Tom Womack

A few months ago I noticed that the Isle of Wight was accessible by reasonably cheap train and not very big, so vowed to cycle round it; on the bank holiday weekend I fulfilled the vow.

Left work at 4:45 on Friday, train to London, tedious cycle across London to Waterloo, train to Portsmouth, fast boat across to Ryde with the wind in my hair. Reading Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class on my phone. It had been quite a long week, and the B&B felt antediluvian: Formica furniture which I'm sure my grandparents had 25 years ago, 'breakfast will be from 8:30 until nine'.

Up for breakfast on the Saturday, bacon and egg and sausage and hash-browns, and onto the bike; set off anticlockwise. Passed Quarr Abbey, a Benedictine monastery built just before the first world war in a particularly uncompromisingly perpendicular style, and couldn't avoid being reminded of Veblen's remarks of the importance that religious buildings be expensively uncomfortable. It started to rain; got to the outskirts of Cowes and went to Osborne House.

This is as Victorian a building as exists; designed by Prince Albert, and the favourite home of Queen Victoria. You could see the arrival of the art-nouveau movement in the much brighter west wing, added in 1890: a factoid that rather startled me was that Victoria had developed a great interest in India after the Colonial Exhibition of 1886, and hired an Urdu teacher, Munshi Abdul Karim, who ended up a Commander of the Royal Victorian Order. There was an interesting exhibition of Indian craftwork in the Durbar Room, with the particular feature that several items had a little video showing how they were made, ending with the address of the craftsman in Delhi or Kolkata in case you wanted to order your own hammered-silver dagger handle.

It was still raining; visited the grounds, in the rain; visited the gardens, in the rain; got back on my bike and continued west. Across the Chain Ferry at Cowes, then along to Yarmouth on roads which were starting to get a bit hilly, out on the Victorian pier, and through to Totland.

It was much earlier than I'd expected, the YHA hadn't opened yet, so I locked up my bike and walked down to the Needles park and back. Supper at a nearby pub - the hostel serves food, but it has to be ordered substantially in advance and 7pm was far too late - then back to watch the last ten acts of Eurovision. I think Germany was a deserving winner, being the only act in other than cod-Eurovision style.

Up on Sunday at six, thinking it was eight; slept on the sofa in the hostel library until breakfast, then off east. This starts off nice and flat, broad open roads, baby rabbits in the fields, old stone churches against bright blue sky; after about fifteen miles of this, it switches into a thigh-straining alternation of pretty clifftop views and pretty seaside views, and continues that way for most of the rest of the circumference. I'd got my speed completely wrong and passed the town where I'd planned to have lunch at about 10:30; ended up eating on the outskirts of Bembridge. Checked my map, retraced my tracks three miles over quite a lumpy hill and visited Brading Roman Villa; a large building with a decent museum, and some attractive astronomy-themed mosaic floors. It seems that the commissioner of the mosaics did not like Emperor Caesar Gallus, and portrayed him, as I am sure he had been portrayed since primary school, with a chicken's head.

After that, retraced my tracks again, round the harbour at St Helen's, downdowndown into Seaview and upupup downdowndown into Ryde, and jumped into the municipal swimming pool for half a kilometre, to cool myself down if nothing else. Malaysian supper, and out like a light, in what was now, in my better mood, a pleasingly retro B&B.

Monday dawned; after the pleasantly communal single-sitting breakfast, caught the hovercraft to Portsmouth (a little disappointing since you have to sit inside and the windows are small and grubby), looked in at the cathedral and the tiny hidden-in-a-corner Falklands War memorial, and bought a ticket to the dock museums. Stayed at the docks all day; HMS Warrior, a trip round the harbour narrating the states and purposes of the many haze-grey hulls, the Mary Rose museum which had interesting artefacts but where the ship itself is still being preserved elsewhere by processes incompatible with visitors, tasty pancakes, and HMS Victory.

The big warships were surprisingly spacious in the way that I remember the Great Britain in Bristol being surprisingly cramped: hammocks are clearly better than cabins for this. I liked the elaborate arrangement of brass strips inlaid in Warrior's deck for swivelling the swivel-gun.

At 4:30 I got a train back to London, cycled more competently from Waterloo to King's Cross, and back in Cambridge by nine. Really a very good bank-holiday outing.

The routes: Saturday and Sunday.

I am older than my new MP; indeed, I was in the year above him at primary school.

I have a couple of computers running ubuntu 9.04, and two others running 8.04, all attached to a gigabit switch attached to an ethernet-to-wifi bridge bridged to a little Buffalo ADSL-router-box connected to the internet.

