Yup.

Maybe with different dates, but the premise is sound.

#Windows8 training at #JohnLewis

Does one feel like dancing? #Roundhouse

Get the message #Starbucks?

A rather good first night at #fishconvention

Raw Meat dropped due to 11pm curfew :-(

Oh no it's not! #fishconvention

Another confident builder, but this time a company

Look carefully at the top and you'll see the old Burton's logo...

It was at this point in the gig #fishconvention

That the keyboard player took a call from Bobby Davro....

To much hilarity!

One of the earliest VC's

Remembered...

Strewth - cycling again

Earlier this year I completed the Big Battlefield Bike Ride for Help for Heroes.  350 miles from near Caen to Dunkirk, the long way round J.

Well, despite clear assertions before I went that I would not repeat the experience, I have completed a Ride to Recovery at Colchester only 38 miles – but in my defence it was only a 10 days or so after a 20mph RTA where my bike was completely written off:

And now, I am signed up for BBBR13 – Paris to London!  The fundraising challenge is slightly bigger (£2,500), so any contributions you can make at Peter's H4H 2013 Bike Ride page will be most gratefully received.

Onwards!

A dreadful hall of shame for cycling in the Armstrong era

Only 3 unambiguous "not implicated in doping" in 7 years once Armstrong is removed from the TDF results.

It looks like the TDF will be annulled in those years.

Thanks to today's Telegraph Sport section.

One of Barcelona's better restaurants

Only spoiled by the Jazz renditions of Queen's We Will Rock You, and Slade's Far Far Away!

It's called Tonorio.

And now Nirvana, Come As You Are!

It's fag and phone break time at #VMWorld

And prize for best stand at #VMWorld goes to

Symantec...

No one died, just early for lunch at #VMWorld!

A couple of hotels from the IKEA range

I think the one on the right is Billy.

Not sure what this says... #vmworld :-)

Interesting choice of DNS servers at #vmworld …

Seems like post 9/11 security theatre has calmed down a little

In at least one location.

Been a long time since I saw an open cockpit door with nobody fussing about securing it.

No longer impressed with your day to day experience of Policing in the UK?

For a possible explanation, then look no further than the latest HMIC report, quoted from this morning's Daily Telegraph app.

"POLICE officers have become unclear about what they are supposed to be doing on the streets, while training focuses on reducing risk rather than creating crime-fighters, inspectors have said.

Some 90,000 officers and staff have their "own individual version of what they think they are there to do and the effect they are meant to have", Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary warned in a report.

Police training featured only one module out of 190 focusing on crime prevention and no evidence that this knowledge is being applied on the ground, it added."  My highlighting.

I am not surprised.

This is not to say that there are not good coppers, just that coppers have not been trained for many years in the things that the general public want.

We want to feel safe in our homes and on the streets, at all hours.

We don't want to feel persecuted when we get in our cars.

We want our belongings to be protected from theft.

That these are not the general perceptions does not mean it is not so; but until perception matches reality there will always be a problem.

Before the storm...

Walberswick beach, noisy sea, noisy wind - a beautifully quiet morning reflection.

This is also not my bike...

Seen off Cav, Wiggo and everyone else at the Tour Of Britain. 

Not my bike!

Cycling in France - a good safety law

As summer draws to an end...

My friends are still on the river as I wind up to a 70m ride for Help For Heroes at Chavasse House, Colchester.

Oops! Olympic flag upside down! #fail

well, I suppose that's a modest improvement...

For the 25m rapid fire pistol final, we can now see about 1/4 of the actual target (although the monitors above will show more detail). And you cannot actually see the bulls they are aiming for :-(

Still annoying though...

#Olympics 2012 spectator centre venue #fail

Note how the black horizontal camera gantry completely obscures the sight of targets, which are (after all) the whole damn point of the event!
Thanks broadcasters...

Yesterday, at this location, the phrase was "Here be gold" and it was British! #teamgb

#PayPal #fail

I wonder why PayPal write this in a refund email.

And then have this on their web site

Happy Birthday Robert John Godfrey #Enidi

After a cracking 'family' lunch the Enidi ponder the meaning of life before the gig!

When I said home was that way, 2.5 miles from home...

Rain and hail plummeted down and were really hurting!  My only waterproofing, a bright yellow helmet cover...

