Review: Phillips inear Virtual Surround Headphones

So, in my everlasting quest to find the perfect sound I've got some new headphones. It was also to try and see if the ipod issue I've been having, with the ipod pausing randomly, was due to the ipod its self, or if it was the headphones.
So, I got the Phillips Virtual Surround headphones from HMV (£19.99). Apparently they've got some sort of outside resonance speaker... No idea.
Anyways, this little speaker thing on the edge looks a bit naff, looks like you've got the headphones the wrong way in your ear....
To be honest the review is overall quite negative... The headphones were bought to be a replacement for my Sennheisers, as I thought that's where the problem lies, but the sound quality is terrible, no where near the Sennheisers. The ipod pausing issue still remains as well, so overall not a good pair of headphones! Don't buy them, get the cheaper and better sound quality Sennheisers.
Piece of junk.

Job swap

On Wednesday the 19th,as a part of the foundation course we had a job swap. (i'm writing this after as I've no internet for a few days and my phone internet struggles to post pictures.) A list went around the young coworkers and we could sign up to a different workshop. Since I'm a dairy farmer, I figured that the creamery would be a pretty interesting experience as we could see where our milk goes.

It was pretty interesting, we started out with a tour of the creamery, with a look at the cheese stores, where they have all the cheeses maturing, some for periods of 12 months! (for a mature chedder cheese) apparently the mature cheeses sell better outside Botton as peoples are after the more exotic flavours rather than mild plain cheeses, I presume plain cheese is the most common in supermarkets then.
Within Botton people seem to think the mature cheeses are too strong, so opt for the milder continental cheeses like gauda and my favorite, bree.
In one of the refrigerated rooms at about 10 degrees were the bree cheeses maturing, you could see the beginnings of the white penicilliun fur beginning to grow, by the weekend they should be almost all white.

We actually began the process of making a batch of bree, first we pasturised the milk by heating it up to 65 degrees (i think, around there anyway)
After this it was held at this temperature for a while and then cooled to a mid 30 degrees. The bacteria strains were then added and allowed to grow for 45 minutes, then the rennet was added and the mixture became thick. We then cut it up to get the whey out from the cheese, and 3/4 were drained away.
The rest was then packed into cheese molds and more whey was drained off. This is where my involvement in the process ended, so I'm not sure where it went from there.
The rest of the time was spent washing the cheeses, a not especially pleasant job, but one that was good to do with a largeish team.
So yea, creamery was an interesting experience, learned something about where our milk goes, and found out just how long it takes for the milk to become a mature cheese.... The one downside is that it smelled and I have a sensitive nose...

Snow again?

Well, the weather this year is just plain weird.. its now mid-april, and we're experiencing more snow....
Well, when I woke up this morning the wind was blowing, and howling around New Botton Farm. I had a walk back to High Farm in the snow, blowing around like crazy. Got ever so slightly cold.
Now, in the wfternoon, the sun has come out and the temperature has gone up to 7 degrees, some very weird weather. Problem is that the fields are too wet to take the cows on, and we're running out of hay. We've started feeding silage from another farm to the cows, and we're going to have to buy in more, going to be a big drain in our budget....

Lifeventure 300ml Thermal Mug

Okay, bit of a mini-review here, just got myself a new coffee (well, for me Yorkshire Tea Gold) mug. It's from Millets and the cost was  £12. So, the outside construction is coloured stainless steel, and I think its a continuous formed piece forming the inside too, and insulation is through a vacuum around the chamber.
The lid is a pressure release thing of plastic and steel, so if your tea gets cold and contracts it doesn't grab the lid and never let go.
The tea I made about an hour ago is still too hot to drink, so its a pretty good insulator, no idea how long it'll keep things nice and warm, but it's probably a fair few hours.
They come in a nice wide range of colours, I chose blue, but there is green, brown, blue, red, pink, silver, black and a couple more I don't remember. So yea, nice little tea/coffee mug. Just don't smash them behind a tractor seat or the vacuum breaks...

Another morning week

Now then.
So, I'm nearly at the end of my morning milking week, and the weekend couldn't have come sooner. Have had some very late nights the past week and nice early morning starts. The weekend is a little bitter sweet though, have been looking forward to it all week, but now I find out I'm cooking on Sunday... So there goes ky free time.
There is one thing about work here that I really hate and that is the lack of free time. Before March or so my priority was my work, and therefore I didn't really need free time, but now my priorities have changed towards a personal relationship, and the lack of free time, or rather the unpredictability of getting free time is begining to wear. At the moment I'm in a bit of a bad mood from lack of sleep combined with a lack of free time, so it could well just be that talking. Ah we'll see next week, might all be better then.

