Home

Welcome in!

Welcome to my cave! I am acra, the owner of this site. I haven't really got much to put up here, but fancied the idea of creating a site - so, I made this place. It's not much, but gives a basic background to me and what I'm up to these days; a good place for family and friends to get in touch with me and one another via my forum.

A Bit About Me

Well, I'm a kinda crazy fool that loves most outdoor pursuits: climbing, walking, canoeing etc. and as a result have enrolled on a college course at Bicton that encompasses all these sports and more: an Outdoor Leisure Diploma (more on that later though). I love computers too - though due to time and interests, I'm not using computers that much unless really bored or for internets.

I've still kept all the stuff I wrote up about my first car (the old Proton), but Now I've got my brand new sparkly C1, I've got the all-new photos and details! All my old photos can still be found on my Flickr Account:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/acras_cave/

As you may be able to tell, I absolutely love driving anywhere and everywhere. On my driving travels I have began to take videos, which once edited will be posted on YouTube with an embedded link on the Car page under a new section called videos.

News and Updates

November 04 2007
Sorry about my lack of updates for months, alot has been happening! Firstly, the observant amongst you will notice my new web template, again curtosy of the excellent http://www.oswd.org/(a free web template place).

In the end, I didn't go to treejumpers for very long. They worked us all for ridiculous hours, tedious work - after completely changing around our contract to make us essentially self-employed and not protected by several laws.
Cut a long story short, after a week I left (much to their annoyance), as did my friend Tom. We ended up helping out voluntarily at a camp/walk for my old primary school for three days, before going our separate ways - I ended up at a place called Blackland Farm, which paid reasonably but I would have to get my own food and pay for accomodation.
After a fair amount of time working there, I left in good spirits being offered to come back next summer season - and after having bought myself a NavMan n280i (or something) satellite navigation system (which is really good, and well-useful) and also attached a spoiler to the rear of my car - the first of a list of mods I have done/will do to my car.
All in all, it was a good summer work placement - although it's left doubts in my mind as to whether I want to continue in that line of work.

A fair amount of other stuff's gone on between then and now, but I haven't really got the time to post it all, as much is fairly trivial. I will say however that Dad was a bit silly the other day - and filled his nice, year-old C2 diesel to the brim with petrol! He called me out, as I'm the only one in our family to have AA cover (luckily it's transferrable between cars, and covers anything I'm in). Long story short, the petrol apparently did something to the car's diesel tank, and as well as having to be drained (he didn't start it, but needed to put the ignition on to be towed - AA's mistake I think - which primed the pumps and system with the petrol) it also had to have a replacement fuel tank installed.
Needless to say, that was a fairly large bill!

Also, I have had to put two front tyres on my car after they nearly went bald - at about 14,400 miles. Dad keeps going on at me that they should be lasting longer, despite the fact that nobody I've spoken to who owns a C1, Aygo or 107 have managed significantly further. All I have to do to shut him up is mention the fuel tank... my tyres may have cost me £94, but they were going to have to be replaced sooner or later regardless!

Finally for now, I've been feeling annoyed with my C1 and it's lack of "feel-like-my-car"-ness for various reasons, but at last I feel like the car's mine - which has got to be a good thing!

Other updates today: Car page

May 18th 2007
At last my brand new C1 came! We had a whole load of confusion as to whether it would be red or dark blue, and whether or not I could be bothered to wait until mid-July to get the model with aircon. In the end, we had a look at the 5-door model instead, as it turned out they had an aircon-fitted dark grey C1 in their holding area near London. It still took ages to come, but now it's here - so I'm happy :)

May 5th 2007
Last week I went to Easthampstead Park near Reading for an archery training week. The week was really annoying, the guy argued with me alot because of my technique, but I passed the course anyways. My car went well on the week, although my right front window stopped working properly. Got it booked in yesterday to get it fixed, and the guy came back saying that he could fix it by Wednesday - and he'd noticed that the clutch was slipping. Grr. This car's costing me more money than it's worth to keep it, so after the whole of three weeks I'm gonna trade it in, use some money kindly provided by my Grandma and by myself a Citroën C1 brand new instead!

April 18th 2007
Rejigged the car page, makes it a little better. Fixed the dates problem on this page (whoops, it said May not April!). Also, added this nifty gadget that calculates age from a given Date of Birth - can be found here.

April 13th 2007
Yesterday, I bought myself a car! Details are on that linked page, as are many pictures (not 56k friendly though!). Today I took the car for a nice long test run of about 30 miles; the trip to college and back. The car handled brilliantly for it's age, and was good fun to be in - it barely even struggled up hills! College should be better now that I don't need to get a bus for even one day of the week, and it should be awsome fun to be not-isolated down at treejumpers.

April 10th 2007
Well, I've just finished a week-long training course for treejumpers; a course which involved a group of us potential instructors being instructed on how to run each of their sessions that we would be able to (highropes, lowropes, survival, crate stacking, orienteering, paintball marshalling and the all-important catering and cleaning!), so we can go back in early May for unpaid work. Pay starts in June, but there's a chance of paid work during the May season.
The worst part about treejumpers was the intense feeling of isolation - it was a good feeling for the first few days, but after a while it became annoying that I had to rely on other people to drive me places - something that would become a real chore during the summer placement, as the nearest anything is several miles away.

March 17th 2007
As you can tell, I haven't really added much to the site for a while - I have a lot that I need doing at the moment, so I'm kinda buisy. I will add this short thing though (along with the site re-template): I've got a work placement starting in May, and I'll be going off to a company called treejumpers to do instructor work for a few months! Should be ace...

December 10th 2006
Ten Tors accounts added and in place, I was contemplating adding an account of Abbots Way - although that won't come until I've caught up with my Assignment Work....

November 23rd 2006
Soon I'll be adding in my Ten Tors accounts and stuff, and may add some more stuff around the place.
The forum seems to be a little dead at the moment, I need to find ways of adding excitement to it and this site to attract more frequent visitors.

October 31st 2006
Recently updated the forum skin and added a working image link to the top left of the forum that has my own image, and now links to this page rather than the phpbb one! Hopefully this is more convenient and fits in with with the rest of the forum.

October 28th 2006
I've updated the 'Hobbies - Walking' section to now include a larger Abbot's way description with an added kit list. This is also available here, and I shall endevour to get this included better into the general site.

October 9th 2006
Finally got around to changing my website layout, and now it looks much brighter and cleaner. Enjoy!

June 9th, 2006
Hooray! My first external hosted website is up and running! Thanks very muchly to our kind host at Akoss Hosting I have this site, and the attached forum.