I got wetter than a wet thing and cycled through several puddles more than a few inches deep.  Some b•••••d car drivers didn't help.

My shoes are still drying out!

Before the storm, cygnets counted and still 6!

Lots of rumbles, expecting a large foot to appear!

Home is that way... Not looking good #2Wheels

#H2G2 well, I've parked my car…

but I don't think that means I have  a brain the size of a planet...

#RaspberryJam Cambridge - the starting point of something quite special?

Today was a really great day at RaspberryJam; a well managed and timed series of short sharp presentations on what people thought of the Pi, had done with the Pi, had done *to* the Pi (addons etc), and would like to do to the Pi!

Sitting in the crowd the image I took below struck me as reminiscent of something

My friend, @JerryDHarper who was photographing the event for the organisers took this one [coming soon!], which much better illustrates my thinking.

The image that stuck in my mind?  This one

(image source: http://ed-thelen.org/FireInValley92.html)

The Home Brew Club Home Brew Club  in 1979.

With the hindsight of three decades, we can see that this club helped start many careers and business (see the Wikipedia link above for more details) - if you want to read more about that era and what came from it, I recommend reading Stephen Levy's book Hackers which I (quite oddly) found on sale in the second hand section of a hotel in Pico in the Azores some years ago.  You can currently buy it second hand from Amazon and Abebooks

More links here:
http://opencollector.org/history/homebrew/index.html
and
http://www.bambi.net/bob/homebrew.html

So, will we look back in 5 or 15 years (things move faster now!) and see an organisation and product that has become folklore in our industry and the source from which many good things sprang?

Comments invited!

Meet my friends…

At the beginning of the year when (after about 30 years off the bike) I started training for the Help For Heroes Big Battlefield Bike Ride my early runs barely left the house and left me knackered!
As a sharp winter evolved into a wet, cold, breezy, spring my training runs extended and I took in a stretch of country road (1 car wide, no road paint, poor surface) alongside a stretch of river. Within a few weeks I spotted a couple of swan who had setup a nest and were caring for 7 eggs.

Although most times I would whizz (well, whizz-ish) by on a few occasions I would stop and take a few pictures - more interesting as the nest appeared to be mobile and was to be found anywhere in a 2-300 yard stretch of the river.

A couple of months later and just before the bike ride I returned to that part of the world (my routes had taken me further afield) to find that the eggs had hatched, and seven string cygnets were heading for the water to swim with ma & pa; however their necks were still too short to bottom feed - so they would nibble on the bank's grass before setting off.

A month or so, 350 miles, 10,000 feet of elevation and £3,000 of fund raising later…
I was passing the river again stretching my legs after an fortnight off the bike to commence my preparations for the H4H Ride to Recovery at Colchester in September. I was pleased to see the family about and all able to bottom feed. Perhaps not surprisingly the cygnet count was down by 1 - I guess that's probably a success against average attrition rate.

I look forward to a few more sighting over the coming months until they move off to pastures new…

Reflecting on RISC OS at #RaspberryJam

With one of my favourite beers...

Interesting approach to public wifi! #RaspberryJam

#RaspberryJam #Cambridge about to start, with @keithshering and @jerrydharper

#Microsoft, your .NET patching is really beginning to annoy

You know the score, you install or update something within the .NET framework and that friendly mscorsvw.exe kicks off recompiling assemblies for you (a good thing) and takes up nearly all your CPU.

But when you have an occasionally used machine, it might be nice if it did not do it for each of 10-20 patches for the framework.  And not in turn for each one.  It’s bloody annoying, especially when that machine has been turned on especially for an unplanned piece of work.

Is there a good reason it cannot be run once, after the last patch is applied?  Or is that just too sensible…

(added later)

Yes I know you can park the jobs, or run them later, or drop the priority.  But the whole point of the patching is to be done under the covers, and just done seamlessly and easily.  Not to intrude so much!

London 2012 - a decent app, but wasting valuable screen space for this...

Strewth, what a bad idea. I have the app,why prompt me to get it?

"It was at this point I lost my presence of mind..."

One for James !

Tech•Ed Europe 2012 and the party is back! #TEE12

Photosynth is really rather good

Day 3 Keynote2 #TEE12

"If this were War & Peace, you'd see Russia" @jsnover #TEE12