Jonathan Jamieson

This post was either going to be the above title or “tick”. I decided not to go for tick because the accompanying photo would not have looked so nice (I got my first tick of the summer while running).

I’ve been enjoying my holidays. Plenty of time to get stuff done. My major project is now finished (I think!). I’ve got a few small things planned but I have quite a few things to finish off so we’ll just have to see.

I’m back in Glasgow for a while now but the past month I went on my unicycle a lot to Mabie forest. Nice to get back into off road unicycling rather than mountain biking all the time. A unicyclist from around Newcastle (Joe) came up one Sunday and we had a long ride that day. Also speaking to some people about going to a skatepark in Glasgow for some riding there. I was out on a run one day when I spotted someone sitting down with a wheel that looked suspiciously like a trials unicycle wheel and I was right! Eagle eyes and coincidence came together there.

The website is getting stuff added to it slowly, it’s surprising just how much stuff needs done to get it looking good. There are still quite a few blank sections that need tackling.

And to explain the photo, I was building (a lot of) Ikea furniture for a friend. I was building the penultimate item and my eyes drifted to the huge pile of cardboard in the corner. I’ve now fulfilled my childhood ambition of building a cardboard fort!

I’ve been meaning to add a new entry and update this website for about a month but there is always something I want to write about that I either don’t have all the content for or photos. Well this is a teaser post with more stuff to come. Holidays give me plenty of time to do whatever so I’m trying to make the most of it!

So here is the teaser. It’s drawn by my friend Sarah who is currently in India. Without further ado…

On Dom's Shoulders

Some good timing, my exams finished and the temperature rocketed! On Saturday I went to Glasgow Green with friends. I’ve never seen that place so busy (except for fireworks of course!)

With exams over I can also work on stuff to my hearts content without feeling guilty about not revising.

I’ve started on Hector – a Hexapod. His current status is that he can walk forwards very slowly but unfortunately his legs keep dropping off and I am struggling to glue them on.

Wordpress is excellent. No denying that but it’s always the minor niggles that really irritate. For me it was the fact the WYSIWYG editor stripped out my line breaks (new line). This is every, very irritating. Now I can do HTML coding, I  would prefer to layout my posts the easy way. Today I found “TinyMCE Advanced” which fixes that problem and I am very grateful. It also comes with some other nice features.

Like quoting! So I can quote!

Thursday 20th is my final exam, Materials. It hasn’t been so interesting to revise for so I am getting a bit bored of it. Heat and Flow, now that fun to revise! Gerald may get some improved vision. I will also start planning my summer projects.

On the website front things need a good deal of tidying and there are still blank pages. Today I messed around with the list of pages in the right-hand sidebar. I got rid of the bullet points. I think it looks better now.

Something I’ve been working on the past few days – Hypnodisc. It’s not finished but is working nicely nonetheless. The finished page will be here eventually. I got the idea from here.

Loganlea Reservoir is in the background

No, really. A popular facebook group just now is “Students – working 12 hours a day, 7 days a week for 2 weeks a year”. Now my revision is not quite as intense as this and I start revising well in advance. With no classes and no travelling into classes there seems to a bit of free time (no point over-working, right?!).

What have I been doing? Some running (great for visiting people unannounced), frisbee at Glasgow Green, making some birthday presents and hill walking. On Monday I went to Pentland Peaks (near Edinburgh) for the first time with two friends. We started at Flotterstone and intended to do this route but this is not quite the route we followed. The printable version of the page had a map even worse than the one on that page. We called it our “postage stamp map”. We overshot the turning back distance by some considerable distance so it was quite a long walk, at least 6.5 hours at around 3mph.

Lovely place to walk at, the first section of the walk was the rambling equivalent of a rollercoaster. The path just went up and down for ages. The weather held out and I even managed to get sunburn but I’m not quite sure how!

I’ve now discovered the rather excellent Multimap which gives you access to OS Maps for free. Here is a link to Ranger’s Office at Flotterstone.

SECTION TO FINISH:

Today I bought something that has tempted me for a while, a Bluetooth GPS Receiver. It works with my PDA. Setting up. Model. NoniGPS.

two posts in one day! The default smileys in wordpress are awful but I finally got round to changing them. That mean’s I’ll have to use them all the time.  Apologies if I overuse them and make you

EDIT: first pack I tried didn’t have transparencies correctly set. The set I am currently using work but I don’t like them much so they will go soon. If you are reading this the chances are they have already gone but to honour their short time on this blog I’ll here is one ->

Most of the guys on our raft were on a stag-do

Yesterday was a long day. I was out for about 14 hours. Great trip though and I’ve just finished my little page about it. I don’t think the awesomeness of it was quite conveyed though!

Photo Courtesy of James

This post is dedicated to Megan who reminded me I hadn’t added a new entry to my “blog” for a while. I respectfully dispute that this is even a blog but anyway, this one is for you Megan.

The first thing I should say is that this should have been more interesting than it is. On Wednesday evening – the last night I was in Dumfries – I went unicycling in Mabie. My mum and dad were with me and the plan was for my dad to follow me down the White Route on his bike wearing the helmet camera. Near the bottom the camera bleeped and turned off. Low battery. No problem I thought, we’ll just change the battery. Unfortunately my dad left the battery in the car. It turns out the footage we did get wasn’t so good as dad struggled to stay at the same speed as me. It’s hard to focus on getting a good picture and not fall off! So it looks like we’ll be going back and trying that again. The White Route is quite challenging, covered in loose rocks and some small drop-offs.

Tonight I will be adding placeholders for new content on the website so I know what has still to be done. Exams will start soon so work will still be slow but come the summer holidays things should speed up a bit.

In other news I picked up a Radline Fang R/C car at a car boot sale for £4 and I’ve been playing with that. Inside it’s plenty fast enough but it could do with some mods and upgrades for outdoors. Still a good little buy at that price. It’s easy to carry around it’s so small.

Marathon training continued in the Easter Holidays. The photo above was taken by James at one of my many times I used his house as a water stop. The editing is not quite there yet, he needs some practice but the general idea is sound.

Tomorrow promises to be a good day as I am visiting Cruachan Power station with the imeche. The early start (I’ll be getting up about 6:10am) is not welcome but the rest of the day should be good! I’ll post some photos of it.

I felt like posting my favourite cartoon clip ever. I must have watched this over 20 times and I *still* laugh out loud!

Easter break time. Plenty of revision to do but I should find some time do go out cycling. The cycling page on this website should finally get some pictures on it

Also have an R/C Helicopter from Christmas to play with.