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Friday, 29 December 2006 - Let Hogmanay Begin!

Hogmanay is a four-day New Year's festival with various events, commencing on December 29 every year (although the weather apparently has a history of messing it all up).		Tonight, it was the "Torchlight Procession" where we give a few pounds to charity and in exchange receive a torch (which is just bloody long candle).

We then march right through the middle of town along Princes Street as though we're off to burn a witch at the stake hehe. It's a very cool sight!

A little bit of entertainment along the way keeps us all, well, entertained.
And here's Edinburgh doing its bit for global warming hehe. We eventually arrive at Calton Hill and (slowly) head on up to the top for a bit pyrotechnic fun!
Grandma put in a good effort at the base of the hill behind the barriers here while the rest of the crowd walked up hehe.		On the path up the hill were several of these flaming tin cans on tall poles. Some idiot thought it would be fine to plop this one right under the leafy tree here in someone's back yard - nice one!
Up the hill was a bloody great fire (which was apparently a Viking ship before they torched it) and everybody standing around watching it with their 'torches' - some of which were starting to look more like burnt hotdogs and bananas.
Burn the witch!		I randomly ran into a few Kiwis I know from back home up there. This is Dave with his burnt-hotdog torch hehe.
Before long it started pissing with rain but we were all wowed and said "Oooo" and "Ahhh" over what was a pretty good fireworks display :)
		Nice!

Saturday, 30 December 2006 - Concorde!
When I was seven years old the Concorde came to Christchurch for a couple of days, so I (along with most of the city) went to check it out. That was the last time I saw it in the flesh, until today :) Scotland's National Museum of Flight is home to one of seven British Airways (now retired) Concordes; all but two of the twenty Concordes ever built are also now housed at museums in the UK, France, and the USA (one of the missing two was scrapped in 1994, and the other crashed in 2000 - more on that one later). The National Museum of Flight is in East Fortune Airfield and is a bit of a shit to get to without a car, involving a half-hour train ride to North Berwick (below), and a 25-minute bus ride from there. And it's a very interesting bus ride too incidentally - it's all narrow back-country roads, some of which aren't even sealed, and the driver seemed to misjudge every corner and slam on the brakes at the last second which really threw all the old ladies on the bus round hahaha!

At last some bloody sun! These were shot from the train on the outskirts of North Berwick.
North Berwick is a little seaside town 25 miles (40kms) east of Edinburgh with a population of around 7,000. Above right is looking over the mouth of the Firth of Forth towards the North Sea.
North Berwick has a golf course...		A few churches...
Something resembling a beach...		And quality streets.
The town centre. This is a one-way street, and I didn't manage to get a photo but some old duck (who should've had her driver's license revoked years ago) drove past twice within five minutes - in the wrong direction hahaha; pedestrians were trying to wave her down and everything!
Where's my bike when I need it?!		This big hill (or 'crag' as they're called here) would've had a great view over the town and the firth, but by the time I walked out to it I really couldn't be bothered climbing it.
So I took this panorama at the base of it instead :) This is looking north over the firth.

