Removing a follower

Housekeeping.

I have now reinstalled my followers and successfully removed the undesirable one.

If you open Blogger Dashboard and look below the title of your blog you will see information saying how many posts and page views there have been and the number of followers on the blog.

Click on the number of followers and you will see them all.

Click on the one you want to banish and select "block".

It has taken me much time and searching to achieve what seems to be a very simple operation, but as always  help menus never seem to contain a solution and the best way is to Google the problem and hear what others have to say; thanks to all those geeks out there.

Thanks also to Gibson (Afoot in the Hills) for encouraging me to persist.

In praise of tea

My predilection for cafés, pots of tea and the like on my wanderings by foot or cycle has been questioned (see comment - L da P on my last post). The implication is that this denigrates the macho image.

This café failed me - click to enlarge to see notice in window

I have no pretension to be the “hard cyclist” alluded to by L da P.

My attitude to cycling seems to ignore the personal challenge I often adopt when walking, when I tend to compare my time with those in guide books, and others, or set myself targets. Having said that, I do have a sneaky look at the mini cycle computer that tells me my average speed, and, best of all, the fastest speed achieved (31 mph so far).

For me, tea refreshes at breakfast time, and during the day. Coffee gives me a kick mid morning, and induces repletion after my evening meal. Wine only enters the equation on outdoor trips if I eat out in the evening, or it may be beer if good real ale is available.

Beer during the day when walking or cycling is disastrous. On the Pennine Way (1987), I had a sandwich and two or three pints in the Green Dragon at Hardraw. The following ascent of Great Shunner Fell, on a blazing hot afternoon was one of the most uncomfortable walks I can remember.

The “mutual friend” mentioned by L da P was my old climbing partner Tony who was as good a friend as I ever had - he very sadly died in 2003. Tony was a hard climber, but he always insisted on a brew at a café before and after climbing, and that influence is now embedded in me.

Tony

A trip with Tony took us to Spain where we climbed with some Spanish climbers who were exceedingly good company. For these guys a days climbing had to include a pre-climb brew, good companionship on the crag, and a meal together afterwards, and this was reverently designated:  un compleat días, which I have always remembered as a laudable concept.

One thing leads to another

Apple have introduced iCloud.

iCloud "pushes" photos, emails, calendar entries etc. from the iPhone to the Mac desktop and vice versa cutting out  physically syncing the iPhone with the Mac. During  download  I bought extra "cloud" space for approx. £10 which I then found I didn't need. Next I learned that iCloud was not compatible with my Mac operating system, nor was my Version 5 of Parallels compatible, so I had to purchase and download OSX Lion - approx. £21, and Version 7 of Parallels - approx. £50.00. Parallels is the software that allows me to run Windows on the Mac side by side - the virtual Windows PC contains all the files and some software that I couldn't bring over to the Mac when I changed to Apple, and is therefore important to me.

After all this I discovered an iPhone app - Parallells, and for a special offer price of £2.99 (proper price £19.99), I can now access and operate all the files and software on my Mac and virtual Windows PC via my iPhone - this seems a trivial price to pay for such a massive advantage giving my iPhone the attributes of a £1000 desktop.

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Yesterday I had the second arthroscopy on my left knee. The surgeon reckons it is worse  than the x-ray indicated and predicts that any improvement will only last a month or two. I have an appointment in 6/8 weeks at which time he says he would have no hesitation in giving me a new knee joint. Looks like walking maybe going on hold for a while.

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Katie update - 

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Caravan and Camping Club grid refs. Whitbarrow. Photoshop painting

Here is a copy of the reply from the Caravan and Camping Club relevant to my last post. I hope this may of interest to fellow backpackers.

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On Wednesday I had a two hour walk round Whitbarrow, my favourite local locale. It was a jewel of a day weatherwise. Here are a couple of pics confirming this. There was a fair covering of snow on the Lake District hills in the second photo. I think this is  unusual in mid November.

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I have gone back to painting again on the computer using Addobe Photoshop Elements.

Here are a couple of my previous efforts followed by the current work in progress.

1. A Yorkshire farmhouse.

2. Ben Alder

3. Part of the refuge complex at Thines in the Cevennes. From my walk of the French gorges.

On the w.i.p  you can see the Photoshop layer behind the painting which is the original photo. The layer with the painting on has a white background, the opacity of which can be reduced so you can see the original photo below. I can then draw the basic outlines of the main features and then bring the white background back again. After that I only use the original photo to look at to help me with the colours etc. The work is done using a Wacom pen tablet. I intend to make further posts as this painting develops. This is a hugely time consuming pastime.

