Anyway, I’ve only just started playing around with the camera and getting used to the layout and all of it’s features. Most of the features that I used regularly are the same as my 12 year old Olympus 2020ZOOM which I’ve been using for the last couple of years. The main differences are the fact that this camera has many more features (which I intend to start using, of course!) and it obviously takes pictures of much better resolution and quality.

I’ve only taken around 150 shots with the camera in total so far, but here are a few of the better ones…

Cake!

The above photo was taken at a focal length of 280mm (full-frame equiv. would, of course, be 420mm) with the lens itself on Macro mode (not entirely sure what that does yet. I know what it does on the camera, but not the lens!). The aperture was F/5.6, shutter speed 1/125s, ISO 200.

Cambridge Science Park

This one was shot at 30mm focal length, F/4.5 with shutter speed of 1/1250s. You may notice that this photo is a High Dynamic Range (HDR) photo (i.e. has deeper, richer colours and more detail in the shadows and highlights). I actually took 3 photos for this – a “normal” photo, a dark photo at -2 EV (exposure compensation) and a light photo at +2 EV. I then used Photomatix Pro from HDRsoft to combine the images into what you see here.

Orion’s Belt

On the evening this was taken, at around 21:30, I went outside to attempt to photograph the moon. Well… i couldn’t actually find the moon in the perfectly clear night sky, so I gave up and zoomed in as far as I could to the star in the middle of Orion’s belt. According to Wikipedia, this star is 1340 light years away and is known as “Alnilam” or “Epsilon Orionis“.

Anyway, the above photo was taken at 300mm, F/5.6 and shutter speed of 1/1.3s. Again, i used ISO 200.

The Moon

Later on in the same evening, the Moon finally appeared above the roof of one of the surrounding houses, so here it is!

The moon was taken at 300mm, F/6.3 with shutter speed of 1/400s and ISO 200 again (I’ve not played around with the ISO yet). You may also realise that even at 300mm (450mm equiv.) the moon will not fill the frame. This photo is cropped as tighly as I’d like, so most of the outside of the photo has actually been removed, leaving just the tiny moon in the middle, which now, of course, fills most of the photo.

So, there we go! That’s the best of the phots I’ve taken so far! I hope you like them! Do feel free to leave a comment on the blog page, if you like!

More of the Nikon D5000 DSLR Initial Test Shots

No related posts.

As mentioned in my review of Modern Warfare 2 on the Xbox 360, I did intend to do a review of Forza Motorsport 3, but several other games have taken me away from actually finishing Forza, so that’s not done yet unfortunately. I’m sure I will do that review at some point though (hopefully!).

Anyway, on to the topics at hand…

I have been busy over the last 2 weeks redesigning my personal web site from scratch and attempting to consolidate various other personal sites of mine into the same, central site. On this topic, here is a big notice to anyone still getting their RSS Feed from the old URL:

PLEASE UPDATE YOUR RSS READER TO POINT AT THE NEW URL!

If you are accessing http://blog.mongeese.co.uk/feed/ please change the URL to http://www.mongeese.co.uk/feed/ – the old URL will STOP WORKING in a few weeks/months.

Also, if you are kind enough to link directly to my blog using the URL http://blog.mongeese.co.uk/ please change the link to point at http://www.mongeese.co.uk/ – as with the RSS feed, the old URL will STOP WORKING in a few weeks/months.

“Why did you go to all this effort?”, I hear you ask. Before the consolidation of my personal sites into Mongeese.co.uk I had my personal site (for photos, guestbook, downloads, wishlist etc…), a separate site for my blog and another separate site for my videos. There were also other things that weren’t online anywhere and perhaps should have been. For example, from the old site, you would not have been able to find me on Facebook or LinkedIn, you wouldn’t have been able to follow me on Twitter, and you would have no idea that I even had an Xbox let alone what my Gamertag was!

The other thing is that the Photo gallery was completely protected by a username/password. The reason for this, which is still valid, is that I dont like uploading photos of my friends and family for the world to see, as they might object to having their photo put up on the Internet! These albums are still protected, but the albums which do not require protection (and there are a lot of them) and now online for all to see!

So, now, on Mongeese.co.uk you will find everything! Photos, Videos, Blog, Xbox stuff, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn links, Motorcycle stuff, downloads and my wishlist!

I’m sure this site will be added to as time goes on, but I think there’s enough on here to announce it to the world now!

So… go browse and enjoy!

Related posts:

1. Fallout 3 (again), my Xbox's blog and the cracked piston…
2. NXE and my addiction to gaming!

NOTE: If you can’t see the video above, click here

So… this is arguably the most anticipated game “of the decade” according to some. For me it was perhaps the most anticipated game of the year, with Forza Motorsport 3 following closely in second place.

I plan on reviewing Forza Motorsport 3 at some point as well, by the way, but I want to make a Forza 3 video first. The making of this video is currently unfortunately hindered by a bug in the ffmpeg video encoding utility, which I’m hoping will be fixed at some point soon!

Anyway, back to Modern Warfare 2…

The game plays out a fictional war between Russia and the United States and is a direct follow-on from the “Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare” game. Take a look at Wikipedia for the full plot.

I should also mention, at this point, that the game contains a somewhat controversial scene (which players can decide to skip at the start of the game) in which Russian terrorists open fire in a Russian airport before shooting the under-cover American operative to make it look like American terrorists had opened fire, thereby causing a war to break out between Russia and the US. This has, not surprisingly, caused the game to be banned in Russia, despite the idea seeming to be making the Russian terrorists look like the bad guys, as opposed to the country of Russia itself. Lots of information can be found about this on the web, of course, if you wish to know more!

