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Brighton Earthship

2008-06-29T17:34:00.004Z

Bottle wall
Originally uploaded by Jane Dallaway

I attended a talk several years ago about the Earthship concept, and have been meaning to join one of the regular tours to the Brighton Earthship but just never got around to it. When I spotted the tour as part of the eco Open Houses it just seemed too good an opportunity to miss.

I found it hard to justify driving to Stanmer Park to go and visit an eco property, so we got the bikes out and pedalled off to Stanmer House where the group assembled. There were probably around 80 people so we split into two groups and walked off through the Stanmer Organics plots towards the Earthship.

As John, the tour guide, was telling us all about the building process, and how the earthship works, I got to wondering if there were any you could stay in anywhere. My question was answered inside as there was a leaflet - "Eco Home Holiday Rental - the house that runs itself" - in Ger, Normandy, France. Sounds like a great way to experience "off the grid" living without committing to it for the long-term.

Isle of Wight

2008-06-29T10:41:00.005Z

Stile
Originally uploaded by Jane Dallaway

Last weekend Richard and I headed over to the Isle of Wight for the weekend. I'd never been before, and Richard doesn't think he has been either.

We based ourselves at the Godshill Park Farm B&B, a lovely, relaxing place a short (10 minutes or so) walk from the pretty village of Godshill and its many eateries.

We spent Saturday mainly along the South Coast - concentrating on the New and Old Batteries at the Needles, as well as various bays along the way. We spent Sunday around the West Coast up to Cowes, ending up at Sandown, and then spent Monday on the East Coast up to Ryde and ending up on the ferry.

A really lovely weekend, and a feeling of England in the 1970s. We're hoping to head off over again, maybe without the car next time, as the Island line train service combined with a plentiful bus service and the myriad of public footpaths make the island very accessible.

There are plenty more photos

Euro 2008

2008-06-27T11:10:00.003Z

For Euro 2008 I tracked the odds of any of the teams winning over time. It makes a kind of fun graph:

The y-axis shows the odds (screen scraped from a betting web site... not doing that again), converted into a probability, and multiplied by 16. Why multiplied? To give a kind of "value" to each team: if you'd purchased a team for £1 in a sweepstake, then you can plot a kind of value for it over time by multiplying the odds of winning by the size of the pot (£16). Kind of.

Hull City Fixtures 2008/09

2008-06-16T17:50:00.003Z

So the fixtures are out for Hull's first season in the Premiership and it starts with a home game against Fulham. As Richard pointed out, I should take a screen shot of the table now, as we're currently 8th, so here we are, recorded for posterity

Being the geek that I am, I've used the BBC fixtures link, some TextMate macro generation, a bit of Excel date manipulation and some hand crafted code to generate a Hull City Fixtures iCalendar file.
There are no guarantees I'll keep it up to date, but to the best of my knowledge it is correct today

Wakehurst Place and Nymans Gardens

2008-06-10T21:02:00.003Z

Last weekend we headed off to Wakehurst Place, a botanic garden and conservation area managed by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Wakehurst Place was added to my to-visit list earlier this year when it was mentioned at a Cafe Scientifique talk about The Flower Hunters. It wasn't the sunniest day, but it was warm and dry and we spent a good few hours walking around the gardens. We didn't manage to get around all of it, and in fact missed almost all of the Woodland zone - a good reason to return.

I really enjoyed the Conservation zone and walking along the raised walkway above the water. At the end of the day, and after reading a few leaflets, and finding out that we'd get our admission fee back, we decided to join the National Trust for the year - we have a weekend in the Isle of Wight and a week in Cornwall later in the year and so hope we will be able to make a lot of use of it.

This weekend we took advantage of our new National Trust membership and visited Nyman's - the closest National Trust property to our house (I think!) and had a very pleasant afternoon. Nymans has gardens, woodland and amazing views over Sussex and it seems to be a really great space - people were picnicking, playing hide and seek, sitting on the plentiful benches reading the Sunday paper - a really, really welcoming area. We had a short walk around and I'm looking forward to an opportunity to return and do some of the woodland walks and possibly even a visit to the house to take a look at the family rooms.

