Arrived in Newcastle on time, and just pulling out. The Lindisfarne reference is nothing to do with the weather, but my inability to get Facebook talking to Twitter. There must be some snaffu in someone’s software. I get asked for my twitter credential, and they are rejected. Why?
Category Archives: Uncategorized
I’me Mandy Fly Me
Here I am on the East Coast rail line, on a bright sunny day, meandering up to Edinburgh for three days of work. The jet planes all roaring over my head, marking their route with their vapour trails. I feel super righteous in cutting down on my carbon foot print. Like hell I do. The future came out as I predicted when I bought my return trip on the chemin de fer, The planes returned to the air on that very day.
I’ve had a cappuccino, and a a pain au chocolate, now holding off on my sandwiches until later. Have been playing with face book, trying to get my blog published there. Looks like I may have it working now. Next lets get twitter and buzz working.
Edinburgh – My First Week
I have started a four week project in Edinburgh, and will be flying up and down each week. I will be staying at the Apex hotels.
Monday
Today ate at Hanams, a Kurdish restaurant which serves no alcohol. Yes the whole day went by without a drop of alcohol passing my lips. I went to Hanams several years ago when it was on Lothian Road. The restaurant has moved closer and is now close to the Royal Mile and the castle.
Tuesday
Strange things happen. I joined Linkedin a few months ago, and up pops someone who Rosemary and I saw when on holiday to Jordan in 2006. I had an invite to visit Alistair and Jane in their home just south of Edinburgh. I had a lovely evening.
Wednesday
Hanams again.
Thursday
Petit Paris, and their post 7.00 meal. Had the works, with wine. Afraid no change out of £30.
Friday
Back home again, managed to get back for the dessert and cheese course of a dinner party we had been invited to in the village.
Sad git thought
I have been reading some bits on the Intel Website. (Whoever said we never click on the Google Ad words?) An interesting topic with two points:
- We used to think of IBM mainframes and MIPS (Millions of instructions per second). Then PCs came along and it was the clock speed. This got irrelevant when Intel got the chips to do more and more in a CPU cycle. Then came along duo chips and quad chips. The word now is BOPS – Billions of Operations Per Second. So a Quad Core Intel chip Xeon E5345 can execute 153,500 BOPS, or 153,500,000,000,000 instructions per seconds.
- This chip that executes at 153,500 BOPS consumes 335 Watts. That’s a lot of power, but compare that with a single core Intel processor which executes at 33,115 BOPS and uses 323.4 Watts. Yes a 4.47x improvement in instructions per Watt. Yes global warming and power consumption are now big issues in the compuer industry.
- Now I see there are some CPUs with 6 cores, are these called Sex-Core? At 2,700 dollars, I will have to wait a while.
Goodwood festival of speed
Near Miss
Red Arrows
Sunday we went to Goodwood to meet Rosemary’s niece Anne, her partner Peter, and Anne’s son, ie R’s great nephew, Colin. They were over from Canada on holiday and visiting various relatives. Robert (Anne’s brother & hence Rosemary’s nephew) and his lady Kirsty were there in attendance. Goodwood was running the Festival of Speed. This is a three-day event of cars and bikes hill climbing and vocalising their engines. (Many engines sounded to me in need of going into a garage pronto, but I was informed that was not the case.) Very clever “sculpture” in front of Goodwood House itself.
Red, White and Blue
Red Arrows
There were many stands, and many cars that motor heads could drool over. (There were also quite a few old sheep dressed as lamb, which weren’t worth drooling over.) Celebrities were around, Jenson Button and Chris Evans to name two. The Red Arrows performed for the crowds.
On the way back we stopped off at Biceser village for a set meal at Carluccios. Quite reasonable value thee course meal for two and a couple of glasses of wine for £35 including tip.
There is a car up there
One Stop
Travelled to Birmingham a couple of times this week. Monday and Tuesday I was installing some new software at the offices of One Stop. They are a small supermarket chain.
The cold weather
Will this cold weather ever stop? We have had -7C on our thermometer. The ponds are frozen, and the temperature has failed to rise above zero for days. Where has this global warming gone, or is it another con by our politicians and the green groups. If we are cold, then one assumes there must be a balanced hot area in the North. To me it does not seem right that all of Europe is cold, and that Canada is having a cold winter as well. Sea ice in the arctic was at a high this summer as well.
Typical of Putin to cut off the gas when it is cold. At least we have our wood burner, fed almost exclusively on hard wood. In this cold weather, how have the wind farms been doing. Oh not a lot, generating nothing. Cold weather comes with no wind. Seems to me a rather waste of money. Time the UK stepped up to the task and built more nuclear reactors. At least they work, look at France which generates 90% of their electricity with nuclear. It’s time something is done, even if it’s opening the closed coal mines and building more coal-fired powerstations before our lights start going out.
Talking about lights, we can not buy any more filament lights, at least the type you can see by. Another green con, and instead all the mercury from the new low energy lights will now go into landfill, polute the ground water and make us all brain dead. Maybe the EU and our Government want to us to be brain dead, so we just accept their dictacts without argument.
WordPress 2.7
Another painless upgrade to my blogging software. I am now running version 2.7. Not sure what new features there are, except for the administrators panel which has changed. I know some, not to be named, who don’t like change, but I do feel this is a move to the better.
Nokia E71
I bought myself a new toy. It’s a mobile phone, a Nokia E71. I have to admit I am really proud of it, and can’t let an hour go by without carressing its tiny keypad, and looking at the new messages that have arrived. [In other words, he’s become a technobore]
It has a GPS, and with google maps I can walk around the garden using the mobile to navigate with. [I can walk around the garden using my eyes]
It connects to the wirless wan as well as the mobile network, and has skype support and ipphone support. So I can make cheap or even free phone calls on the mobile, and receive phone calls from my IPphone number. It’s a video phone as well. There is the normal camera and a small video camera on the keyboard side to video me when I am making a call.
Of course it it web enable, so I can browse the web and email on the move. The email is always running, so I get little sound notifications when a new email arrives.
Finally I have discovered a wealth of applications which run on the phone. I was really impressed when I found ptty which runs on it. For those who don’t know, ptty is a secure terminal emulator, and allows me to logon to unix boxes in character mode and run basic editors. Sad I know but a great tool.
I really just love the build quality of the Nokia E71, the solid cold feel of the metal case of the slender phone. It was love at first sight. [Humph]
Norwich
Rosemary and I went to Norwich for the weekend to see Ann and Mike. We visited Nick and Ali, and saw the great work they have been doing on their house. Much remodelling, removal of walls, moving staircases and a complete replaster of all the walls. Truely quite a change to the house and a really excellent change. Their children had changed too! Both much taller.
Sunday was spent on Mike’s PC sorting out the pictures and re-loading the electronic picture frame we gave them.