Now some actual gameplay (WARNING: This clip also contains violence!)…

NOTE: If you can’t see the video above, click here

As you can see, the storyline is relatively gruesome, as are the graphics, but as a game from the “first person shooter” genre, I think it’s pretty amazing! As a nice bedtime story, it’s obviously awful.

There are many things I like about this game, and a few I dislike. I like the graphics, the suspense, the feeling of panic that often sets in (within the realm of computer gaming, anyway!) and the overall realism. This game still obviously contains computer-generated graphics, but they look more realistic than any game I’ve seen in life so far. Much more movie-like than previous games, especially in 1080p.

I also like the multiplayer side of the game – it’s highly addictive. Each time you shoot one of the enemy, you gain “XP” points. As you gain XP, you level up and gain access to better weapons, skills, titles and ranks. There is obviously a need to keep playing because the more you play, the better you get, the bigger your weapons become and the more you can beat your opponent!

I dislike, however, how short the single-player campaign is – it took me 6-7 hours on my first play through and given that Half Life 2 kept me interested for 40 hours, and Fallout 3 for 75 hours, 6-7 hours is kinda short. I’m not expecting Fallout 3-type time scales with a game like Modern Warfare 2, but I still felt it was a little short for my liking.

One thing I have just begun to attempt is the single-player campaign again, but this time on “Veteran” difficulty instead of “Recruit”. This will almost certainly take a lot longer, but will also be much more difficult. I am about 30 minutes in so far and have already “died” 15 times or so. We’ll see how that goes over the coming weeks.

There is one area I’m undecided about – “Special Ops”. For some reason, I’m finding the Special Ops much harder than the single-player campaign. It’s not that they are not as enjoyable, they certainly are, but they do seem more difficult. This wouldn’t be a problem if it weren’t for the fact that they seem to be so much more difficult, that I’m struggling to achieve anything in any of them whatsoever! I’m sure I will improve though, as time goes on, especially with all the multiplayer time I’m putting in!

Overall, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is arguably my favourite game of the year, and possibly of the last 2-3 years. Perhaps it’s tied at the top spot with Forza Motorsport 3. I need to let the initial excitement wear off first, wait 6 months and see which of the two I’m still playing. Then I can decide which one is my favourite!

Well, that is just about everything I can think of saying about Modern Warfare 2, so I think I’ll end it there!

Related posts:

1. Web site consolidation – UPDATE YOUR RSS READERS!
2. Broken Xbox, fixed Xbox and "Dead Space"!
3. Fallout 3, piston rings and the ruined sleeve nut!

The first event since the AJS & Matchless Owners Club Annual Jampot Rally was the Histon British Legion Bike Show. The day began with a few Fenrunners meeting up in Tesco’s car park for a scenic country ride, ending at the British Legion Club. Other than a really bad sore throat (which became much worse by the time I got home!), the day was great!

Photos of British Legion Bike Show, Histon

Haddenham Steam Rally

Our fourth camping experience was at Haddenham Steam Rally (a rally which my Grandad used to visit with the Matchless regularly). This was another enjoyable and relaxing steam rally!

Photos of Haddenham Steam Rally 2009

Videos of Haddenham Steam Rally 2009

Bedfordshire Steam Rally

This was the largest steam rally I have ever been to, by quite a margin. There were roughly 150 steam engines present on the Sunday, I believe, including almost every single crane engine in the UK!

We didn’t take the Matchless to this one, unfortunately, because I didn’t find out about the rally until it was too late to book in, so we turned up as paying visitors (although camping for 3 days as well). It’s not the cheapest rally in the world (weekend camping tickets being £70 per pitch), but it was money well spent in my opinion. Needless to say, I will try and get the bike booked in for next year though, to save paying and to exhibit it to the world, of course!

Other than the sheer size of the rally, the other reasons it’s worth paying £70 for a weekend camping ticket is that you gain free entry to The Shuttleworth Collection, Birds of Prey Centre and Swiss Garden, all of which are excellent. Well… the swiss garden is actually really quite dull, but then I’m not into plants/green things anyway.

The planes, on the other hand, are great, and if the weather’s nice, a lot of them are regularly flying throughout the weekend!

Photos of Bedfordshire Steam Rally 2009

Videos of Bedfordshire Steam Rally 2009

Kettering Vintage Steam Fayre

Our final camping expedition of the year was at the Kettering Steam Rally at Cranford. The weather was wonderful during the day, but freezing cold at night. We bought a chimenea for use at this, and other, rallies and it was great at (a) keeping us warm at night, and (b) cooking a full-english breakfast each morning!

Photos of Kettering Vintage Steam Rally 2009, Cranford

Videos of Kettering Vintage Steam Rally 2009, Cranford

Great Chesterford Steam-Up

The Great Chesterford Steam-Up is a one-day event at the beginning of October, and it’s another great day, completely free of charge, to relax with the bike and see other old vehicles and chat to lots of people.

Photos of Great Chesterford Steam-Up 2009

Remembrance Sunday at Imperial War Museum, Duxford

Possibly the last place I will be riding the Matchless to with others this year; Imperial War Museum, Duxford. You get get in free-of-charge at Duxford on a few days each year, one of them being Remembrance Sunday. The main reason for opening up for free, of course, is to allow people in to remember the fallen over the years by having a large ceremony and site-wide 2 minute’s silence.