More photos here and here.

Geek heritage needs saving

2008-06-07T12:36:00.005Z

In 2006 we visited Bletchly Park, and I really recommend you head out there sometime. In fact, go soon, because we found out at the Cafe Sci talk that they have three years left of funding. Then... it's gone.

Yesterday I received a press release which contained some worrying images of building decay. But there's something you can do...

You can sign the petition lobbying the Prime Minister to act to help preserve Bletchley Park: http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/BletchleyPark/.
You can visit. We were lucky and went on a special day, so check out the list of events. The train station is more-or-less across the road from Bletchly Park, so it's easy to get to.
If you want, you can donate.

Mountain bike ride

2008-06-04T21:13:00.006Z

Every few weeks or so during summer one of the Madgex guys, Steve, organises mountain bike rides after work. They've always sounded a bit hard-core but this weeks was accessible for us lesser mortals (or maybe just me . The hard core bunch left the office and headed over the downs via Devil's Dyke (I think) and down to Shoreham. I got on the train and arrived at Shoreham station all refreshed and ready to pedal.

I switched on the GPS unit to start recording where we were and we headed off along the River Adur for 40 minutes or so until we got to the Bridge Inn at Upper Beeding. Here we stopped, refueled on beer, soft drinks and crisps for 20 minutes before heading back on the other side of the river and back to Shoreham. We waved goodbye to 2 of our party when they decided to head off back via Devil's Dyke - nutters!

On getting back to Shoreham someone pointed out that actually it was only another 15 - 20 minutes to cycle back to Brighton, and would probably wind up being quicker than the train - so that is what we did.

Total (according to Sports tracker): 15.4 miles
Time (not counting the break at the pub when I paused the unit): 1 hour 48 minutes
Route: See the map

Gnar Wars

2008-06-04T06:53:00.018Z

I caught up with the latest episode of shralp! yesterday and amongst other stuff they showed a teaser for a 4 minute snowboarding film "Gnar Wars". A brilliant bit of filming, editing and riding.

Here it is in full:

Gnar Wars by Mike Benson from Mike Benson on Vimeo.

Final Festival update

2008-05-27T20:13:00.003Z

Udder fail
Originally uploaded by d6y

So, the final week of the Brighton Festival saw us at four events:

Double Header: Hattie Hayridge & Norman Lovett at a very chilly Udder Belly. This was the first night on their tour, and it was an entertaining hour or so
The death and life of Sherlock Holmes at the Nightingale Theatre. This only starred Roger Llewellyn and he worked immensely hard for both 45 minute halves - especially given the heat in the theatre. It was a great play - with Roger playing Sherlock, Watson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Moriarty and a number of smaller, lesser characters. Excellent and real good entertainment
Brain Drain - a locally produced play at the Sanctuary Cafe. We missed the first half as we were still travelling back from the Hull City game at Wembley so despite Jeremy and Kirsty's best efforts I never did quite work out what was going on
The return of the Ornate Johnsons at the Udder place - the most noisy venue I may have ever been to - with the traffic on the roundabout, the generator to keep the structure inflated and general people noise from both the Udderbelly and people milling around. It was quite memorable, however, first of all one of the microphones wasn't working so quite a few scenes were played out with one of the cast shouting whilst the others were conversing normally - it broke things up a bit, but the level of professionalism was immensely high and they incorporated this handicap into the sketches. The background noise quietened down, and then the roof started coming down, until it was so low we had to be evacuated. After 5 or 10 minutes they got it sorted out (apparently a carrier bag blew into the fan - which was why it suddenly went quiet) and we started again. This was probably one of the best shows I've seen during the fringe - the level of professionalism that the cast showed throughout a troubled performance was incredible. I'll look out for them again.