Some more photographs from the snow

So, I’m still ill, but the power just came back on, so I decided to take the opportunity to just post some pictures. I took these yesterday during morning routine:

Silhouette of a Chicken! When I opened the barn doors there was the blinding white snow behind me, and the dark barn in front, with a load of straw dust in the air, it would've made an amazing photograph, naturally black and white, high contrast silhouette of me opening a door… But sadly I can’t take photographs of myself and no one else was there.

Back of the barn

 

The clouds were impressive all day.

 

Something I always find pretty, pine trees in the snow, they were a bit far away and I wasn’t really in the mood to walk nearer, plus I was supposed to be working…

One more, from the weekend. We went past a car that clearly looks like it’s stuck on the curb… Rather amusing if it actually is…

Update from the war stricken village of.. Snow! Snow! Not war!

Olé! So, I’m stuck in bed ill at the moment, though luckily we’ve got a backup generator running my house at the minute…

Backup generator you say? Yea… Because of the snow falling on trees that have leaves etc, loads of trees and branches have come down, destroying powerlines throughout Yorkshire. The only confirmed number of houses without power I got was 12,000 houses, though the entire of Whitby and Saltburn were also down, so it could be a few more than that…

Anyways, here out in YO21 we’re not exactly on the top of the list for fixing power lines, and there are still 1700 homes without power:

 

So, how has this affected us? Botton wide there isn’t a huge impact overall, the internet is clearly still up (… Yea, Hi!) because the centre and North Neighbourhoods have big generators capable of powering the whole neighbourhood. All the other neighbourhoods are reliant on their little generators that some houses or farms have.

In the South Neighbourhood we have 2 generators, one gas generator for the farm, and a diesel generator on wheels which can power maybe 2 houses at once…

So, this is our farm generator:

(It can do 16.5A at 240v, apparently…)

However, as you can see, it looks like it was left over from the first world war… And during morning milking it didn’t work at all… Gilberto came and got me out of bed at 7, after he’d spent 2 hours trying to get it to work, and we hand milked our cows…

In the afternoon we spent a lot of time trying to get the generator to work, and finally sort of figured it out, the Farm Workshop had a go and replaced the fuel pipe, and it sort of worked..

We managed to milk with the machines, though only just, when the vacuum pump kicked in the generator really struggled… And occasionally it’d just slow all the way down, switching off the vacuum pump as it did so, the only way to bring it back to life would be to shake the gas bottle… Great designed system!

Anyway, we managed to machine milk them all in the end.

For supper I went out to the industrialised North Neighbourhood to see my mother at first, with their fancy generators, so I actually had power for a bit, charged my phone, which was down to 11% battery… (I’d been switching it on, using the camera and switching it straight back off again, I’m surprised it lasted that long)

I had asked Giberto if he needed me to be available in the morning (This morning) in case everything went wrong, and sadly he said yes, so I had to leave my girlfriend in  her warm house,with her electric lights, and venture back, nursing the beginnings of a cold to my little room with no heating or lights….

I managed to make a herb tea using the gas cooker and a candle… Woo!

Then today I woke up ill, I struggled through part of the morning routine, but was feeling too rough and requested time off… So here I am, nursing some sort of upper respiratory tract infection and hoping it doesn’t go into a headache otherwise I’m likely to be down and out for a week….

…It’s snowing….??!?

So, I had a perfectly good date planned for tonight, with my better half. We were going to go to Farndale valley and have a look at their famous daffodils before they die back.

The weather wasn’t brilliant, the worst I thought was that it was going to be about 2-3 degrees, which is fine, we can just wrap up warm! The weather forecast suggested that the rain would stop around supper time, just the time when we were going, so it all looked grand.

This afternoon I was afternoon milking, and looked out of the parlour window only to see snow flakes falling past the window…… Let me point out that it is the 3rd of April….

Since then the snow hasn’t really eased off at all, which makes everything look very pretty, but kind of scrapped a perfectly good plan.

Sadly all I had on me was my phone camera, but you get the idea