Photos of Imperial War Museum, Duxford

Related posts:

1. An enjoyable pair of weekends!
2. Not such a great weekend, but still enjoyable!
3. Cambridgeshire Steam Rally, Thurlow Steam Rally, "Gigantic" and my new phone!

I have to say, it was amazing! Admittedly, this was, apparently, the best Jampot Rally yet, in terms of facilities, catering, camp site size etc… so it did have everything going for it, but I think Sarah and I would have loved it anyway! Thank you very much, Heart of England section, for organising this year’s rally!

This year’s rally was held very close to home, at Kimbolton Castle. There were 3 main bike runs, with 2 green-laning trips for those who wanted something a little different.

Friday’s run took participants from Kimbolton to Jampot Spares Limited (JSL)/Kettering Classic Motorcycles. Sarah and I have been there many times, as we live locally, so decided to relax at the camp site during this run. Lots of people were still arriving when this run took place, and it was good to see the camp site gradually fill up as Friday afternoon/evening progressed.

The Saturday run (seen assembling above) took us to Oundle. Over 160 bikes took part, by my count, and a couple of hours spent in Oundle were certainly enjoyed!

We all arrived at the wrong car park when we got there because, despite the excellent Marshalling of the run, the school who were kind enough to open up the gates for our arrival, opened them a day early, then closed them on the day we needed them! This was a very minor issue, however, and caused little more than 5 minutes confusion!

We left Oundle at around 2pm to ride back to the camp site, where I had a long wander round looking at the bikes and saying “Hello” to people I knew, and later that evening most of the Fenrunners section had fish and chips next to our tents.

I should also point out that on Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings and Saturday, Sunday and Monday mornings, Kimbolton School caterers prepared excellent meals for us all, which were truly good value for money and not like stereotypical “school dinners” at all!

The Sunday run took us through a nice country route, involving a ford(!), to The Shuttleworth Collection at Old Warden. 260 bikes took part on Sunday, which was a truly spectacular collection of classic and vintage machinery!

The Shuttleworth Collection itself  was also fantastic. A truly unique collection of some of the earliest aircraft ever made, right up to World War 2. I may be mistaken, but I believe they are all in flying condition too, which is even more amazing!

The Shuttleworth Collection also has a Swiss Garden and Birds of Prey centre, although I didn’t visit those while I was there. I’ll hopefully be back there in a couple of weeks anyway, at the Bedfordshire Steam & Country Fayre, so perhaps I’ll visit them then!

When we got back to the camp site, some of the Fenrunners got together for a photograph (seen above) and then booked a team into the Tug-of-War at 4pm!

Sadly, we lost.

After the Tug-of-War, however, was a guided tour of Kimbolton Castle.

The tour lasted about 2 hours and was very interesting indeed. I can highly recommend it to anyone, if you are in the area and able to find out when the tours are occurring.

That evening was the last one of the rally and we spent a short while in the bar/disco area watching the presentations for best bike, furthest distance travelled etc… and then awaited the raffle! We didn’t wait until the raffle happened in the end, but did learn the day after that Sarah and I won a bottle of wine, which was a pleasant surprise.

The following morning, we ate breakfast, packed up the car, put the bike back on the trailer, helped clear up the rally site for a few hours and headed home thoroughly worn out and wishing the rally hadn’t ended!

A 10 minute video of the Saturday and Sunday bike runs can be seen below for those of you who are interested.

There are also more photos of the event here:

Photos of the AMOC Jampot Rally 2009

Related posts:

1. Cambridgeshire Steam Rally, Thurlow Steam Rally, "Gigantic" and my new phone!
2. An enjoyable pair of weekends!
3. Quite a good weekend, all in all…

I’ll start this post by saying, in order to do the iPhone justice, all screenshots will be shown in this post full-size! I could shrink them to save some screen space, but screen space costs nothing, so why not?

The phone screen is probably a little smaller than the size of the screenshots you are seeing on your screen, but nevertheless, they do show the quality of the various apps!

So, first of all, above is the desktop of my iPhone right now. The only non-standard iPhone applications are Google and “UK – Ireland”, one of which which I’ll come to later.

Just so you know at this stage, the main reasons for writing this post are (a) I think such a revolutionary device deserves to be written about and (b) to tell you about some of my favourite apps in case you have an iPhone and want to hear about potentially cool and useful apps!

So… onto my favourite features & apps!

Above you can see the iPod feature. I have spent a great deal of time copying every single CD I own onto my computer, then into the iTunes software and then onto my iPhone, including information for each song such as Artist, Album, Title, Genre, Year and album art! Right now, I have just over 2,500 songs on the iPhone and yes – I do try to listen to them all as time goes on! The main advantage of having so much music at your disposal is that you never know what’s coming next!

The nice feature of the iPod app on the iPhone (and any iPod with a screen, I understand), which admittedly I don’t use a great deal, is the way of flicking the album collection from left to right to find the album you want. I generally use the voice activation instead of this as it works kinda well and is much quicker than scrolling through over 200 albums!

Anyway, it’s a nice feature and, for those who don’t know about it, worth pointing out!

The next feature, as you can see above, that’s worth a mention is the Youtube application. This is built into the iPhone, and with an unlimited data download limit it works amazingly well!

The phone must be tilted horizontally to view the videos, as the aspect ratio suits better that way, and it seems to download a suitable size/quality of video depending on the quality of your Internet link at the time.

At work, for example, on the WiFi, it shows good quality full-screen videos. Elsewhere, however, where 3G is the only connection method available, it shows slightly worse quality and slightly smaller videos. This is a good feature though – I’d rather see a video after 30 seconds or less and put up with low quality than wait 5 minutes for a high quality version!

