Explorer Leaders weekend up in the Lake District was this weekend. Stopped over at Rydal Hall in the bunkhouse. Well, we were going to be in the bunkhouse until the electric went out:
Large quantities of candles came to the rescue until we got upgraded to the main hall which looks like this and has a library, drawing room and even a “Bishops Room”. The Bishop wasn’t in so we sat in there for a few drinks.
Saturday was supposed to be a day on the hill but with the weather forecast looking ropey we spent the morning in sessions before heading for a little walk to Ambleside.
Sunday involved a walk round Rydal up to Grasmere. Lunch at Greens Cafe involved a 30 minute wait for coffee but a very nice cumberland sausage baguette. Blagged a lift back to Rydal from Ash (fresh from his stomp around Fairfield) to give me enough time to pop in at Booths to buy some beers for the Ormskirk Baron.
One thing to come out of the weekend was the suggestion of running a course for Explorers to help them get organised. Thinking of calling it something like Getting Organised… now where have I heard that before 
See the full set of photos on Flickr.
Ferrets started back this week and since our planning meeting was just after a large quantity of snow had dumped itself over West Lancashire we decided to have a go at building a snow hole. By the time we met on Monday evening, the snow had started to ice up and the plan was looking considerably more ropey. Not to be put off we grabbed a large cardboard box, some spacehoppers and started shovelling. The results were far more impressive than I imagined!
Not only was there enough space in there to crawl through (getting very wet in doing so) but it was able to take a bit of weight:
It held under direct pressure for a while before finally giving way:
See all the photos on Flickr.
I spent a good proportion of last weekend doing web development – what an exciting life I lead! First up on Friday night I finally managed to get a few moments to knock up a new Advent Calendar. Basically the same symfony-powered site as last year (which is also available for them’s that missed it) but with a new colour scheme and now using the commentable behavior plugin instead of my homebrew effort.
On Saturday I headed up to Waddecar to work on the new West Lancashire Scout County website. Mark Charlton, Pierre and myself did most of the work in a weekend before the summer but life caught up with us and it never got finished. So in 7 hours it was polished off, and that included accidentally running:
$ symfony propel-build-all
Learnt my lesson now 
I’m pretty happy with the site for a first release. The top navigation bar is quite neat – a bit of JavaScript created using sfPJSPlugin which can be included on other sites in the West Lancs “network”. Should hopefully build a bit more cohesion between the various sub sites. Options in the back end allow it to be customised with different colour schemes and functionality. Already Network are interested in having some extra buttons to use across Local Scout Network sites.
My already-infrequent blog entries might be a bit less frequent while I’m updating the Advent Calendar but I’m going to try to post occasionally to the Web Services blog.
I noticed earlier today that Google Maps seems to have improved its satellite coverage for the UK. I haven’t noticed any announcements about it but you can now see pretty cool images of all sorts of places:
It’s not complete, but it’s a lot better and more recent imagery that before, and it doesn’t have a join running right through my house!
Update: Seems they updated on 2nd June.
Really nice and pretty relaxed weekend up in the Lakes for DESC. Went up Friday night with Hugh (thanks for driving!) and the realisation that I had to camp in March came to me all of a sudden. Tent looked its usual saggy self once put up on a GT slope but managed to find a line for my thermarest between the mounds. Wasn’t too cold at night once I’d wrapped my towel around myself for a bit of extra insulation.
Saturday Martin and I got permission of go off and do our own thing so we met up with Tim for a little walk. Parked up in Patterdale and walked St Sunday Crag, Fairfield, Dollywaggon Pike, Nethermost Pike and Helvellyn. About 20km in all taking 8 hours. Tim’s done the business on spareweekend.com so check out the details there.
Sunday the Explorers tried out the new low ropes course at Great Tower. It’s pretty cool and a great asset to the site. Unfortunately one of the trees has fallen down taking out a couple of obstacles so it’s not a complete circuit at the moment.
Numbers were down for DESC but in terms of atmosphere and activities it was as good if not better than previous years and I think the Explorers catering in smaller groups is a model for future events. But please someone stop me from making scrambled egg next time
So it was Moonlight on Saturday. For the first time Explorers and Scouts were let off from different points – Scouts from Camelot theme park and Explorers (plus the two Veteran teams) from Yarrow Valley Park just outside Chorley.
We did fairly well losing just 2 or 3 lives depending on whether one of them counted. Our plan to walk down the A59 stopping at every pub, Chinese and fish and chip shop on the way was scuppered by Chris changing the rules so we had to do without such luxuries. In the end it was a good job we headed west before Burscough as continuing to Aughton would have added a significant distance and we were pretty tight for time.
Our total distance was 32km (about 20 miles) which isn’t too bad really! We won the Veteran prize beating the firemen by a few minutes (and possibly a life). Most of Alcatraz’s winners took the Explorer trophy and first prize overall while 45th Ormskirk won for the Scouts and Leigh, Tom, Nev and Jamie won the catcher prize.
My plan was to get home and start programming for PHP Throwdown. Well that did happen… for about 2 hours before I went to bed for 9 hours and woke up feeling worse than I had before sleeping. I’ve done a bit of work on the website and I’ll try to finish it off over the next week or so.
So next weekend is Moonlight. The finish was announced yesterday as Halsall School, a place I should know fairly well having done Explorers there for the last few months! Still a team member short but hopefully we’ll be able to sort that out before next Saturday.
Also next Saturday is the PHP Throwdown competition. Take a look at the website if you’re interested in all the details but it’s basically a race over 24 hours to make the best website application you can in PHP. I’d really like to take part but I’m going to struggle a little I think – I’ll be up at 8am on Saturday but won’t be able to start programming until after 10pm and the last slot starts at 6pm so I’ll be 4 hours behind without writing even a line of code.
I’ve got an idea for a website so I’m going to try to work it out on paper this week to give me a chance of being able to complete it but it’ll take a lot of work and I’m going to be knackered by 6pm Sunday!
