Goonhilly

Gooonhilly satellite earth station, in the depths of Cornwall, has some lovely antennae. Arthur was the first parabolic dish for satellite communications, built in the early sixties to work with Telstar. He is beautiful, built from a modified design from Jodrell Bank. He is still operating, but without human assistance - bouncing banking information around, rather less glamourous than his original purpose. Guinevere was the third dish built, and is similar to Arthur, while Merlin is the largest dish and points straight up at the sky. He is much lighter than Arthur, depsite being larger, as the engineers had by then calculated that aluminium was strong enough to use for the dishes, rather than the steel used in the early models.

The antennae are as romantic to me as their lovely names from Arthurian legends. Unfortunately, the site has been converted into a theme park, which is a great loss.

Storm Troopers

On Saturday, Tim and I met up with Adam at the British Museum. We spent several hours wandering around the Asian and Egyptian things, and then walked around the Chinese garden outside in the rain. Leaving the museum, we took refuge in a games shop, and whilst browsing their goods, I wondered aloud where the geohash point of the day was. To my surprise, the guy behind the counter produced a large box, and announced that we had found the geocache point! I was very pleased with our stumbled-upon geocache, and signed the book.

Feeling hungry, we went to look for food, and I remembered the last time I had headed out into London in search of some sustenance, with my friend John. On that occasion, we had found a lovely Italian place, and I thought rather wistfully about it, and hoped that we might find something similar. Lo and behold, five minutes later we found the exact same restaurant! It was just as yummy as before.

The general awesomeness of the day continued when we saw four Storm Troopers outside Forbidden Planet opposite as we were eating. When a bunch of balloons accidentally got free and floated into the air, they pretended to shoot them down. As soon as we had finished, I dragged Tim and Adam across there, just in time to see the Storm Troopers leave their post. I trailed after them, and when one of the publicity people with them saw me, she made them stop and I got my photo taken surrounded by all four of them! Needless to say, I had a huge grin on my face.

We then made Adam try bubble tea, and concluded the day with a walk around Covent Garden, where we saw a guy who balanced a bike on his head, bought a single bright red gerbera, and spent an hour hunting for the shop Cyber Candy (which we eventually found thanks to a kindly gent who showed us the way, but did not tempt any of us with its artificially-coloured, artificially-flavoured American sweeties).

Later on, Tim and I had pizza with Pete and Matt, and played Settlers of Catan, which I very almost won, but victory was cruelly snatched from under my nose by Tim.

That was a very good day indeed.