Above, you can see the video-watching screen layout. Pretty intuitive really! After a couple of seconds of not touching the screen, or when you touch the center of the screen, the bars disappear leaving the video to play with nothing in front of it.

Above you can see the Google Maps application. This is a remarkably useful app – it has aerial photos of most of the world, including accurate map data. It has points of interest, businesses, directions, traffic info and almost everything else Google Maps online has to offer! The Maps application on the iPhone has one major advantage though – use of the GPS and compass. At a press of button, you can see within a few seconds your exact location on earth and in which direction your iPhone is pointing. Very useful indeed.

Now, what with my addiction to Facebook, I’m very glad there is a Facebook app for the iPhone. On the above screenshot, I have, of course, blurred out the information that is particular to my own news feed, but I’m sure Facebook users will recognise the classic News Feed.

The current version of the Facebook application lets you view your News Feed, user profiles, friend lists and photos. It also lets you deal with requests, chat, messages, events, photos, notes and other things too. If you are on Facebook, this is the app for you!

While we’re on the subject of Facebook, I’ll also talk about Twitter. There are various apps which allow you to interact with Twitter. My favourite is “Twitterrific” (seen above). It is a simply interface which allows you to search, post, filter and many other things. I use the Free version and put up with the advert right at the top of the page, but there is also a paid for version which has no ads (as far as I’m aware) and possibly other features too. The free version is perfectly good enough for me though!

If you are a keen eBay buyer or seller, then the eBay and PayPal apps are for you. I haven’t pictured the PayPal app here, but you can see the eBay app above. I’m not too sure which features are available in the eBay app, but I believe you can at least place bids on things and keep track of the items you are selling. To be honest, I’ve not used it too much yet, but I’m sure time will tell.

Above and below is the “Photogene” application.

The “Photogene” app. costs £1.79 at the time of writing, but if you are into Photography and often end up taking photos with your iPhone for one reason or another, this app is definitely worth having.

It allows you to brighten, darken, increase/decrease contrast, saturation, white balance, black balance, apply effects, sharpen, soften etc… and as you can see from the two screenshots above – it’s very capable of making an original photo look significantly better!

If you have Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, or some other software on your PC, then that may do a better job, but as far as the iPhone camera goes, this app is very good indeed.

The “Decibel” app, shown above, has had a series of very good reviews, apparently, and on that basis I paid the £0.59 to download it to find out that it was a simple, but accurate, decibel meter! I had to calibrate mine slightly (fortunately I had access to a professional calibrated decibel meter), but once calibrated it was pretty accurate! If you have a need for a decibel meter, this is probably the best and cheapest one out there!

I’m now going to talk about games…

Above, you can see “Blowfish”. This is a very addictive game. The idea is that the red sea urchins float around the screen and you have to inflate the blowfish to fill the screen without a sea urchin hitting the blowfish while it is being inflated. Very simple, but high addictive!

I am also a big fan of racing games on any platform, and above you will see “Fast & Furious” on the iPhone. The handing is a little strange – left and right turns are made by tilting the iPhone left or right, respectively. The accelerometers do a fairly decent job, but by the end of a race I often find the accelerometers have skewed one way of another and I end up holding the phone tilted to the left in order to maintain a straight line! Regardless of that, however, the game is very good and worth the couple of quid I paid for it!

Finally, I’ll talk about the TomTom turn-by-turn satellite navigation software.

There are now lots of turn-by-turn navigation apps available for the iPhone, and I think TomTom is one of the most expensive ones at £59.99. Navigon sells for £52.99 and CoPilot Live sells for £24.99 at the time of writing, but regardless of this, I think TomTom is still the best!

All iPhone satnav users complain of dropped signals (due to the low power GPS unit inside the iPhone itself), CoPilot has mixed reviews but is generally regarded as a very good value for money satnav solution, but I personally don’t like the way it looks. For me, it was down to the two main players – Navigon and TomTom. Navigon has “Lane assist” and “RealityView Pro” to help you get into the correct lane when entering or leaving a main road, but it only has 5 character postcode searches. TomTom, on the other hand, has full 7 character postcode searches, but doesn’t have “Lane Assist” or “RealityView Pro”. What TomTom does have, however, is IQ Routes which make routing much more intelligent and take general traffic trends into account.

For me, 7 character postcode search is a very useful feature, and I can work around Lane Assist etc… by simply reading the signs on the road. What I can’t do, however, is know the traffic trends and incorporate them into my route plan, and this, in my book, makes TomTom a winner!

Anyway, with that all said – the iPhone does have one major limitation, in my view. You cannot transfer files between devices via Bluetooth. You have to plug your iPhone into your iTunes install to get your photos/videos from it. You could email them, but that can take a very long time depending on your Internet connection.

That aside though, I think the iPhone has revolutionised the mobile phone market and is hopefully here to stay for a very long time!

Related posts:

1. Cambridgeshire Steam Rally, Thurlow Steam Rally, "Gigantic" and my new phone!
2. Remembrance Day at IWM Duxford and another classic motorcycle run
3. Brake light fixed, and 50 more miles completed!

The first event since winning “Best Motorcycle” at Somersham Carnival was the Classic & Vintage Bikes Day at Cambridge Museum of Technology.

This was a fun day, as usual! There were lots of bikes, as you can see, and lots of good people to talk to and get advice on my carburettor, which is still running rich for some reason!

Photos of Classic & Vintage Bike Day, Cambridge Museum of Technology

The weekend after this was the Hollowell Steam Rally.

