Posted by Eddie & filed under Travel, October 9 2009.

On top of the Empire State Building

A week ago Lesley and I were in New York for a 6-day holiday. We did all the usual tourist things, like visiting the Empire State Building (sensational views from the observatory at the top on a perfectly clear early morning), and we did lots of other things like walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, visit Grand Central station, take a ferry past the Statue of Liberty to Staten Island, walk in Central Park, shop in Macy’s and Tiffany’s and have a wander around Times Square.

Posted by Eddie & filed under Military/Aircraft, Mountains & hills, Science, September 24 2009.

An Garbh Choire and snowpatches in Garbh Choire M�r

Last Sunday I spent the day in the Cairngorms (again). I walked from Loch Morlich, past Rothiemurchus Lodge (where I spent a week on a school trip in 1983), and into the Lairig Ghru pass. From the Lairig Ghru I climbed up to Coire Ruadh to the east of Braeriach to look for wreckage from a RAF Bristol Blenheim bomber that crashed here in 1945. I saw a lot of this wreckage on a trip to Coire Ruadh in August (see my previous blog posting ‘Yet another soggy night in the Cairngorms and yet more aircraft wrecks‘), but the debris is so extensive that a second visit was required to find it all. You can see new photos from this second trip on my website here. The view from this location down to the southern parts of the Lairig Ghru pass, and towards the western slopes of Ben Macdui are absolutely stunning, it’s a truly remote and wild area with high summits and glaciated corries.

Posted by Eddie & filed under Mountains & hills, September 15 2009.

I’ve written before about ‘Munro-bagging’ and how little sense it makes to obsess about the heights of mountains (see my previous blog postings ‘I�m not a Munro-bagger, honest‘ and ‘What is the largest mountain in the world?‘). Now a Munro summit (Sgurr nan Ceannaichean, near Glen Carron in the North-West Highlands) has been remeasured using GPS equipment, and it has been decided that the list of Munros is to be reduced by one, from 284 to 283. See a BBC news article about this here.

Posted by Eddie & filed under Military/Aircraft, Mountains & hills, September 2 2009.

The Great Corrie of Lochnagar

Last weekend I walked to the summit of Lochnagar from Glen Muick. This is a popular route and the mountain was quite busy with walkers (the Glen Muick car park is a nightmare on a Sunday afternoon). The weather wasn’t great, with strong cold winds on the summit and rain later in the afternoon. August in the Scottish hills this year has been very poor in terms of weather. I did get a great view of the cliffs in the Corrie of Lochnagar however (photo here).

Posted by Eddie & filed under Mountains & hills, Science, August 24 2009.

Snowpatch on Ben Macdui

Last Saturday there was a gap in this month’s seemingly endless rain and I travelled to the Cairngorms where I had a good day walking on the Cairn Gorm – Ben Macdui plateau. I managed to get a good view of all the usual areas where perennial snowpatches lie (see this page on my website about this topic).

Posted by Eddie & filed under Military/Aircraft, Mountains & hills, August 14 2009.

Blenheim engine near the summit of Braeriach

Last Sunday I travelled to the Cairngorms for a walk to Braeriach. I walked from Whitewell in the Rothiemurchus Forest through the Lairig Ghru. I stopped near the entrance to the Lairig Ghru at a memorial to Angus Sinclair who died in the Cairngorms in 1954 and who was the CO of the Edinburgh OTC at the time (see a photo of the memorial here and of the plaque inscription here). There used to be a mountain hut near this memorial named after this man, which I visited in April 1990 as part of an Edinburgh OTC group, not long before the hut was demolished. It used be positioned above the river on a small flat area at OS 10-figure grid ref. NH 95869 03637.

Posted by Eddie & filed under Military/Aircraft, Mountains & hills, July 21 2009.

Wellington remains near Bynack More

Last week I travelled to the Cairngorms and walked into the mountains through the pass of Ryvoan, camping on flat boggy moorland near the summit of Bynack More. The weather was not ideal, with lots of rain and thunderstorms so it was a pretty wet night (although I stayed dry in my new Terra Nova Laser Competition tent).

Posted by Eddie & filed under Military/Aircraft, Mountains & hills, July 15 2009.

Wellington remains near Ben Alder

Last week I cycled into the Ben Alder area via Dalwhinnie and Loch Ericht, camping overnight near Culra Bothy. The next day I walked up to the Bealach Dubh between Ben Alder and Geal-ch�rn where there is some wreckage from a Vickers Wellington bomber that crashed in 1942. I first saw this wreckage on a long walk from Dalwhinnie to Fort William in 2000, and was the first time I’d seen wreckage from a crashed aircraft in the Scottish mountains.

Posted by Eddie & filed under IT & the Internet, Software engineering, July 6 2009.

For many years I have developed websites the old-fashioned way. I have used the MicroEMACS text editor and Unix/Linux command line tools to create HTML/Javascript and Perl/PHP CGI files entirely from scratch, and installed and configured MySQL databases and Apache webservers the same way.

Posted by Eddie & filed under Travel, July 3 2009.

Last week Lesley and I went on holiday to Andalucia in Spain. We rented attico rooms in a villa in the mountains north of M�laga, near Lake Vi�uela. The location of the villa was fantastic, perched on a ridge with amazing views of the surrounding mountains (particularly 2066m La Maroma). We spent most of the time relaxing, swimming in the pool, sunbathing, and eating and drinking outside under the stars.

New York

The Lairig Ghru and An Garbh Choire

Munro nonsense

Lochnagar and the wreck of a post-war naval trainer aircraft

Summer snowfields in the Cairngorms (2)

Yet another soggy night in the Cairngorms and yet more aircraft wrecks

A night in the soggy Cairngorms and another Wellington bomber wreck

Geal-ch�rn and the wreck of a Wellington bomber

Bigger and better websites – the early years of bitter struggle (cf. Robert Crumb)

Andalucia, Spain

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