Scotland's National Museum of Flight has what you'd expect such a museum to have, but I was only interested in one thing here.		Incidentally, this is an Avro 698 Vulcan B.2A nuclear bomber, pictured with its mate, Mr Missile hehe. A quote on the information boards says, "A fearsome machine kept ready to drop the bomb" - lovely. Anyway, this wasn't what I was interested in.
It was this!
British Airways Concorde G-BOAA (aka Alpha Alpha). This is one of only 20 Concordes ever built between 1967 and 1979, and one of seven owned by British Airways. Alpha Alpha made its maiden flight on November 5th 1975, and was the first Concorde delivered to British Airways (hence it's name and registration code). The shot on the left is Alpha Alpha taking off from London Heathrow for the first ever commercial Concorde service to Bahrain in the Persian Gulf on January 21st 1976. Its final flight was from New York to London on August 12th 2000. The shot on the right is that final landing in Heathrow. All Concordes were grounded around this time pending safety modifications due the crash of Air France's Concorde F-BTSC on July 25th 2000 just outside Paris (more below). Alpha Alpha never received these modifications and was instead retired. In the time between the two shots above, it flew close to 22,769 hours. It now sits here in East Fortune Airfield.
This gives an idea of Concorde's cruising statistics. Concorde cruised at around 20,000 feet higher than conventional aircraft, and at those altitudes turbulence was rare, and the view from the windows clearly showed the curvature of the Earth. Needless to say, Concorde was also a shit load faster too, covering a mile about every three seconds! Concorde's cruising speed of Mach 2 (2,140km/h - twice the speed of sound) exceeded the top speed of the solar terminator meaning it was able to overtake or outrun the spin of the earth. On westbound flights it was possible to arrive at a local time earlier than the local departure time. On certain early evening transatlantic flights departing from Heathrow or Paris, it was possible to take-off just after sunset and catch up with the sun, landing in daylight; from the cockpit the sun could be seen rising from the horizon in the west - unreal! Concorde set a record flight time of 2 hours, 52 minutes and 59 seconds between New York and London.
Sleek belly, just like mine ;)		Alpha Alpha made a total of 8,064 landings, and no doubt went through a lot of these! This lot were looking due for replacement!
The power behind the machine! Concorde was fitted with four Rolls-Royce Olympus 593 Mk 610 afterburning turbojets, each providing over 38,000lbf (foot-pounds) of thrust with the afterburner (32,000lbf without). The Olympus jet was originally developed for the Avro Vulcan V Bomber I mentioned earlier. These are thirsty bastards too! Concorde can only hold a maximum of 90 tonnes of fuel, of which 12 tonnes is consumed during take-off and ascent. Because of this, Concorde has a maximum flying range of only 7,250kms. The jets sit behind the large open flaps visible here. These adjustable flaps are required to slow the air entering the engines at supersonic speeds and (when fully extended to close the inlet) to deflect air downwards past the engines should they fail, thus gaining lift and minimising the drag effect of the failed engine (which causes havoc for conventional airliners during engine failure). In tests, Concorde was able to shut down both engines on the same side of the aircraft at Mach 2 (twice the speed of sound) without any control problems.
You could toast a few marshmallows with these!		No shit.
Concorde has delta wings that provide numerous advantages over conventional aircraft wings for supersonic flight. However, delta wings require a much greater angle of attack on landing (as can be seen in the shot on the right). This is one reason Concorde has the droop-nose it is so well-known for. This feature allows the pilots much greater visibility of the runway for landing.

Concorde could seat 100 passengers. The windows are considerably smaller than those of conventional airliners. Research showed that at the extremely high altitude that Concorde flew, a larger window, if broken, could have led to the passengers and crew passing out before the aircraft could be brought down to a safe altitude. Standard oxygen masks would not have helped. The windows were therefore made smaller so that the compressors could maintain sufficient cabin pressure during the descent.				The incredible air friction on the fuselage at Mach 2 would heat the external skin at the front of the aircraft to approximately 120 °C, making the windows warm to the touch and producing a noticeable temperature gradient along the length of the cabin, resulting in Concorde expanding in length by up to thirty centimetres during flight!

On July 25th 2000, Air France's Concorde F-BTSC crashed into a hotel after take-off from Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, killing all 100 passengers and nine crew aboard, and four people on the ground. Details of the crash can be found here, but in a nutshell: After reaching take-off speed, a tyre was cut by a metal strip lying on the runway, which came from a plane that had taken off from the runway several minutes before (this strip was installed in violation of the manufacturer's rules!). The fuel tank above the landing gear failed from the inside out, possibly by a hydrodynamic pressure surge, after a large chunk of tyre struck the underside of the aircraft's wing at over 300 km/h. Leaking fuel was ignited and engine two failed. The crew continued the take-off but they could not gain enough airspeed on the three remaining engines because the undercarriage could not be retracted. The aircraft was unable to climb or accelerate, and eventually engine one failed too meaning all the thrust was coming from the right-hand side. Due to this asymmetric thrust, the right-hand wing lifted, banking the aircraft to over 100 degrees. The crew reduced the power on engines three and four in an attempt to level the aircraft but with falling airspeed they lost control, and that was the end of that. The accident led to the grounding of Concorde and modifications being made, including more secure electrical controls, Kevlar lining to the fuel tanks, and specially developed burst-resistant tyres. The first passenger flight after the grounding took place just over a year later on September 11, 2001, and was in the air during the attacks on the World Trade Center. 18 months later, British Airways and Air France both announced that they would retire Concorde later that year due to low passenger numbers following the F-BTSC crash, the slump in air travel following 9/11, and rising maintenance costs.

