Darren Foster

More images visit my flickr page...

2008-04-26T15:18:00.000-07:00

http://www.flickr.com/photos/93421786@N00/

Nice engine!

2008-04-26T15:17:00.003-07:00

IMG_3148, originally uploaded by darrenfoster1976.

The Burrell

2008-04-26T15:17:00.001-07:00

IMG_3194, originally uploaded by darrenfoster1976.

Puffing Devil

2008-04-26T15:16:00.003-07:00

IMG_3196, originally uploaded by darrenfoster1976.

Richard Trevithick

2008-04-26T15:16:00.001-07:00

IMG_3201, originally uploaded by darrenfoster1976.

Trevithick Day!

2008-04-26T14:58:00.000-07:00

Well today was Trevithick Day. A day to celebrate one of Cornwall’s greatest inventors. This event takes place every year. This year will be 25 years that it has been celebrated in this way. So earlier in the week I gave you a brief summary as to who Richard Trevithick was courtesy of the Richard Trevithick website. Today I’m going to go in depth a bit more.

Richard Trevithick was the first man to make high pressure steam actually work. His first engine was a stationary one. Trevithick wasn’t the first to think about Steam as a good engine. William Murdoch had already developed and demonstrated a model steam carriage to Trevithick in 1784. During 1798-99 Murdoch had moved next door and the pair of them obviously worked closely together as by 1799 the first stationary engine was born. After many months of testing Trevithick believed that he could eliminate the condenser from the stationary model and compact the engine making it small enough to carry its own weight and have a carriage attached. Thus in 1801 the “Puffing Devil” was born. Trevithick had built a full sized steam road locomotive on a site near to the present day Fore Street otherwise known during that time as Camborne Hill. On Christmas Eve that year he demonstrated to the people of Camborne his new toy. Carrying folk on his Steam engine up Camborne Hill and onto the village of Breacon.

In 1802 Trevithick took out a patent for his high pressure steam engine.

Trevithick was always a man to put his ideas into action and in 1802 he built a stationary engine at the Coalbrookdale Company’s works in Shropshire, forcing water to a measured height to measure the work done. The engine ran at 40 piston strokes a minute, with a boiler pressure of 145 psi. The company then apparently built a rail locomotive for him although little is known about it. There have been no plans found and the only known information about it comes from the London Science Museum, a letter written by Trevithick to his friend Davies Giddy which contained a drawing of the locomotive. This is the drawing that is the basis for all the images and replicas of the Penydarren locomotive that was later built.

The “Puffin Devil” constantly broke down as she was unable to maintain a sufficient steam pressure for long periods of time. Then in 1803 he built another steam powered road vehicle called the London Steam Carriage. The press were all over him when he drove it from Holborn in London to Paddington and back. However as you can imagine it wasn’t the most comfortable of rides and of coarse it was more expensive than the cost of running a horse drawn carriage. So the idea never really got off the ground. Although it was a great show piece don’t you think.

During 1802 Trevithick built a high pressure steam engine to drive an automatic hammer at the Pen-y-Darren ironworks near Merthyr Tydfil in south Wales with the help of an employee at the iron works and under the supervision of the proprietor he mounted the engine on wheels and turned it into a locomotive. It was 1803 that Trevithick sold his patent to Samual Homfray for the locomotive.

Randy Pausch - What an inspiration!

2008-04-20T07:05:00.000-07:00

Trevithick day – Saturday 26th April 2008

2008-04-20T04:25:00.000-07:00

Trevithick day will be upon us soon enough. I don’t normally go along to this event but this year I intend to go along camera and blogger notepad in hand. I hear that it’s a great day out and there are loads to do.

So who is this Richard Trevithick anyway I hear you ask. For those of you who are not from Cornwall let me tell you. He is the inventor of the worlds first high pressure steam powered engine. His first ‘baby’ was called “The Puffin Devil”. So let’s prepare the ground with a little information about the man himself.

Lets begin with a biography by Marj Rowland taken from the Trevithick Day website http://www.trevithick-day.org.uk/

Richard Trevithick (1771-1833) - a short biography
(original research by Marj Rowland)

Richard Trevithick was born in a cottage a mile or so from Dolcoath Mine, where his father was a mine Captain. His curiosity about the engineering aspects of the mining area that he grew up in started at an early age, and this led to a career during which he pioneered the use of high pressure steam, and increased the efficiency of the engines used to pump water from the lower levels of Cornwall's tin and copper mines.

Trevithick's inventive mind was never still - his ideas ranged from the first successful self-powered road vehicle, and a steam railway engine, to schemes for wreck salvage, land reclamation, mechanical refrigeration, agricultural machinery and for tunnelling under the Thames.

Trevithick's career spanned the dawn of the industrial revolution, a time when Cornwall's engineering prowess was the envy of the world. Trevithick spent eleven years in South America, working for owners of silver mines.

Richard Trevithick is buried in an unmarked grave at Dartford, Kent, where he was working when he died. Like many great men and women, Trevithick did not get the recognition he deserved during his lifetime. Indeed, his worth has only recently been recognised by many history books.

He did not acquire riches either; any wealth that came Trevithick's way soon disappeared as he developed his next idea- one of his last ideas, for a competition for a memorial to the "Reform Bill", was for a thousand feet high cast iron column with an air operated lift to convey passengers up the inside!