Another book and Escape to Scotland

Book fever continues. I am now working on a book for my 2005 GR5 walk from Lake Geneva to Menton on the Mediterranean. Yes, I know the GR5 finishes at Nice but I elected to take the rewarding alternative finish through the Mercantour Alps. 

Unfortunately I naively  transferred the photos into Powerpoint and deleted the original jpegs. At the time I did not understand that Powerpoint files  are unusable in most other applications (although they do open in Keynote on my iMac). I have been able to re-save the photos from Powerpoint as jpegs, but this causes loss of quality which I will have to put up with. A further problem is that these photos retain the black background used by Powerpoint slideshow, entailing the cropping of more than 200 photos which took most of yesterday. One advantage was that I was able to crop these photos in the normal way to their best advantage at the same time.

Here are some samples: I am still having some problem with black background but have just spent twenty minutes in Photoshop finding out how to sort it - the middle one here was the guinea pig, but it now seems to have lost the r/hand blog frame. 


                                    

Before anything else crops up to prevent me getting back to the hills I have booked onto the Caravan Club site at Banchory (inland from Aberdeen) for eight nights from Friday 15th October. Now that I am not pursuing Munros I am looking forward to exploring other hills. I bought the SMC Cairngorms guide and intend to investigate the hills in the Mount Keen, Glen Esk, and Lower Deeside areas. Hopefully I will be able to post from my iPhone, Vodafone and deer stalking permitting.

Nostalgia for The Pyrenees

After my most troublesome computing exercise to date my Atlantic to Mediterranean Pyrenean traverse via the GR10  is now available  as a hardback book or download. The 52 day journal with many colour photos covers 107 pages.

To purchase or download Google: Lulu.com (not: Lulu Publishing), and enter Conrad Walks in the search box. The download costs £7 of which I would donate £5.05 to Motor Neurone Disease Association, and the hardback is £23.71 net. My Lowestoft to Patterdale, and Land’s End to John o’Groats walks are also available (details are shown here in red underneath my profile details).

I walked the GR10 in 2003. Putting the book together brought back many memories. Of all my walks this one provided most interest and the most anecdotes. The GR10 has a unique, pleasurable sort of ambiance in my mind which is associated with the observable change in climate, flora, and landscape as I gradually drew nearer to the Mediterranean.

Walking is the most rewarding way to see new territory, especially if it involves an objective because this seems to heighten the sense of anticipation, which in this case was fulfilled by the final descent into Banyuls-sur-Mer through parched vineyards, and yellow baked dusty roads, culminating in my arrival in the town and an evening meal which I failed to record in detail, all creating an unforgettable essence of everything Mediterranean.         


                                    Banyuls-sur-Mer

Priorities

My Lowestoft/St Bees Head walk is renamed Norfolk/Patterdale after I aborted on 9th July.

Since then hours have passed on the computer integrating the journal and photos. 

The cut on my shin has not fully healed.  Apart from short walks with Jill’s dog Jake I am grounded.

Some months ago I converted to Apple but installed Parallels to run a virtual Windows machine on the Mac. To produce a book through Lulu’s website the ms has to be in Microsoft Word. Almost at completion Word crashed, perhaps because I had too big a file - the photos were integrated with the text.

I still had text and photos and started again, adding photos after the text for each day. Today Windows crashed. I  get the screen saying “Windows is closing down” and cannot proceed.  I am now awaiting a reply from  Parallels help team.

Yesterday my iPhone stopped receiving signal and has been sent back.

In some ways I am proud that, at my age, I have dragged myself into the world of tech, but sometimes I wonder how much more I can take. At the moment I feel philosophical about the current problem, and do not see it as a threat to my wellbeing. What is more important is healing of the leg,  and visiting Scotland before BST ends so I can listen to stags from on high rutting in the glens below. 

45 Photoshop painting

Awful weather has driven me to indoor pursuits although I have managed to walk Jake the dog every day locally.

About nine months ago I started painting pictures in Photoshop Elements 3. I was given a Wacom pen tablet as a present and this revolutionised things. My interest was rekindled by a post on my brother’s blog, and now I am off again.

Regular readers may notice that I have redesigned my blog header using three photos, a mask layer and a text layer. I am currently working on a landscape picture that may or may not appear here later.

Painting is quite different from manipulating photos and it can be very much like the real thing layering colours to obtain tonal and texture effects along with most other techniques involved in painting. The overwhelming thing about this activity is the rapid passage of huge hunks of time.

Here are some of my previous efforts.