Down for the count

Oh great, so my sore throat from yesterday decided it was going to kick in, leaving me with a temperature and the inability to talk... So this morning I just did the routines and went back to bed... This afternoon my betters half helped me out and did the whey rub and routines for me. Oh I am a lucky man having her :) lets hope it's better tomorrow.

First day of being the main farmer

So, my "boss" is on holiday for 2 weeks and I'm now the main farmer on falcon. It was a pretty in eventful first day, we put up the beginnings of a new hay rack up, and I moved one of the wood boxes with the front loader. Pretty relaxed day, though I'm left with a heluva sore throat... Hope it doesn't get too bad for tonorrow.

My beautiful herd

The light this morning was so pretty, i just had to take a photograph of the herd. Sorry for the poor quality, my phone camera is... Well, it's a phone camera.

First day on Holiday: Boat

So, I'm currently sitting on the top deck of a P&O ferry, I think it's called the Pride of Hull... Though it could be the pride of Rotterdam... We're somewhere off the coast of Holland, and its 5:30 in the morning. Sadly I don't have a phone with GPS so I don't know exactly.....

We're on our way to Rotterdam, and should be arriving in a couple of hours. We've been traveling all night from Hull where we started out last night at about 7:45pm. It's been pretty smooth sailing, the sea looks flat from up here (it's about 30m to the water from here.. Is quite high up...) there is a bit of a, what feels like a North Westerly wind, though I don't know the heading if the boat, but its not causing much swell. The bunks are pretty small and well, adequate...

I'm sitting on the "SunDeck" which is at the top of the boat, overlooking the ocean as it slides by, the moon is on my right hand side, and I can see the light it casts on the ocean.

I'll be honest the iPad camera is a bit rubbish...

Well, I've just moved over to the other side of the boat, Port side, and one inside because its freaking freezing... I can see the beginnings of a sunrise to the east, which tells me we're on a course of about 150... Roughly south for ye scurvy landlubbers, or people who don't know how many angles there are in a circle.... (360 by the way.... 360/0 being North, going around clockwise, 90 being east, 180 being South, 270 being West...) ... Sunrise:

We're passing, what by the anti collision lights appears to be a pyramid.... But on closer inspection as it moves into the light on the sea it seems to be a tanker ship, and now we've caught the bow wave a bit and are rocking gently back. And forth, can't be more than 1 degree over.

So, we've just had an announcement over the intercom that its 7 in the morning local time, in 3 languages... Poor Ulli, she's still asleep in our bunk.. Not anymore me thinks...

Well, we'll be arriving in port in a couple of hours, where I'll try and save and send this...somehow. Wifi anyone? So, good morning world

Age Of Empires 2 The Conquerors Colour Fix

Hello folks, it's your friendly neighbourhood farmer here...
Taking a break from farming this afternoon to get my head around a little problem I've been having.
Some of you might remember a little game called Age of Empires 2. 
I recently started playing it again, and noticed something off, the colours in the game were really freaking weird!

Actually this isn't what it looks like exactly, I merged a screenshot which for some reason only showed the weird colours over black, with one that worked with the correct colours to make an almost broken one

The sea is pink and purple and the grass is red and the trees just look weird!
I searched around a bit and found that many people have this problem, and apparently it's a problem with Windows 7 etc.
So, I've made a fix for it, it's a registry fix, apparently there is one coded into Windows to deal whatever causes the bug (This guy explained it pretty well) Since I didn't fancy running a tool that edits my registry, in case it's a virus or something, I basically made my own registry entry.

So, here is how I did it, first I ran Age of Empires 2 (When I refer to AOE2, I mean AOE2 Conquerors expansion by the way... I didn't try it with AOE2 normal). I then ALT-TAB out and fire up the registry editor (search for regedit in the run/searchy bar thing)
In here is the entry we're looking for, it's under:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\DirectDraw\MostRecentApplication

Here you want 2 things, it's easiest to print screen and paste it into paint for this, you want the ID and the name, it'll look something like that, though my ID is different from this:

ID in DWORD (32 bit): 0Dfc5342

And the name is: age2_x1.exe

So then I made a new key here:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\DirectDraw\Compatibility\

I called mine aoe1_x1 just because that's the name of the game exe. Then in here you want a DWORD (32 Bit) Value (called ID) and paste in your ID, and a String Value called Name and stick in the exe name, so age2_x1.exe

You'll want to check your ID though, I made that one up.
But anyways, here is one I made:
If you want, create a blank .reg file and copy this into it, but change the xxxxxxxx next to Dword: into your ID you got from the first part


Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\DirectDraw\Compatibility\aoe2_x1]
"Flags"=hex:00,08,00,00
"Name"="age2_x1.exe"
"ID"=dword:xxxxxxxx


Then run it (Merge) and it should update your registry accordingly. 

And this is what it looked like in the end! Lovely eh?

Tada! Looks beautiful!

Potato Harvest

So, we’ve started to harvest our early potatoes. The gardener thinks there will be around 600kg of potatoes in our little plot, would be nice! Should last all of Botton for around a month…. We’re hungry farmers!

Anyways, I decided they look very beautiful, ginger light brown as one of the villagers says.

Very nice!

High Farm Contractor…

It seems today that I’ve become something of a contractor…

Yesterday night my girlfriend brought our big Blue tractor back from the Farm Workshop, and hopefully it’s been repaired fully now.

So, this morning after morning milking I hooked up the tedder to our blue tractor and headed out into the field to turn again..

On the way I hit a huge bump and did this to the fuel gauge:

Oopsala…

Anyways, after I’d turned the field, Justin from Honey Bee Nest asked me if I could go over and turn his fields as well, so I went over and turned 4 of his 9 cut fields, Hans and he did the others.

I then went back to return my 2 fields after, then he asked me if I could come over again and do some rowing up with the hay bob, so I finished my fields and went over.

Aww, look at those beautiful rows

After that I went to see about getting our contractor pay, eg tea and cake… They didn’t have either, but flapjacks… Almost as good

Then I headed back to High Farm and put the frontloader on: