally, nothing happened in September. There were a few site issues, and a day trip to York. That really is it. There’s nothing in either the blog archive or my flickr account to show that anything happened at all.

OCTOBER

The occasional site problems continued into October, though the whole month appeared to be dominated by a hunk of metal and magnets. Yes, that was the month where that bloody Samsung hard drive arrived, and spent a good few days trying to get it working.

Photograph-wise, it was even more barren than September, with a mere 91 photos being uploaded to flickr, though one of these was part of my “bargain of the century”…

I went to a radio rally with Daddykins, and met one of my Flickr contacts, which was nice. I also got “knocked back” at Asda, and no matter how cheap their buns were, the humiliation meant I never returned there for over two months.

NOVEMBER

The flickr meet I attended at the Historic Quay was the highlight of the month, even though there were only a few photos that were actually any good. It was good to get the camera out for the first time since September and actually get some shots took. My computer problems officially ended when I gave Beastbits the right royal kicking it deserved, and it is now an ex-machine – its parts used to update and repair the scribcam.co.uk server.

The old video card from the server was a bit broken…

… well, it was after I’d finished with it. The new machine gave me my first glimpses of Windows 7, and… well, it’s not Vista, so that’s a plus point, I suppose.

DECEMBER

December has seen something we don’t usually se a lot of this time of year – snow. It also became the month where it occured to me, that I am officially old.

You are officially old, the second you look out of the window, see snow, and instead of jumping up and down like a kid, you slowly turn away from the window and think “If I go out in that, I’m going to break something”. Instead, I stayed in the confines of Mercuryvapour Towers, and took plenty of photos of it.

It takes a lot to get something hanging from a wheely bin to look insanely festive, but I think this manages it quite nicely…

Although at the time of typing, it’s actually Xmas Eve (thanks to the wonderment of scheduled posts, you’ll be seeing this a couple of days later), I doubt anything else is going to happen within that time, so this leaves me to wish both of my readers a very happy 2010, and I hope that it’s a much better year than what 2009 was.

Technorati Tags: new year, review

The sooner 2009 ends, the sooner I can get on with life, and start afresh…

JANUARY 2009

The first proper post saw me killing off the video blogs. They were unpopular and embarrassing. I took the first of a handful of walks throughout the year, and documented it with photos. Work continued to get me down, for reasons I can’t think of, and I survived the great Google outage. The first death of 2009 came in the form of my 4Gb memory stick, which succombed to a shorted out USB port…

FEBRUARY 2009

It snowed a little, more than once. JT moved onto the other rotation, and I started blethering on about creating backups using Clonezilla. Unfortunately, this was not going to be the last long-winded post about my computer experimentations. In fact, this seemed to be the whole theme of the year. Work started on building houses on the vacant land on Warren Road, despite it being heavily landscaped only a few years before, no doubt at great cost to the Hartlepudlian taxpayer.

Dick Brown, webmaster of www.dick-brown.com (the w’s stand for wankstain) received an insanely full bottle of orange squash.

MARCH 2009

An entirely forgettable month, if I’m honest. I worked overtime for only the second time in my life, and I went to Durham with Chris at some point, to give my camera its first test. I ended up misjudging a step and twatting my knee off the floor. The cooler on the sarnie machine also malfunctioned, casuing it to display “HEALTH CONTROL” on its VFD display.

APRIL 2009

April 1st consisted of vast amounts of kitchen cleaning. April 4th consisted of my Grand National faux pas, and mercuryvapour.co.uk once again moved servers.

A bird took residence in Mercuryvapour Towers, and it became apparent that nobody reads this blog anymore.

MAY 2009

Unperturbed about the bad news regarding the blog “statistics”, I still continued to write. On May 7th, Andy The Iridium Fan donated the second mercury lantern into my streetlighting collection, in the form of an unused Revo Prefect.

The biggest overhaul came towards the end of this particular month wne I took delivery of a new dartboard.

A lot of spare time was taken with this particular hobby from this moment on.

Dick Brown received some money from MS, on May 13th. I have no idea what for, but I was on-hand with cameraphone, to record the historic event…

JUNE 2009

So, everyone will be asking, where were you when he died? Yes, surely, the biggest, most famously untimely death of 2009, according to the mercuryvapour.co.uk super-statistic website generator, is…

Yes, sod Michael Jackson. This was the most untimely death for me anyway

Apart from death, June consisted of record breaking sunburn, after climbing Christchurch, and spending about an hour up there.

It really was crustier than it looked.

Unfortunately, it turned out that a sunburned scalp was to be the least of my worries, as July rearerd its ugly head… stay tuned for Part 2

Technorati Tags: 2009, life, review