Up The Glyders

Away for the weekend with the kids, Nick and his kids for the now annual wilderness camping trip. This time we pictched camp in the pouring rain by the side of Llyn Bochwyld, beneath Tryfan in Snowdonia. The kids had just about dried out by morning when we had a wonderful walk and scramble up Y Gribin onto the Glyderau. Quite the best weather Nick and I have ever had up there, superb visibility, even if it was windy and the cloud base was only a few hundred feet up. The kids had a good time (I think) and bagged both 3000' peaks - Glyder Fach and Glyder Fawr.

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Racing Canal Boats

Great time at the wekend racing a canal boat (!) from Stratford to Birmingham. All in aid of local chairty St Basils. Lots of city companies undertake the challenge to set the fastest time. But going at only 4mph it doesn't feel like much of a race. That's me centre rear steering the boat.

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SpaceShipOne Makes It

Scaled Composites' SpaceShipOne made it into space and back today. Roll on the X Prize.

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MP101 Radio Update

Downloaded the latest firmware upgrade to my WiFi/HiFi bridge. The upgraded included the first release of the radio tuner. This now lets me play hundreds of Internet radio stations form the HiFi. Unfortunately the BBC stations aren't on there yet - maybe if I register! Apart from the obvious rock/pop/oldies stuff there are great stations like SF soundtracks, scanner linked streams such as the LAPD and the NY Fire Department, air traffic control from JFK< and even just an open mic somewhere in LA!

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OGC SME Showcase

Spent the day today at the Office of Government Commerce SME showcase. This was all about what the Government is doing to help SMEs sell to the public sector. It reported on the Midlands SME procurement portal project which acted as a clearing house for Midlands public sector organisations to advertise contracts - and resulted in a good few pieces of work going to SMEs. They also talked about standardisation of pre-qualification documents, clustering and teaming of SMEs, and plans for a national portal. The speaker from Wolverhampton Council also talked about the importance of personalising tender approaches and mail shots by showing that a) you'd actually read what the tender was for and were proposing a proper solution to it, and b) you'd actually researched the client and had knew the customers background, and what their "hot buttons" were. All in all a good day and well attended.

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Dark Materials Trilogy

Philip Pullman - His Dark Materials *** 1/2

Finally finished the His Dark Materials trilogy. Started off well, but got steadily worse. I suppose it's meant to be anti-climatic (well what else do you do when you kill of God), but it just didn't work for me. Would have been better as 2 books.

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En-g-land

With England awash with the Flag of St George in support of our team in Euro 2004 every liberal englishperson is facing the dilemma about whether it is PC to show the flag. The Guardian as ever had the answer, printing the flag with the following small print in bottom left:

By flying this flag I would like to show my support for the England team but:

1. Wholeheartedly reject any connotations of xenophobic nationalism
2. Dissociate myself from anyone who removes his shirt in public
3. Salute the rich contribution made by my Celtic cousins to British life
4. Reaffirm my commitment to the European Social Chapter.

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Feynman's NanoTech Paper

Writing the GURPs book and listening to the recent Radio 4 programme on Nanotech promted me to hunt down Feynman's original talk on nanotechnology - back in 1959.

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Auchinleck

Posting this from James Boswells study at his house in Auchinleck Wonderful place.

[later]

Photo added - above. Stunning place. We rented it from the Landmark Trust.

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