We headed off for a single night camping trip on Saturday. Having bought a new tent we thought it would be a good idea to try it out before going further afield in the summer. So we decided to try and stay at West Runton again. Last time we tried to stay there, Emily was not well and we had to abandon. This time however she was fine and we actually stayed the whole night!

The weather was sunny and warm when we arrived and we pitched the tent without too many issues. We had already had a practice run out on the field here although that did involve a few grumpy discussions. Once pitched we got some chips from the van that was on-site and then settled in for the night. All was going well until about 3am when a massive storm arrived with a bang. It was the most active lightning storm I have seen for a long while and the rain was incredibly heavy. Both myself and Helen were woken up by it but Emily slept through it completely unaware!

The next morning we had arranged for Mum and Dad to visit and spend the morning with us. We started off with bacon rolls and then walked to the nearby beach for a spot of rock pool searching. It was a really nice morning and great to be at a place I enjoyed being when I was a child.

We are pleased with the tent and we are looking forward to the next trip already.

I have been down to see my Bees today and they are really busy. They have nearly filled the two supers on there with honey and I have added the third super today. Looks like I might get a nice honey crop this year after all the excitement.

I also stopped in to see John at Applebee and looked through some hives with him. One of the colonies had swarmed and the queen was actually on the underside of the mesh floor. There was quite a contingent of bees with her so we moved her into a 6 frame travelling box to get the colony started. There was also another swarm in a nearby tree which were in the process of finding their new home. It was really interesting to see the workers performing the waggle dance to indicate the location of possible homes.

The weather has been atrocious the last couple of weeks. This seems to have prompted the bees to try and start new colonies even when they have sufficient room and stores. Another good reason to regularly inspect the colonies to find out what they are up to.

I have upgraded my desktop and laptop to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. I am really impressed with it so far. The upgrade was quite smooth although it did require quite a few packages be downloaded. This took a while over my slow internet connection. How I crave that 20Mb/s link I had in Italy.

I'm not sure whether the start up speed has really improved that much but once in it definitely feels snappier. The new theme and Gnome tweakery has helped make it slicker too. It feels a lot more polished. I am wondering now whether linux Mint is actually the more elegant option....

As part of the upgrade I have also started looking at empathy again. I am using it for all my chat needs and it is performing well. We'll see how long I stick with it. I have also set up Gwibber to update my twitter status. This really eases twitter integration on the Ubuntu environment.

So my overall impression is "Upgrade away and enjoy!"

I went down to my friend Mike's yesterday and did some maintenance on my bike. I decided to grease the stands and gear linkage as the salt over the winter had made them a bit less smooth than they were. I started by working on the centre stand by using a grease gun to squeeze some grease into it's shaft bearings. I then stripped the kick stand down so that I could grease the spindle. The gear linkage has rubber gaiters on the joins so it had faired better over the winter but I still put some fresh grease into them and on the selector shaft.

While I was there I also gave the bike a good clean so she is nice and sparkly. Hopefully the weather will be nice for Monday when we plan to have a nice ride out.

Helen has very kindly bought me a shiny new graphics card and I now have my desktop machine working again. It's another Nvidia one so that I didn't have to worry about drivers etc when replacing the card.

After inserting the new card, the PC started up without any problems and Ubuntu just carried on as if nothing had happened. It is not a bad card for 59 quid.