Sunday, 31 December 2006 - Another one comes and goes...
2006 was an extremely busy and eventful year for me. I know that's probably a common thing to say, but it was more full-on than any other year I can think of. I spent last New Year's at home-sweet-home, and upon my return to Brisbane was put straight into a pretty challenging and pivotal client project (Tarong) at work. The scope of that project was such that the six months I was on it pretty much set me up experience-wise and was a great stepping stone to get me my current job here. For the following couple of months (my last in Brisbane) I was utilised to pick up some of the pieces of an even more pivotal project that had gone over schedule and over budget. While I had all that going on at work, I also had a Microsoft certification I was doing in my own time which took up a few hours most every night, and even then it took me about nine months to complete the damn thing (started in 2005) as opposed to the 12 to 18 months I was told it normally takes.

Then came my big relocation here to the United Kingdom in August. Spending a total of 24 hours on a plane over the course of 36 hours (including the 13-hour flight between Hong Kong and London) was a rather new experience. The UK in itself was an entirely new experience as Mo showed me around Edinburgh and I showed myself around London, but then the 35 days travelling western Europe absolutely blew me away! To be seeing and experiencing all of these new things and places that I had heard and read so much about and only seen in photos and movies was incredible to say the least. As expected I arrived back in the UK wanting desperately to do it all over again! But instead I had to get back into the real world.

The following couple of months were spent job-hunting, flat-hunting, and acclimatising to this bloody miserable shitty weather. The job-hunting thankfully proved to be much easier than expected (especially after the nightmare of a time I had in Brisbane finding work) - in less than a month I had secured my current role. Like I said before, those two big projects I did for Mincom proved to be a great stepping stone, as did the Microsoft certification. With that sorted I started flat hunting more seriously, and geez what an eye-opener that was! Some of the places I looked at were more like a tip, and other places had people living in them who I'm sure were on crack or something equally potent at the time. There were some really nice places around if I was willing to pay a lot of coin for them, but I wasn't, so yeah. In the end, one of Mo's flatmates moved out so I ‘moved in' (which involved moving my shit from the spare room where I had been staying into the room next door - brilliant! :)

In late November I started work, and while one might expect that to be a rather busy time, it really hasn't been, at all! My first two days involved being sent down south for an induction (which is hardly what you'd call work), and for the rest of the week I was ‘working from home'. Then I was in London for a week on a training course which was more like a refresher course for me on stuff I'd done in Brisbane. The first two days of the following week I was in Prague, and spent the rest of that week ‘working from home'. I then spent three days in Glasgow on a client site (which was work), ‘worked' the rest of that week from home, and now it's Christmas break hahaha! I still got paid a month's wage for that though, but when I go back again next week it will be all heads down and tails up again (well I assume so anyway).

So that was my 2006 in a nutshell - pretty bloody exciting year I felt. Happy New Year everyone, I'm off the street party! :)

Monday, 1 January 2007 - Happy New Year!
Well shit. Yesterday I finished off my rant above with “I'm off to the Street Party!” As it turned out I should've said “I'm off to the Street Party, or at least I would be, if the bastard was still on!” Three years ago the Hogmanay street party was called off at the last minute due to bad weather, and this year it was the same story. We all suspected as much because for the last few days the weather forecast for last night was gale-force winds. However, for most of the day yesterday the weather was alright - it wasn't until early evening (after I'd written my spiel above) that the heavens opened up in a big way, and so too did the bloody wind. The Street Party wasn't to start until 10pm, and I was at a mate's house with about 30 other randoms for most of the day - all of us trying to find out whether the party was still happening. Eventually the official word came through. Apparently the wind blew over a portaloo and it landed on some chick (hehe), and a security guard got taken out by a tarpualin that had come loose, so the powers that be figured they'd best call it off. I've been told the Hogmanay Street Party is one of those things everyone should go to at least once, so I was really geared up for it! Oh well, I'll try again next year.

With our plans all buggered up we hit a couple bars and were there for midnight (and celebrated with some stiff Scottish whiskey - whoa!). The wind was absolutely incredible! At the party all the lights were flickering, and when we headed into town the street lights were doing the same thing. Around town were several road signs and a moped that had all been blown around the place. On the way to a bar just before midnight I heard an almighty crash directly across the road and looked over to see the glass from this phone booth door showering right across the road. The wind had hurled the door open so fast that when it had opened as far as it could the glass carried on going! The shot on the right is one of the stages being dismantled in Princes Street Gardens under the castle. It was a waste of time putting that up!

Anyway, here are a couple things I thought were relevant: new words from 2006, and you know you grew up in the 80s or early 90s if...

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