The little Buffalo ADSL-router-box has a DHCP server, which is set to hand out particular fixed IP addresses to the MAC addresses of my computers; I have /etc/hosts files on all the machines saying things like '172.26.200.43 cow'. For the 8.04 machines, this works fine.

For the 9.04 machines, the address assignment is ignored entirely. However, something (which I think is zeroconf) talks to the ADSL-router-box and causes it to set things up in its DNS, meaning that I can say 'ssh node2@cow.local' and get to the machine called cow, whose IP address is however not 172.26.200.43 (and indeed changes every 24 hours).

How do I go about turning this off, so that the computers keep the addresses that I have assigned for them in the DHCP server on the router-box rather than daily going through some complicated protocol to negotiate a wrong address that keeps changing ?

Extracts from /var/log/syslog that might be relevant are at http://pastebin.com/T0rLdrc1

There has been a large and annoyingly-located tree stump in my garden for some considerable time.

With the aid of my brother, a bow-saw, a pick-axe, a spade, and a great deal of time, I have finally achieved

VICTORY!

This is an eland, the largest antelope; named after the Dutch word for 'moose'. The fields of southern Africa contain a striking variety of medium-sized browsing and grazing herbivores, generally listed under the heading of 'bok'; click below to see seven other kinds. As always, click on any picture to get a bigger version.

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This photograph, students, was taken at 1238 Dubai time on March 13th from seat 47A of Emirates flight 763, which had taken off from Dubai airport en route to Johannesburg almost exactly two hours earlier. The aircraft was proceeding southwards oven the Yemen at approximately 900kph at an altitude of ten thousand metres; our operator used a 27-millimetre focal length lens on a Nikon D50, and the aircraft crossed the coast between al-Hajaf and al-Bahiyah approximately twenty-one minutes later. Today's exercise should be no great problem for you: find the confluence of river canyons at the bottom on Google Maps, and tell me how you did it.

Once you have given up in frustration, marvel at the strange things one finds in the desert; this picture was taken about twenty minutes after takeoff, the point of the teardrop is at 24.144N 55.923E, near the UAE/Oman border at the town of Al-Ain - note that there's nothing on the Google map in that location, though a good deal on the satellite picture. There's been a fair amount of new construction since the Google Maps satellite image was taken)

and the amazing shapes of the terraced hills of Ethiopia (taken about an hour after the Yemeni canyon image, and looks as if it must be somewhere around 9.7N 42.5E, but the season's different on the Google Earth images of that bit of Ethiopia and I haven't a clue how to make a more exact match)

I'm sitting in a large two-storey thatched building; if I turn round, I can see the flood-swollen Zambezi river, and if I go down to the bar and look left I can see in the middle-distance the great plumes of spray rising from Victoria Falls. This morning, looking further left, a three-metre crocodile was briefly visible a couple of metres below the deck.

Both great waterfalls that I've visited have been more than worth it - I'm going back to the Falls as soon as I send this, we only got half an hour there yesterday and there are lots of paths to explore. There's a bridge across the gorge, where your visibility is reduced to zero by surging spray, it's like a constant version of the worse squall in the worst thunderstorm you've ever experienced. Probably three thousand tons a second of water crashing down over the better part of a mile of cliff.

I'll try to get round to doing photo-a-day posts sometime when I'm back in England; African Internet isn't terribly good, though mobile coverage is amazing - the guide taking us in a mokoro (a sort of two-person fibreglass punt) through the lily-flecked reed-beds of the Okavango delta was able to ring his girlfriend from the deserted island where we pitched our tents. I carefully didn't bring my phone.

The tents are spacious and well-ventilated, though removing sand from tents is hard and we've been in the Kalahari desert most of the last week; the days are hot - the time around lunchtime uncomfortably so - and the nights not cold enough to need a sleeping bag. We've mostly got up with the sun at 5:30, and not minded it.

I measured the bath-plug carefully as 41mm base outside diameter, and wandered to town. Mackays sold me a beautiful inch-and-three-quarters stainless-steel bath plug with rubber O-ring for £4.58: they had sold out of cheap long-nosed pliers but I was able to borrow some, and the new plug is now fitted and shines in watertight splendour.

Maybe the best of all possible worlds would not have included the spectacular hailstorm that I got caught in walking over to pick up the pliers, but such is life, and ceb had a fluffy purple towel ready as soon as I opened her door.

There will be gratuitous shiny photos when BT have fixed my ADSL and I don't have to post from the iPhone, but at their present rate of progress it may be fixed by Easter.

I asked on the Internet for axe-wielding maniacs.

Twice.

Did I get a single maniac? Whether with an axe or otherwise? No.

I got through two and a half structural roots in about forty minutes, and am now quite zonked. Also, I bought enough biscuits to feed an army of lumberjacks and now I have to eat them myself.