Hull City promoted to the Premiership

2008-05-26T18:30:00.003Z

Congratulations to Hull City
Originally uploaded by Jane Dallaway

On 6th February 1999 Hull City were at the bottom of the football league, with little to shout about - the club was going nowhere, the owner wasn't contributing and it looked like Hull City didn't have much of a future. We were living in Ealing at the time, and when I spotted the Brentford v Hull match I decided that we should go and offer my team some of the support it needed. That started my adult attendance of Hull City games and we won 2 - 0 starting what became known as the Great Escape led by Warren Joyce. Over the next few seasons we attended quite a few of the Southern games including trips to Southend, Cheltenham, Leyton Orient (including for the play offs in 2001), Barnet, Hayes (for an FA cup match), Brighton (at Gillingham) and at the Withdean, as well as some games at Boothferry Park (vs Barnet Feb 2001) and later in the KC Stadium (vs Bournemouth Easter 2003).

I hadn't managed any games this season - when we were in Hull, the Tigers weren't, and when they were down here, we weren't - but both Richard and I had been carefully checking the scores, and were keeping a very close eye on the end of the season.

When Hull made it through the playoff semi-finals and into the final at Wembley I knew that I had to do whatever I could to go (along with every other Hull fan). I was up checking the website at 8am last Monday morning, when the remaining 3800 tickets went on sale (to non-season ticket holders) but failed to get any - I kept selecting them and getting to an error on the website. Aagghh!!

I found some (very expensive) tickets via 1st4FootballTickets and decided that I really wanted to be at the match - the first trip to Wembley for Hull City after 104 years, I couldn't afford to wait another 104 for an opportunity to see my team on what might be the biggest stage in Europe. I bought the tickets, they turned up without problem and got me access to the ground. Hurrah!

On Saturday we arrived at Wembley at around midday, leaving ourselves plenty of time to soak up the atmosphere and enjoy the experience. I have been to Wembley for a football match only once before, a rather poor 0 - 0 friendly between England and Norway in 1994, and so was keen to experience the "new Wembley". The walk down Wembley Way towards the stadium was impressive, looking towards the stadium and the arc and seeing the familiar colours of black and amber lining the street along with the red and white of Bristol City.

We made our way into the ground, found our seats and then took a wander around to find a beer. I've never seen a Champagne and Seafood bar at a football ground before, but we were in the Club Wembley section which I guess explains it.

The atmosphere was great, and the noise was fantastic - the sounds of the supporters singing just echoed around the ground. We watched some of the warm up, the pre-match fireworks and presentation of the teams before the match started.

I've nothing to add about the quality of the football that hasn't been said elsewhere - Dean Windass's wonder goal - lots and lots and lots of attempts by Bristol City, but nothing really of power. Boaz Myhill and the defence did a great job and kept another clean sheet.

The final whistle blew, and the Hull supporters (and team) celebrated for all we were worth (I know I had little voice left yesterday). And so, Hull City are in the Premiership and Plymouth get the title of "Biggest town in Britain never to have seen top flight football" - Hull City still holds the title of "Only football club in Britain that has no letters you can colour in" though :-)

Richard is keen to point out that we're still on track to meet his prediction of being winners of the Premiership in 2017.

A £60 Million moment...

2008-05-26T09:26:00.008Z

More to come about this later, but in the meantime, take a look at my photos and Richard's photos

Why do I blog?

2008-05-21T17:50:00.003Z

Libby asked this question last November at the Brighton Bloggers meetup. It's taken me a while to get around to actually answering this question properly, and in fact it might be a better starting point to ask:

Why did I start blogging?
Richard and I started this blog back in March 2001 and back then it was to save bookmarks centrally, to leave ourselves reminders and to keep our friends, overseas or local, up to date with what we were up to. Since then, I've started 2 other blogs - Jane's Technical Stuff and Jane's Photography blog.

Why separate blogs rather than just one?
Originally, the technical and photographic blogs shared a home with the joint blog with Richard, but it seemed a bit weird to have no separation between work and home. If I documented some feature on my technical blog during the working day, then I might want colleagues to read it, without them necessarily having to search through photos of my garden. The photography blog is the least active of the three, and is a place for reviewing lenses, equipment and for sharing good podcast/vodcasts I've come across.

