View across the Outer Harbour of Stornoway

Sunday 5 April 2009

Helicopter tragedy - update

The bodies of all the people who died in the helicopter crash off Aberdeenshire last week have now been recovered.

Blogger Community Photo Challenge


Signs of spring
Taken on 27 March 2009 at Stornoway, Scotland (position 58 degrees North, 7 degrees West).

Helicopter tragedy

Search teams have located the wreckage of the Super Puma helicopter in 330 feet of water, off Rattray Head in northeastern Scotland. It went down last Wednesday, with the loss of all on board. Eight bodies were found in the immediate aftermath of the crash, another seven were recovered from the wreckage on the seabed this afternoon. The 16th body is yet to be found. The black box recorders of the aircraft have been retrieved as well.

/AOL

That is me finished for good with AOL. I just had a warning from the Resident Shield on my AVG Virus scanner, saying a Trojan (Trojan horse Agent2.ceg) had been found on my computer. It had infected a file on AdAware, and AVG had shunted it to the virus vault. The Trojan had come in on the back of an unsolicited download from AOL called Triton_uk_2.2.25.1\setup.exe. As I said I have not asked for this b****y download at all.

My apologies for anyone who got plagued by my emails from Bebo.com as well. AOL shunted its user profiles over to Bebo in January, and I cannot cope with yet another social networking site. My account with Bebo will be closed down today. I have quite enough to keep up with on Blogger, Facebook and Twitter.

Sunday 5 April


With thanks to Sugar for providing this image of spring, which is still some way off in the islands. Particularly today, when heavy rain and strong winds are strafing the Hebrides.

Found a story about a youngster in southern England who had told an Facebook contact he had taken an overdose. The girl, in Maryland USA, contacted police. They in turn, through the UK Embassy in Washington and police channels in this country managed to locate the boy in time to get him to hospital for treatment. Makes a difference to the horror story from the last few years when chatters in a chatroom sat by and let someone take their life on webcam.

Northern Madagascar is hopefully bracing itself for tropical storm Jade, which is bearing down on the region. I am dismayed at the differing forecasts; the regional forecasting centre on the French island of La Reunion shows the storm veering south down the east coast of Madagascar, whereas the Pacific-based Joint Typhoon Warning Center sees Jade continuing on a westbound course. I tend to agree with the latter, as JTWC's forecast has been shown to be more accurate over the last day or so.