I had booked the Matchless into this rally as an exhibit, but hadn’t realise quite how far away it was – just over 60 miles. As a result, I begrudgingly went by car! I could have ridden, but 60 miles would take at least an hour and a half by bike, and to get there before 10am and not to leave before 5pm would mean it would be quite a long day, which this particular weekend I didn’t fancy.

Nevertheless, it was a great day, and having had a towbar fitted and ordered a bike trailer, there should be nothing stopping us going next year!

Photos of Hollowell Steam Rally 2009

3 weeks later, it was Cambridgeshire Steam Rally. Sarah and I decided to use this rally as a test of our new camping equipment before the AJS & Matchless Owners Club Jampot Rally at the end of August and also to find out whether Sarah and I both like camping or not!

As it turns out, we love it!

Above you can see our tent with the bike parked next to it. We parked up next to Des and his Trantor, who we learned was possibly the most fun person to camp next to on the entire camp site, so thank you for helping to make our first rally great, Des! I think I still have your lighter too if you’re reading this!

I should also suggest, at this point, that everyone visits the Cambridgeshire Steam Rally web site! I noticed, a couple of weeks before the rally, as the rally is quite new at its current location (this rally was previously known as the Wood Green Steam Rally and was located at the Wood Green Animal Shelter, as you may have guessed) it had no web site!

I therefore contacted the organisers and offered to create a web site for the rally. They agreed, and the site was made! Needless to say, at the moment, the entire design and all the photos and videos are my own. Whether this will change over time I’m not sure, but for the moment at least, it’s true.

The other amazing thing that happened this weekend is that I finally, after 13 years or so, found Tony Warwick and his steam engine “Gigantic” (engine pictured below)!

As a child, I frequently visited my Grandparents’ house and also attended various local steam rallies on the back of my Grandad’s Matchless. At various rallies, and sometimes parked out the back of my Grandparents’ house, I went to have a look at “Tony’s engine” – “Gigantic”. It is a 1912 McLaren road locomotive which Tony has owned for as long as I can remember. I’ve had several rides on the footplate of “Gigantic” as a child and remember the engine like it was yesterday.

However, when I went to university and my Grandparent’s sadly passed away, I never went over there any more and consequently never saw the engine. Tony also had the engine off the road for a very long time as he was rebuilding most, or all, of it. As a result, I’ve been hoping to find “Gigantic” again and after 13 years or so, at the Cambridgeshire Steam Rally I finally did!

For old times’ sake, I also managed to get on board again – once on Saturday evening, and again on Sunday for a trip around the arena. Videos below…

Photos of Cambridgeshire Steam Rally 2009

The weekend after the Cambridgeshire Steam Rally, it was the Thurlow Steam Rally at Horseheath Racecourse near Linton, Cambs.

We weren’t originally going to camp at this rally, but having had such a good time at the Cambridgeshire rally, we decided to camp after all! For this rally, however, I bought a tow bar for the car and borrowed a bike trailer!

The problem at the Cambridgeshire rally was that I had to drive to the rally site with Sarah and the camping gear, drop off both, drive home, get the bike out the garage and ride back to the rally site. Then, when the rally had finished I had to do the opposite! This wasn’t too bad at the Cambridgeshire rally because it was only 15 miles from home, but the Thurlow rally was much further. This is why I bought a tow bar and borrowed a trailer (my own trailer is on order)!

So, again, the rally was excellent and we will make every effort to go again next year! A video summarising at least some of the rally is below:

Photos of Thurlow Steam Rally 2009

Now, onto my new iPhone!

In summary, I have a new mobile phone – the 32GB iPhone 3GS and it’s excellent in almost every way!

On the left you will see my current desktop. In case you somehow haven’t managed to learn this fact yet, the iPhone is a touch-screen phone by the way!

For those of you who don’t know, most of the applications on the left are available as standard on all iPhones. The only non-standard icons are the Google “g” icon and the “UK – Ireland” TomTom satnav icon.

To be honest, most of the applications are available in slightly different implementations on other phones too, but the iPhone’s apps are typically much nicer to use than on other devices due to the touch screen and the way the menus etc. are all structured.

I know other phones have similar functionality now, but I’ve never tested any of those, so for the moment, in my opinion, the iPhone is amazing!

Anyway, I will talk about my new phone more in a separate post – there’s too much to talk about here!

Related posts:

1. Steam Rallies and the Rest of Summer
2. The AJS & Matchless Owners Club Jampot Rally 2009

Sarah and I have had several enjoyable days (and an evening) out since the last blog post on 29 March 2009! Most of these occasions are summarised below.

AJS & Matchless Owners Club North Weald Section Meet

Every so often, the AJS & Matchless Owners Club has a meeting where various sections of the club meet up to say “Hi” and discuss all things motorcycle-related. This particular one was at North Weald Airfield where we met up with another section or two. I forget which ones though, I’m afraid!

As you can see from the above photo, there were quite a few bikes there – perhaps 80 in total; they’re not all visible in this particular photo though.

All in all, a very enjoyable day! I got to meet lots of new people and was able to sit within feet of the taxiway to the runway in use for that day. I even saw a Spitfire power itself down the taxiway to the end of the runway just before throttling up its wonderful Rolls Royce Merlin Engine and taking off into the distance!

Photos of the North Weald Section Meet can be found here.