Perranporth

2008-04-16T03:38:00.000-07:00

Had to go to Perranporth today to deliver a monitor to a customer. I sat on the bench over looking the beach from the top of the cliff and could have sat there for hours. Nice breeze coming off the sea, a few surfers running down the beach, sun blazing down. And wow what a view and i didn't have my camera with me :-(

Twitter

2008-04-15T09:06:00.000-07:00

Having joined a few weeks ago and not really come to grips with it. I thought to hell with the invoicing and lets have a play with twitter and to my surprise i like it a lot. I'm tweeting slowly but surely. I even have some followers. I think the trick is to follow your friends and a few other folk that are interested in the same sort of things or even just come from your area. I do find it hard fitting everything into that little box with just 140 characters, but it is slowly coming.

Frozen in Grand Central Station

2008-04-15T04:23:00.000-07:00

German language

2008-04-03T05:02:00.000-07:00

I have a customer of mine who is a translator. He works abroad and lives locally when he is in Cornwall. Anyway he contacted me a few days ago asking me if i could convert a word document into a Visio document. I think he thought that i might be able to just convert it by using a magic program or something. Anyway i wasn't sure as i hadn't used Visio although i was familiar with what it could do. it turns out this couldn't be done. So i was tasked to convert an English word document that i had over a German Visio document. My German sucks but i did manage to come to grips with some of it and hopefully i have placed all of the correct text in the correct holes. Interesting document actually. It was a major car manufacturer and a document describing a web interface and showing the different layers of the web interface. So it was a little intricate.

Someecards.com cards crack me up! im addicted....

2008-03-31T13:59:00.000-07:00

So Julia Roy at A Digital Girl Blog blogged about Someecards.com and ever since i have been hooked. Sorry Julia don't mean to copy post about someecards but i cant help myself. Like Julia i have been reading and cracking up taking in the inappropriateness of these cards. They rock! and they are awesomely funny!

Year of the Dragon....

2008-03-29T17:49:00.000-07:00

Having just read in my blogger profile that i was born in the year of the dragon i thought i would find out what it meant. So i googled it.

I found a Chinese Culture Site (www.c-c-c.org/chineseculture/zodiac/Dragon.html) and this is what it said.

The Year of the Dragon.

1916, 1928, 1940, 1952, 1964, 1976, 1988, 2000

People born in the Year of the Dragon are healthy, energetic, excitable, short-tempered, and stubborn. They are also honest, sensitive, brave and they inspire confidence and trust. Dragon People are the most eccentric of any in the eastern zodiac. They neither borrow money nor make flowery speeches, but they tend to
be soft-hearted which sometimes gives others the advantage over them.

Now there's a thing eh, if i were to overhear someone reading that aloud i would almost be sure that they were talking about me. Its me to a tee!!

Canada's Next Great Prime Minister

2008-03-29T04:45:00.000-07:00

So there i was a couple of days ago sitting recovering from jetlag and there it was exactly as i predicted the first legal download available from a major tv network available using the dreaded Torrent. Canada's Next Great Prime Minister Mininova listed it seeded fairly well. This may not be the kind of program that i would normally watch but because it was a first i thought i should. Quality was ok and all in all its as it should be. CBC should be congratulated on being the first to release programs in this manner.

Here is a Link to some work i posted at a site called groundreport. about this very subject. I just hope that more of these broadcasters take note and start publishing programs in this manner. Include adverts too. We would welcome them if it meant that programs were available in torrents.

Well Done CBC.

A little about me.....

2008-03-29T03:56:00.000-07:00

Hello. My name is Darren Foster. I am going to bore you a little now with an introduction as to who i am and what i am about hopefully.

I am 31 and reside in Cornwall in the United Kingdom. I am a Computer Repair Guy/Tech Consultant. My first computer was a ZX48 Spectrum with the little rubber keys and a tape cassette drive you had to plug in and listen to it squeal as it loaded your game. Sadly i don't have it anymore unless my folks have it stuffed in the loft and I've not seen it. Anyway i fell in love with computers then at 14 years old. I used to buy a speccy mag back then and try my hand at programming and creating my own games. That sparked an early interest.

I spent the first three years of working life at a Tandy store. Where i would sell Amiga's and the Amstrad PCW's. They also had that Tandy 1000 in the back room to do the accounts on. In those days we were also selling 386 and 486 processor PC's with next to no memory and 5 1/4" Floppy Disks. How things have moved on :-)

I then spent a good 7 years working on Yachts. Small yachts, Superyacht's and huge ships. I became fascinated with sailing and in my heart today i miss it like crazy. I am still looking for an excuse to get out on the water but as yet haven't found the right boat but she will come along. Maybe my own at some point.

I love to travel and see the world and have been all over Europe, America and Australia recently.

Today i have a small business working from home taking care of my customers computer aches and pains. I started out by helping someone fix their computer and i was unemployed at the time. I had my own PC at the time and was always helping someone with their computer issues. Secretly i have always enjoyed helping people with their computer woes. Anyway this person that i was helping said "I dont know why you dont do this properly and charge people for doing it!" This planted the seed i thought about it for about a month. And decided to go for it. So to start out i simply did what your not supposed to do and that was to spam every business in my town with the hope that someone might respond and respond they did. Out of about 200 emails that i sent out i got about 10 Reply's. I gave those ten customers ten business cards and i still have those customers to date. Giving ten business cards to your customers is vital because if your customer is happy with your service they will pass on your card. The trick is to make sure you have a happy customer every time to ensure a thriving business.

This blog is about me and some of the wonderful things that computers can do for us and the pain they induce when things don't work as we would have wanted them. Anyway i hope i didn't bore you with my introduction.