Gritting

So, my winter job as a farmer, now that I'm not morning milking, is gritting duty. This means, if the weather is cold enough, I get a phone call at an ungodly hour and have to grab my tractor and gritter and go out and grit the roads.
This weekend the weather has gone from bad to worse, and since Friday I've been out gritting each morning.
So, here are some pictures...

Trip to Larchfield

So, today we went over to Larchfield to look at their piggies. After a reasonably long drive, which involved getting ever so slightly lost, we arrived at their shop/coffee bar. There was some negotiations with the tea lady, who wanted to give us 1 tiny pot of tea for 4 cups, we had our tea break.
Then it was off to look at the piggies. They were down an ever so slightly muddy track about a kilometre. There were a number of pens, made up of electric fence and pig house thingies, with sows, piglets and a big boar.
Sadly the camera I brought with me, my dive camera, broke... Well, for some reason it refuses to focus... Sometimes it says its focused, and isn't and sometimes it says it can't focus.... Weird.. So I didn't manage to get any pictures of the piggies.
Larchfield is a little bit of a strange place. Some of the buildings look very Camphill, but the place doesn't feel like Botton at all... There are no coworkers anymore, everyone working there is an employee, so I think there isn't so much of an impulse to help out above and beyond as it were.
The farmer, or one of them, called Dave, also an employee said he works so much overtime, as he's running a farm, but it's all unpaid.
Was a strange experience, and hopefully not a vision of a future in Botton.

It's just my luck

So, Falcon Far, has increased back up to 2 full time farmers, and we gained an additional part time coworker, who can share the weekends with me, or at least that's the intention.
Dispite that, I've managed 2 whole days under the new system before ending up with a crazy high temperature... Great!
So it's back to bed for me.

Falcon Farm

So, I thought I'd post some pictures of my animals on Falcon. First of all we have some beef cows, they're Aberdeen Angus cows.
Then we've got piggies. We've got a mixture of Saddleback pigs, Gloucester Old Spot, and Tamworths.
We've got a bunch of sheep and some geese as well.
In the tea break room we've got an animal that isn't quite one of the stock... He or she (I'm not sure...) is called Whisky, and it's a cat.

Geese chase the sheep :)

The other day I moved half my lambs, the other half decided that they were going to be silly and not come into the field.
So in the end I just left the other half in the field until I have some more people.

The lambs I managed to move are in with the geese, and they're not exactly best of friends... It's not as bad as when you put geese with cows (the cows just straight up kill them).
So, I fed the sheep, and the geese came over and got interested... They then proceeded to chase the occasional sheep... Some of the sheep weren't having any of it, but some got a little scared.

Bale Spike for a tractor

Another mod for Farming Simulator 2013. This is a bale spike that can be attached to the link arms. Allows you to transport 2 bales at once… Makes moving bales from the field a little bit easier without having to load the blue trailer.
There is a slight bug at the moment that it’s quite difficult to get the bales off the spikes… But if you’re just selling them, its not so much of an issue.

Fun stuff.
== Download ==

and on LS Planet: http://ls-planet.com/mod/bale-spike-for-a-tractor 

Front Loader Implement Carrier

This is a tool that allows implements to be attached to the front loader. Why might this be useful you may ask? Well, if you want to load up the blue trailer for example, with a seeder, a fertilizer and a mower (I'm sure there are reasons!) you can pop this baby on, attach the implement to it and drop it on the trailer.


You can even do silly things like this

== Download ==
Also on LS Planet: http://ls-planet.com/mod/frontloader-implement-carrier

Back in action...pretty much

So, after a few days of being off ill, I'm pretty much back in action. It was an interesting few days, running a farm on your own while you're ill is not the easiest thing to do... With a little help though, we got there in the end.
One of my villagers has been complaining all week about a silage bale we brought down for feeding. It was a left over from last year, and was a bit rotten... Every day, at least once, he tells me how it is too rotten and that I should get another one. Ah well, we finally fed it all now, to some rather upset cows, and got down a slightly nicer quality bale.
The piggies have been behaving themselves, mostly. The little ones that were bought in from outside still do not seem to be growing much at all... Slightly disconcerting. They also keep squeezing through their feeding trough and then running around the farm yard... Ah, piglets will be piglets...