Sandringham Arts and Crafts Fair

I don’t really have a general photo to summarise this event, so here’s a rather specific one:

This event was exactly what you would expect from an Arts and Crafts Fair. It had honey, jams, wood turning, wood carving (shown above!), cookery and various other things. We also spent a few hours in Hunstanton after visiting the fair to have Fish and Chips by the sea, which was also quite enjoyable and relaxing!

Photos of Sandringham and Hunstanton can be found here.

Cambridge Museum of Technology Steam-Up Day

For Sarah, I think this day was decidedly average. For me, however, it was great!

I’ve been to the Cambridge Museum of Technology many times, and I can highly recommend it to anyone interested in pumping engines, steam engines, big single-cylinder gas engines and all things industrial. On this particular day, they had the main big boiler fired up and most of the servicable engines running. They also had a model tank club visiting with very accurate scale models of various military vehicles (mostly tanks, of course!) which they were remotely controlling around the site.

Photos of our day at Cambridge Museum of Technology can be found here.

Videos of our day at Cambridge Museum of Technology can be found here.

Cottenham Yesteryear Road Run

On 19 April 2009 the Cottenham Yesteryear Road Run took place. This is a charity event raising money for MAGPAS. 400 or so classic and vintage cars, motorcycles, tractors, trucks and military vehicles took place in the road run which went from village to village showing residents and visitors  all the vehicles and also collecting money for MAGPAS, as mentioned above.

As of 20 June 2009, this year’s Road Run had collected £12,000 for MAGPAS, and I’m glad to have contributed at least slightly to something contributing to such a good cause!

Photos of the 2009 Cottenham Yesteryear Road Run can be found here.

Videos of the 2009 Cottenham Yesteryear Road Run can be found here.

FBHVC Old Vehicle Drive It/Ride It Day

The FBHVC Drive it/Ride It Day is not an organised event as such. It’s a day where the Federation of British Historic Vehicle Clubs (FBHVC) request that as many historic vehicle owners get their vehicles out on the road for the day to show to the nation that these vehicles exist and are still driveable/rideable!

Sarah and I decided to ride to a pub in a nearby village to have lunch by the river and to then ride home, and I must say, it was another great day!

AJS & Matchless Owners Club Motorcycle Run

Throughout the year, various members of the Fenrunners section of the AJS & Matchless Owners Club organise motorcycle rides around the county (and beyond!), and this ride was no exception. We met at The Chequers Inn at Wrestlingworth before setting off on a 75 mile route, finishing back at the Chequers Inn again! These 75 miles were ridden in one continuous stretch, which, despite being the longest non-stop ride I’ve ever done, was very enjoyable!

6 of us turned up at the pub in the first place, but within 500 yards or so, 2 people had broken down, leaving only 4 of us to take part in the run. Luckily enough, though, despite 2 bikes breaking down within that short distance, they were both up and running again by the time we got back and were both ridden home later that day with no problems!

I have no photos of this event, I’m afraid, but I do have the route as recorded by my GPS if you are interested!

The Nesting Blackbird

This wasn’t an event at all, but it is worth mentioning!

At the beginning of April, Sarah noticed that a blackbird was nesting on top of our water butt, 5 feet off the ground, in the corner between the fence and trellis running down the front edge of the canopy in our back garden, and around 12 feet from out back door, which is used all day every day!

The blackbird didn’t seem to care about Sarah and I going in and out of the back door and using the garden for BBQs etc… or even hanging washing out on the line which was around 4 feet away from her nest! I was also able to setup my tripod and camera behind the trellis pointing into the nest, about 12 inches away, zoomed right in to take some quite impressive photos.

The blackbird then laid 5 eggs!

At this point, Sarah and I looked up various facts about the blackbird and learned that these eggs were going to hatch in around 2 weeks. Before that time, however, roughly 3 weeks after the blackbird started nesting and 1 week after the eggs were laid, the blackbird appeared to have deserted the nest entirely!

After 24 hours of staying away to give her a chance to come back, we realised she wasn’t coming back and upon looking into the nest again, we realised that there were now only 2 eggs remaining.

I would like to add that we really don’t think it was us that scared the blackbird away as we had never attempted to touch the nest or disturb the plants growing around it – the gap in the plants through which the photos were taken was there naturally, and the blackbird had never been bothered by us in the past at all!

A couple of days later, there was only 1 egg left, and it was slightly cracked from the outside, so we figured something had found the nest and taken the eggs, sadly.

Anyway, we do seem to have either the same blackbird, or a different one, nesting in a new spot in the garden now, and this time we’re not going near it, just in case. I guess we’ll see what happens in due course!

More photos of the blackbird, the nest, the eggs and a few other birds in our garden can be found here.

Jampot Spares Limited Open Day

Although this was a very enjoyable day, it did start off badly!

The Open Day at JSL is an event often visited by lots of club members. A lot of these members I know from the club web site as they have helped me get the bike on the road over the last year or so, but I’ve never actually met them. This event was going to be a perfect opportunity for Sarah and I to not only meet these great people, but to turn up on the motorbike so they can actually see the bike they’ve hearing and talking about so much.

However, that, sadly, was not to be. Having wheeled the bike out into the open, started it up and got kitted up, I rolled it off the stand, pulled in the clutch, put it into first gear, and the engine stopped. The exhaust valve had jammed open again, like it did early last year.

We therefore attended the JSL Open Day by car. As I said, it did turn out to be a very enjoyable day, but for the first half an hour or so, before we arrived, I did feel rather annoyed, to say the least!

Photos of the JSL Open Day can be found here.

Videos of the JSL Open Day can be found here.

