Mini Travel Log: Seven Sisters, Sussex

Seven Sisters is situated between Seaford and Eastbourne in Sussex. It is a series of chalk cliffs and is a great place for hiking with its rolling hills and offers breathtaking pictures. There are no safety barriers and the cliffs can be as high as 20 over storeys. Children are not recommended at this place. Even adults have to take great care when standing at the very edge of the cliffs. The chalk composition of the cliffs is weathered over time and fragile. It can give way anytime without warning. There is also the element of strong winds. A moment of carelessness will result in a plunge to death.

If you are coming from London, you can take the train from Victoria Station to Eastbourne. A same day return ticket costs 31.60 pounds. You alight in Eastbourne. This town itself is beautiful and has nice beachfront. It is worth to spend half a day here if you can spare some time. Else you can go straight to the visitor's center not far from the train station and buy a day pass for bus. This day pass costs 4.50 pounds for unlimited rides on Brighton and Hove buses. What you are interested on is the 13X tourist trail bus from Eastbourne to Brighton. You can hop onto this bus near the visitor's center or you can hop from the first stop at the beachfront after your little sightseeing detour. Take note there are limited timings for this bus route on weekdays. Only during the weekends they have the hourly sessions. So I suggest you study the timings carefully here and download the correct timetable for weekdays or weekends.

I suggest you alight at Beachy Head so you can start your hiking. You'll be hiking along the cliffs through gentle rolling hills. A casual hike until Birling Gap probably takes around 1-2 hours depending on how long are your photo stops. Take some refreshments at the lodge at Birling Gap and after that you can head North following the road until Sheep Centre and East Dean village. That should wrap up your day and from East Dean, you can take the more regular buses plying on this main road either to Brighton or back to Eastbourne for your return train back to London.

Click on the image for picture gallery

Windows 10 Anniversary Update Crash/Hang

For those having problems with Windows 10 Anniversary update which causes your PC to crash/hang, here's a solution for you. This problem existed when Windows 10 was first introduced and until now, Microsoft still did not fix this problem. This problem normally exists on desktop PCs with multiple hard drives and DVD/Blu Ray drives installed. When Windows 7/8 users tried to upgrade to Windows 10, they will end up with the same crash everytime. And subsequently with every major update which requires a fresh copy of Windows to be loaded, the same crash/hang problem occurs. I have written a detailed solution a year ago which can be found here. I reproduce it below so users can have an ease of reference.

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After hearing all the buzz about Windows 10, I finally jumped into the bandwagon. But I hit a snag during installation. Initially I did not give a thought about it, thinking maybe it was a one off thing. Good thing is that the installation was smart enough to restore everything back after I had to hard reset the computer. So I launched the second time installation. No luck as it encountered the same problem. And so my endless install, reboot and re-install cycle began.

My PC is a self built desktop which passed all the requirement checks done by Windows 10 installation. I never had hardware failure nor crashes (BSOD) before during my last 2 years of running Windows 8. But every time I try to upgrade to Windows 10, it will always crash (BSOD with a sad smiley face) and shown together with the error code of MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION. It always happens during the "Copying file" stage and overall progress at 22%. At this junction, the computer will not restart or do anything. I have to hard reset it and let the computer reboot back to Windows 8.

So I googled up regarding this error code. It returned many results for all the previous Windows versions, but not a single result for Windows 10. Really? No one else has had this problem in their Windows 10 installation? I must be the damn unlucky one. I read up on this specific MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION error code and understand that it generally means there may be a hardware failure itself or caused by other factors like overheating. I recalled back the sequence in my installation and it always crashes during "Copying file" stage. So I presume it may be problems with my RAM, or overheating of motherboard chipsets or hard drive (as huge chunks of data are being copied before it crashes). With this diagnosis, I tried the installation one more time, but pulling out a stick of RAM (making it single channel), pulling off my unnecessary DVD and extra hard drives and then blasting my room air-conditioning to max. Voila! It worked and the installation proceeded smoothly.