Steamship Sir Walter Scott

Today I attended a special sailing of the Steamship Sir Walter Scott on Loch Katrine.

The sailing was to celebrate the completion of a three year refurbishment project and for the 110 year anniversary of the launch of the steamship. 1899-2009.

Click here for photos of the event.

Click here for Loch Katrine website.

Save Gillies Hill

Today I attended a walk in the Stirling area from Cambusbarron to the Battlefield at Bannockburn in support of "Save Gillies Hill".

Gillies Hill near Cambusbarron is regarded to have played a pivotal role the battle in 1314, when the people who lived on the hill moved towards the battlefield banging pots, pans and anything that made a noise. This in turn scared the remaining English off the battlefield thinking the noise from the Gillies Hill folk was another large Scottish army coming to back up their counterparts on the battlefield.

Gillies Hill itself is now in a battle to survive after quarrying began a number of years ago. This is now on temporary hold after local protests and walks like today must continue to gain maximum publicity to the Save Gillies Hill cause.

Click here from some photos from todays walk.

Click here for more information on Save Gillies Hill.

Cambusbarron Gala Day 2009

I attended our local village Gala Day on Saturday. Thankfully despite the weather forecast for heavy showers it stayed dry all afternoon with some sunny spells, and it looked like a very enjoyable afternoon was had by all that attended.

Heres a link to some photos from Cambusbarron, Stirling Gala Day 2009.

Photos.....

Are You Job Seeking? - If So, Dont Fail Yor First Test!!!

I'm going to re-publish below a blog post I made in November 2007 regarding under paid postage from mostly job-seeking apprentices. Its that time of year again when we receive numerous enquiries per week from job-seeking apprentices. Its good to see young apprentices being pro-active and seeking employment but if you enquire to Stirling Electrical Services Ltd about an apprenticseship, you may not be aware that the minute you post your CV to us, you are actually taking part in our first aptitude test.

- Taking the time and effort to make sure that your important CV actually has the correct postage stamp on the envelope.

The biggest mistake made is enclosing A4 paper into a large envelope and only puting on a small first class stamp - Large envelopes at A4 size require a LARGE 1st class stamp. That's your first test and if you fail this basic task and not bother to find out proper postage prices, it doesn't give us a good first impression of candidates who we will be trusting with potential dangerous electricity.

Here's the blog post from November 2007:-

Attention All Job Applicants - especially apprentices

I am very big on attention to detail, so when it comes to job applicants many fail a very important hurdle before we have even collected their CV from Royal Mail.

Since the introduction of the new postal prices and size of stamps in April 2007, we have had to collect and pay for underpaid letters 16 times from job applicants. Most of the applicants are school leavers looking for an apprenticeship who having printed off their CV and do not want to fold their CV and enclose it in an A4 envelope and then fail to correctly put a large 1st class stamp on the envelope, instead they put on a small normal sized first class stamp. Hence, we receive a note in our normal daily delivery from Royal Mail, saying we have underpaid mail at their depot, we then have to fight our way through traffic, wait in a queue, pay a handling fee of £1.00 plus the remaining underpaid postage price which since April is approaching £25.00.
I know this is a lame blogpost but it just irritates me when people who are trying to impress a prospective new employer, cannot at this initial stage pay that little bit more attention to detail and find out which stamp to use.

Audio Visual Work

I've been kept busy this last week working on audio and lighting equipment at a Visitor Attraction we maintain. The attraction opens next week for the summer season and a lot of the equipment has been switched off for the winter and as well as getting all this equipment up and running again we have took this opportunity to give the equipment a good old spring clean.

Its been fun working with a different type of electrical equipment away from the normal day to day electrical work we carry out.

The photos below show some of the equipment used in this attraction - accent control system, alcorn mp3 players, soundstores, amplifiers and amx controllers. All this equipment is required to play various sounds and narration.

Interesting stuff !!