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:

Busy day…

So, today was the day of bringing in. I started off at 5am with morning milking, nothing spectacular there.

First thing after that I went turning the hay:

At 12ish I got the Side Rake from Botton Farm and began rowing up the fields:

Beautiful rows there

These rows were then picked up by Forage Wagon:

Me with a full one:

In the end we were foraging right into the night, and tractor lights came in very handy:

In the end Hans turned up around 10:30 with his forage wagon and tractor, and we did the last couple of rows together, had a little race (which I so won!) and then I brought in the last row of hay for the night at 11:30PM, long, but good day!

Sad news

Well, they say when the farmer goes away, one animal will die… Sadly for us that turned out to be true, one of our little calfies didn’t make it.

This is him in better times:

He was our first bull calf this year, we’ve had 6 or 7 heifer calves so far… And we were thinking of keeping him to be the next bull.

Not sure why he died, he got weaker and weaker, then collapsed in his pen and lay there all day. Tom tried to revive him with warm milk, and I opted for a electrolyte and glucose pack, but neither brought him back to full health and he passed away while I was out mowing the next 2 fields (Small and Big Bank Fields, 0.8ha and 1ha respectively).

Poor little guy, he was a real cutie, when we milked his mother he would be in the milking parlour too and lick and nibble peoples ears, or noses depending on which he could get to….

Hay making–Mowing

So, on Saturday we started mowing. I started off on Swedish Fence Field (1.85 hectares) on Saturday (21st), and ran on in there until it got dark around 10:30. Then I tried to switch the lights on, and realised that the lights didnt work… So I trudged back to the farm and got the fuses out and my volt metre and went through the fuses, I replaced one and the lights came on briefly, but then I found out that the alternator (the bit that charges the battery) was dead, and the battery was completely flat, so my dear little tractor (actually a big tractor) was dead in the water. I started again on Sunday morning, and borrowed Botton Farms tractor to jump start mine, but it didn’t work, so in the end we rolled the tractor down the hill to the barn, and put it on charge.
I then borrowed the Falcon farm tractor, but realised that the mower wouldn’t go on, so I waited for a bit till the battery was charged on our tractor, and used that. We got that field mowed, but the mower kept breaking, and the blades kept popping out, which while the thing is running at full speed, the loose blade then smashes into the blade holder, so I kept having to file out a part of the holder because it got bent, then part of Gully Meadow Field (1.17ha), then the mower broke completely. So I went and borrowed Botton Farms mower, which was on our little blue tractor.

Botton Farm’s mower was amazing, so smooth and fast, I managed to cut the entire of Gully Meadow Field in the same amount of time it took me to repair our mower whenever it broke.
Ooh, and I saw a deer:

New House (Temporary)

So, my dear girlfriend and I have taken on a house in Botton Village now for a month. The house is called Gean, it's very much nice and lovely. We've got 2 Villagers there at the moment, and we're just taking it on temporarily as they're looking to close the house and rehouse the villagers. Anyways, it should be a good bit of fun to run the house, the paper work is already piling up, but I shall pioneer onwards!
-Skipper out!

We went to see the Olympic torch in Whitby…

So, I’ve finally got some free time to update this dear blog of mine, so I’m just going through my photographs to see what I’ve actually been doing, this is the top of the list…

So, we set off at 8:50 from Botton to go to Sandsend to see the torch as it went through at 9:30… Sadly it takes more than that to get there, and dispite my bestefforts to fly faster than the speed of sound in a people carrier, we got stuck behind huge amounts of traffic:

The torch is somewhere in front of us!

Anyways, thanks to some sneaky driving, and a bit of knowlege of the roads in Whitby I managed to get around in front of the torch as it went down one side of Pannet park, and I went down the other. I got stuck in traffic at the bottom of the hill by Bagdale, but all my passengers jumped out and ran off to see the torch. After they’d seen it my mum came back and relieved me of driving, my clutch foot was getting tired, so I grabbed my 300mm lens and ran off to see if I could find a decent vantage point.

