Trevithick day – Saturday 26th April 2008

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/

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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!

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Perranporth

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

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

German language

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....

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....

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!!