Snow!

Snow, in Birmingham, in April!

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Gargunnock House - Landmark Trust Holiday

Just back from a lovely week at Gargunnock House, a Landmark Trust house near Stirling, and the 4th of our biennial Landmark Trust trips. The party as ever consisted of the Burdens, Goddards and Bassetts, plus Landmark virgins the Baines and Cecilia.

The house was of course glorious, dated back to around C15, but mostly C17/18, with huge rooms connected in weird and wonderful ways. A huge dining room which easily sat the 17 of us (Alex stayed at a B&B), a salon with piano reputedly played by Chopin, a drawing room, a small library and more and more.

The grounds were lovely, and we all watched the young lambs play in the field across the filled-in ha ha. I don't think any of us had seen the way that the lambs teamed up to play of their own, almost daring themselves to do things. The daffodils were out, and the extensive rhodedenron just coming into flower - a week later and the garden would have been perfect. The Gardener himself was really friendly, Colin and I had a long chat with him in the now almost empty walled garden.

The whole area was stunnning, the Gargunnouck and Touch hills rising in a steep escarpment to the south, and to the north fine views of the mountains, and to the east Stirling castle sat high on its crag and tail. The area in between was almost completely flat - the Carst - it was only drained in the last century.



The week went something like:

Friday - arrive, pizzas
Saturday - walk below the escarpment to see a waterfall and get our bearings, nice shop in Gargunnock village
Sunday - Stirling Castle, its amazing Hall and taperstries, Nick found an Action Man shop
Monday - Lock Katrin and a 2 hour cycle, a lovely place and fine views of Ben Lui that Nick and I climbed a few years agio, glorious weather
Tuesday - Torrential rain for a trip to the Falkirk Wheel and Falkirk. I managed to find a counter-culture Cybercafe to catch up on email
Wednesday - Did Ben Vorlich, a wonderful Munroe, and still with snow on the top which gave a steep and serious summit, and a fun descent. We even saw an artic hare running across the snowfield. From the summit the whole of the northern horizon was snow-capped peaks.
Thursday - Took Ruth and Kirsten to Go Ape with NIck, Marie and Rellie. Great fun.
Friday - pack and home via the Pineapple House

In the evening we managed to squeeze in games of Warhammer (which the boys Chris, Cameron and Ollie played the whole time), Wings of War, and Risk (which Jo won).

A great week, which went faster than any previous Landmark, and it looks like Saddell in Kintyre for 2010!

Flickrstream (i.e. more photos)  available

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Official Google Blog: New Google AJAX Language API - Tools for translation and language detection

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-google-ajax-language-api-tools-for.html

An easy way to give our chatbots multi-language capability?

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And we're back....

Just over 5 months since I last posted here. The prolonged outage started when I tried to upgrade from MT1 to MT4, and found out halfway through the process that my hosting provider didn't support the latest version of MySQL. So I then went to find a new provider, then found that I'd lost the password to the converj.com domain name and it was still registered to my old STS email address, so that needed faxes to and fro across the Atlantic to sort out. I then got MT4 installed but found that it would let me edit posts and templates with tags in them, or change the archive mapping, so spent the last week or so sorting that out - finally found it was a config issue with the hosting provider - but at least they sorted it in about 12 of of working out of my asking.

So finally we're back up. Over the Easter hols I'll transfer all the images across, and sort out the intra-site links (especially for Headcrash/Flipside/Gushemege), sort design out and the home pages.

Then I can get cracking on what I wanted to do in the first place, integrating the blog with Twitter and Second Life, and then getting a blog ready for Deb's trip, and then migrating the Daden web site across to EUKHost and MT4.

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Thought Controlled Avatar

New World Notes: The Second Life of the Mind: The story behind the brain-to-SL interface

Great stuff!

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SL to USB Interfacing

Started playing around with the Velleman Components K8055/VM110 USB interface board. It gives you a variety of analog and digital inputs and outputs, and a .dll file so you can access the whole things very simply from C#. Built a first test rig and got SL to RL control going, next stop is RL to SL control - and then start finding some neat applications - possibly in the arts.

I'm posting videos of the progress on this to our YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/dadenmedia.

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X|Media|Lab

X|Media|Lab :: The Internationally Acclaimed Digital Media Think-Tank and Creative Workshop.

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