A return to model building and flying. Part 66
June 2010
Having finally manage to get a solid
state camcorder that doesn't use a really stupid proprietary encoding
on the files it produces. I set off to the UK FF Nationals at the end
of May for a wander round for a few hours. The weather was abysmal with
winds that would not be kind to any form of model flying, let alone FF.
By
noon it was obvious that a lot of
people were beginning to give it up as bad job. But the Bowden Trophy
comp was still going strong much to my amazement! There must be
something to to be said for these vintage designs. with the larger
models coping better on the whole. There where lots of Oooh's and
Ahh's as things lifted, spun, hit tarmac or grass, or vanished off
downwind at alarming rates. I gave up after a couple of hours as
the vintage CL I had wanted to see seemed to have been abandoned, and
made my way home.
The video I had collected was
remarkably good, and a week later after finding and trying out various
suitable video editing software to find what would do what I wanted
satisfactorily on my Linux system, I set about editing it into a
reasonable little piece.
Then disaster struck! I had yet
another hard drive fail. Would you believe, the same make and capacity
as the previous one? this time it was so dead it stopped my whole pc
from booting, even onto the second drive I have in there as a backup.
Only removing the faulty one completely enabled me to recover from the
damage. I have learned from the last fiasco what to back up and where,
so recovery was only half a days work; with most of that taken in
diagnosing what the hell was wrong and waiting for a few hundred
gigabytes of data to transfer.
Only when things had got back to
semi-normality did I realise what was missing. I had backed up
everything except the desktop as I never have anything of consequence
on it. You guessed it! For a couple of days I had kept the temporary
video files I was working on in a folder on the desktop. I had lost the
lot! After completing the video I had also deleted the raw files in
the camcorder the night before, so even that avenue was closed. Stupid!
Stupid! Stupid!
So these handful of stills are all I
have left of that day.
The
CL pictures were taken at the
BMFA Festival of Flight in June. I was too busy flying in the carrier
event to take many pictures. You will notice the difference in quality
between the FF Nat's pictures and the FOF. The latter where taken on
the camcorder I was using for convenience.
FF
Nat's Bowden Trophy
Festival of Flight