The torch was supposed to be getting on the train, so I got behind the station into the Coop carpark, and stood on a bin, and was able to get some shots of the torch with the big zoom lens:

The guy in the suit must’ve got a better picture, but he was with the press, so that’s cheating….

A lot of crowds turned out to see the torch too:

And I got one final shot of the torch bearing train:

There was another guy from the press I’m guessing, not sure, he had a very expensive camera… He decided he was going to get a shot from the rails, but a policeman saw him and he got a good bollocking.

The only downside was that I jumped over a bin and then a railing straight after, landed badly and bust my knee…

Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary Edition Review

So, when Halo Combat Evolved Anniversary Edition came out (Woa, that really is a mouthful… Lets just call it the Halo 1 Remake) I preordered and got it a day or so after the release date (It’s cos I live in the middle of nowhere…)
I played the first level on Pillar Of Autumn straight off, and thought it was class just to have a Halo 1 that looked like Halo Reach (Almost…). Time limits due to my work on the farm meant that I couldn’t finish playing any more than the first level and it sat dormant on my desk for a few months. I was hoping to play some at Christmas, but Skyrim was big on my play list, and somehow Halo got pushed to the back. Anyways, I’ve recently found myself with a bit more spare time in the mornings before breakfast and started to play again. This was helped by the fact that I’ve been ill in bed for 2 days and have managed to get some more time into Halo due to that.
So, I’ve finally completed it, i wussed out and did it on Normal, not Legendary… One day maybe…. If I end up in prison serving life mayby…. Unlikely.
So, the game… Well, I played the original Halo quite a few times, first on the PC waaay back.. (2004 maybe?) and again on the Xbox 360 with some friends and I’ve loved it, classic Halo, great game. Storyline is epic, coop play is good fun;  All round good game. The remake is pretty much the same, same storyline, coop is still good, but added to that are epic graphics from the Halo Reach engine. Very much nice and lovely.
There are some downsides though, First is that they reduced the number of players for Coop from 4 down to 2… Which means I can’t play it with 2 of my friends… It’s a shame, but not a massive problem. The graphics aren’t quite up to Halo Reach standards, but they’re close, the guns don’t look quite as nice and polished as in Reach, and it would’ve been nice if they’d added the DMR…But that’s not really in keeping with the Halo 1 remake. The one big problem I had was with the sound, many many times I had one audio track over the top of another one, was really annoying in the final cutscene when there was supposed to be sad, epic end music, it was overlayed with the action music from the previous scene…
If you’re a real Halo fan, then I would recommend getting this game, if you’ve played Halo 1 and the rest but aren’t really a great fan, not really worth getting, it’s just a better looking Halo 1 with better graphics…And achievements… And skulls….
All in all though, class game. It’s Halo 1… Can’t really go wrong there… Just want a redux Halo 2 now….
I’d give it a 7/10, it was as good as I was expecting, a remake of Halo 1, there is nothing new or groundbreaking that warrent a higher score though. Maybe if you completed it you could get all the nice stuff from Halo Reach in.. Customizable gear and awesome weapons, then it would get a 9/10 maybe..
Halo ODST is still my favourite...

Teasing Star a little bit…

So, I’m currently working on some fencing in one of the fields near the back of the dale, and afterwards we usually bring the cows in around 3:30PM for milking. One afternoon I decided that I’d put my work gloves on the cows horns, just to see if I could….

So we now have  a cow that looks a little bit like a Moose or Reindeer. She doesn’t seem hugely impressed….

I tried last summer with my hat in Botton Farm, on one of their cows (Cherry) but she didn’t really do anything exciting, and the hat didn’t fit on her head…

Cows go out

So, the cows have been going out in the day time for a week and a bit now, but now finally all the young stock are out too, for the summer. Hopefully they won't be coming in until November time or so, we shall see. Should save a bit of time on routines.