Classic Bike Show, Stanford Hall

I attended this show by car, as it would have been rather a long and tedious journey by bike! It was another good day with perhaps a hundred or two classic bikes on show, plus another 1,000 or so in the car park field, ranging from vintage pre-war bikes to modern Hondas and Kawasakis.

The Photo above shows the AJS & Matchless Owners Club stand which, as ever, was nicely presented!

I didn’t buy anything other than a mug, pin badge, cleaning cloths and a tube of Autosol on this particular trip, but there were an awful lot of things to buy, ranging from almost complete motorcycles to individual nuts and bolts. I highly recommend it to anyone wanting to admire some old bikes and to also spend a couple of hours trawling through the autojumble stalls!

Photos of the Classic Bike Show can be found here.

The Sidestand Spring and The Hurt Finger!

I have known for a very long time that the spring holding the sidestand up on the Matchless was both stretched slightly, and hooked onto the wrong place on the frame.

A fellow club member (thank you, Peter!) kindly donated a new sidestand spring to me and showed me, on his bike, where the holes in the frame should be to hook the spring into, so armed with that information I headed into the garage to fit the spring!

I won’t go into too much detail here, but in summary, the spring is quite tough. Having hooked one end into the frame underneath the bike, I began to pull the spring towards the side stand to hook on the other end. In doing so, the spring slippped out of my grip and the hooked end went into the skin on the bottom of my finger and pulled my hand back under the bike. Having looked under the bike to see what on earth I’d just done, I saw the end of the spring trying to push through the skin on the top of my finger!

I quickly removed the end of the spring (which had gone roughly 15mm into my finger!) and made my way into the kitchen whereupon I cleaned it up and sat down on the sofa for Sarah to kindly bring me a cold glass of water!

Needless to say, I felt rather ill for the next 20 minutes, but there was actually very little pain, almost no bleeding, and 7 days later it was as if it never happened. Very strange…

Souldrop Open Evening & BBQ

A new motorcycle workshop has opened up in Souldrop recently and they decided to have an Open Evening and BBQ, which Sarah and I, of course, attended!

It was a great evening! Roughly 20 people turned up, most of them on two wheels, there was plenty of food, all barbequed by myself ( ) and it was a late, but very enjoyable evening!

Photos of the Souldrop Open Evening & BBQ can be found here.

AJS & Matchless Owners Club Crosskeys Pub Inter-Section Meet

Similar to the North Weald Section Meet mentioned earlier in this post, this event took place at The Cross Keys in Norfolk.

It was an incredibly sunny, and rather warm, day and in total I rode 134 miles! We met some more new people, spent a few hours chatting about motorcycles, had a great pub lunch and then rode home!

I must say though, 134 miles in one day, with the last 65 of them being non-stop, is quite tiring, especially at an average speed of 30 mph with a top speed of 45-50 mph! The last 65 miles, for example, took 1 hour, 54 minutes!

It was thoroughly enjoyable though, so I’m not complaining!

Photos of the Crosskeys Section Meet can be found here.

Somersham Carnival

As of the day this blog post was published, the last event we’d been to was Somersham Carnival.

I’ve been to Somersham Carnival nearly every year of my life, which isn’t so strange considering I grew up in the village!

There’s not a lot to say about the carnival really. It’s exactly what you would expect from a village carnival; classic cars, floats, a parade around the village, Somersham Town Band, an arena in the field in which various displays occur and a generally good day out for adults and children alike!

This year, however, I took along the motorbike for the first time ever. The bike itself has been in the parade and displayed in the field before, perhaps 15 or so years ago, when my Grandad still owned it, but this time it was my turn.

The other thing to mention is that I won the “Best Motorcycle” award, as shown below!

It is important to note, however, that my motorcycle was the only one there, so you could argue that my bike was also the worst bike!

Anyway, as a few people have already said, an award is an award, regardless of how it was won!

Photos of Somersham Carnival can be found here.

Related posts:

1. Not such a great weekend, but still enjoyable!
2. An enjoyable pair of weekends!
3. The AJS & Matchless Owners Club Jampot Rally 2009

The weather was pretty awful, the forecast was even worse and it wasn’t very warm either, but nevertheless a few dedicated club members turned up for the run at the Tesco store just north of Cambridge.

The run was basically from the Tesco store to Mildenhall, for a warm pub lunch and then home (obviously via some convoluted route that actually makes the run worth doing!), but sadly, I didn’t quite make it that far…

In total, including the journey from my house to Tesco, 46 miles were planned there, and probably another 46 miles or so home again, totalling 92 miles for the entire day. However, all in all, I rode a grand total of only 39 miles!

As you will know from reading the rest of my blog (assuming you actually do, of course!), my own bike is still being put through the 35mph run-in period having had a new piston and rings, so I’m currently attending club runs on a fellow club member’s (Peter’s) bike which he has very kindly lent me – a 1955 AJS… not sure of the model, but it’s also a 350cc heavyweight like my own bike, just 11 years older. Very good condition too, I might add!

Anyway, as you can see from the map below (click to enlarge), the plan was to meet up with a couple of local club members in Sainsbury’s car park in Huntingdon (at point A), to then ride to the starting point of the run (at point B), and then to ride the route shown to Mildenhall (at point D). However, frustratingly, I couldn’t go any further once I reached point C! So close, and yet so far…

Point C (the layby where I stopped) can be seen below:

As you can see, it’s in the middle of nowhere!

As we were riding along this long straight road (from bottom to top as you look at the above photo), there was a horrendous sidewind which was gusting a lot. It wasn’t gusting to the point where it was dangerous, and we were nowhere near being blown into the oncoming lane, but it was certainly significant. It was also raining. It was roughly at this point I started to look forward to the warm pub, the hot pub lunch and the opportunity to dry off slightly! Maybe that was my mistake…

With a sidewind, as any motorcyclist will know, it can feel a bit like you are riding on jelly, you are gently swept from side to side as the wind comes and goes and as soon as any gust disappears, you find you are still steering into it slightly, so suddenly move the into the gust and have to compensate again by steering in the other direction. It’s pretty much the same as in a car, but you feel it a lot more on a bike!

Anyway, with all this happening, and the rain coming down, albeit lightly, I noticed that even when the gusts stopped, it still felt a little like I was being blown around. It wasn’t until I noticed this happening a couple of times (in the space of 15 seconds or so) that I realised that if I really was being blown around, it was only happening at the back of the bike!

It was at this point I decided I ought to pull over and see what was going on – was the wheel coming loose? Was something else wrong? Was it really just the wind?

Well, it turns out I had a puncture in the rear tyre, caused by a metal fencing staple!

So, that was it – the run was over! 3 or 4 other club members pulled over too, to see if everything was OK, and I must thank those people again for doing so!

Now, canisters of compressed air mixed with liquid rubber-like stuff exist which can be squirted into the valve to both pump up the tyre and seal the puncture, but (a) they don’t always work, and (b) nobody had one anyway, so that clearly wasn’t an option!

I decided, at that point, I ought to find out if Peter’s insurance (on which I am a named driver) had breakdown cover. I spent 30 minutes or so phoning 118118 and all the numbers they gave me, to no avail, and eventually phoned up a work colleague who looked up the number online for me! So much for 118118! It turns out that Peter’s insurance does have breakdown cover, and so 45 minutes later, the truck arrived and took me and the bike home!

By the time the breakdown truck arrived though, I had then been stood in the windy layby for 1hr, 15 mins, 45 minutes of that was spent with Neville and Mark from the club, so a big thank you to them! During that time, we had even stronger wind, more rain, hailstones twice and countless cars zooming past spraying us all with dirt and water! The photo of this location, at that time, can be seen here:

I must admit, I’ve brightened up that photo a bit… it almost looks bright in the above photo, but believe me – it wasn’t!

And here is the bike being loaded up onto the truck having been carefully strapped to the loading device:

Once I got home, there had been half a warm turkey delivered from Sarah’s parents (Sarah had been at home during this short trip), which Sarah kindly made into a sandwich (as I never made it to the pub and really was getting kinda hungry by this point!) and later on that afternoon Peter phoned me to say he was more than happy to sort out the puncture, as it’s his bike and therefore his problem, and as much as I disputed the latter, he wouldn’t back down, so he later turned up with his trailer and picked up the bike. So, thank you to Peter too, not only for lending me his 54 year old bike, but for also offering to repair the puncture before letting me have the bike back yet again!

Hopefully I’ll have beter luck on the next run…

Related posts:

1. It does appear to be working, but now there's rain!
2. The bike is finally up and running, but that means the run-in period has begun…
3. Touch-wood, things seem to be ok!

The piston I picked up from AMC Classic Spares, although the correct diameter, was definitely the wrong one (this was not their fault, I might add) and although it could potentially be milled out, I decided to wait and see if a proper, original, BHB piston was ever going to turn up. This piston is therefore sitting on my shelf right now, waiting for me to sell it back to AMC Classic Spares if they’ll take it!

The main problem was that even if it could be milled, the metal underneath the milled area would have been very thin, and the reinforcement ridges built into the casting of my original piston don’t exist on this new one, so it would be far from ideal in this situation.

Having almost given up on the new piston, I started to phone the rest of the places on my list, in the UK and abroad! I even, accidentally, woke up someone at home in Australia at 4am, having got the timezones 4 or 5 hours out compared with the UK! I knew it was morning over there, given that it was evening over here, but I wasn’t sure how early in the morning it was. I figured that given this was a business, if the business was closed I could leave a message, but it was actually a house phone, so there it was – the call at 4am!

After phoning all of the places on my list though, I gave up hope of finding one via the web or over the phone and started hoping the adverts placed in the various magazines might throw something up.

Before these were even published though, I received a response on the club web site from a club member in Canada who had an original BHB piston, part number 030148, which had been sitting on his shelf since 1977, which I was welcome to have if I wanted!

So, this piston was posted to the UK, and 12 days later it arrived. Once cleaned up a bit, I revealed the same part number as my cracked piston!

Excellent!

So… into the bike it went, and after 2 hours in the garage, on the 5th kick, the bike started!

The next day I set off around town for a couple of miles to see how the bike ran, and to begin the run-in process, but once the bike warmed up, there was a distinct rattle from somewhere in the engine.

I adjusted the tappets, the day after, and went out again to find that the rattle was still there. When I got home, I adjusted the tappets again (while the bike was still warm this time!) and since then, I think the rattle has gone away.

I’m 35 miles into the run-in period now, and I still can’t hear the rattle, so I guess it really has gone!

The trouble is… I’m now questioning both my memory of the rattle, and my audio observation skills. Perhaps the rattle is still there, and I just can’t hear it for some reason… perhaps the rattle really has gone… perhaps I’m over-analysing things again!

I guess I’ll know for certain when I have a second opinion from someone who actually knows about these things!

Related posts:

1. The cracked piston and the not-quite-right replacements
2. Fallout 3 (again), my Xbox's blog and the cracked piston…
3. It does appear to be working, but now there's rain!