Has the reason for blogging changed?
Sort of, I still blog technically on things I've found out, especially if I've had problems finding an answer using good old google. I still use them a little bit for bookmarking, but only when I've got some extended comments to make about it - otherwise I use del.icio.us. In 2003 I did an interview with the Mirror about being a blogger, reading the extract I took of it shows that actually my reasons haven't really changed over the past 5 years.

Vegetables growing

2008-05-19T20:49:00.006Z

Vegetables
Originally uploaded by Jane Dallaway

I've done much more planting than usual this year. Here are the majority of my pots/containers growing wonderfully. The potatoes have been a bit mad.

The bottom right hand corner are my potatoes 9 days before this photo - the potatoes here are again the bottom right hand of the photo. I'm really not sure at what point they prevent me being able to see out of the kitchen window. I've marked up this photo with notes explaining what all of the vegetables are.

More Festival delights

2008-05-16T08:42:00.007Z

It is still Festival time, and as Richard mentioned the other day, we've made a real effort to see some of the many fringe shows:

Open Wide - A comedy sketch show with 2 actors covering topics from Justin Timberlake appearing on a history program, to Hitler being investigated by Columbo and the Sweeney. Not the funniest show I've ever seen but had some good sketches
Final Cut: Lightning Documentary Challenge - showing short films (2 minutes each) produced by teams in 24 hours covering one of the fringe acts appearing on Saturday. Some great films and even better an opportunity to catch some more fringe acts - the Pet Sounds v Sgt Pepper show looked good, and we even had live music from The Top Bananas whilst the judging was going on. Some of the films are now available on youtube
Catchy! The Great plague musical - A cross between a Carry On film and a pantomime. Smutty, funny and with some great tunes to hum along to. And a bargain at £8 for a good 2 hours worth of entertainment. I'm still not sure if the guy sitting next to me sneezing during a musical about the plague was a good sign though.

The festival continues for another 10 days or so and we've got a couple more shows to attend.

Festival so far

2008-05-07T22:15:00.003Z

It's festival time, and although we're not doing much in the Brighton Festival itself, we have a punishing schedule in the Brighton Festival Fringe—which, I'm told, is the "England's largest arts event, and the 2008 Fringe is the second largest Fringe Festival in the world". Citation needed, indeed.

So far we've been to...

X-Files Improv with Dean Haglund, who turns out to be the long haired blond geeky one in the X-Files. A small turn out (30 people?), but a huge amount of fun. Essentially, an X-Files episode is created using audience suggestions, and it worked really well. A top act.
We spent an hour or so of a boiling hot day in The Last South: Pursuit of the Pole. Yes, there were initial technical issues with the sound, and yes the venue suffered from being on a roundabout on bank holiday Monday with motorcycles roaring passed, but this didn't distract from a great play. It was Scott and Amundsen on stage, writing their journals, in step with each other, but with very different experiences. Touching, funny, etc.
Up to the university we dropped in on a professorial lecture, namely "Alcohol: a simple molecule with complex consequences for emotion and behaviour". We learned about the experiments on memory and behaviour under the effects of booze, and it was eye-opening. I didn't know, for example, that drinking enhances your memory (but only for events before the drinking starts). Naturally, there was a wine reception after.
And tonight we went to see Mike Leigh in conversation with Amy Raphael, discussing his films and watching bits of some of them. We headed back home to sign up to LoveFilm to get his back catalog.

One negative: the £1 per ticket booking fees are evil, especially as the booking system isn't finished and the web sites are frustrating to use. And on top of that "internet booking fees" should be made illegal. But, there's no competition, so we pay. I'd rather have to pay than not have it at all, is what it comes down to.

Old Bailey

2008-05-06T22:23:00.002Z

Transcripts from the Old Bailey (from 1674 to 1913) are now online, which has generated plenty of press.

As I suspect many others have, I went searching for references to my family name and I've found a few...

In 1796, a 19 year old George Dallaway wandered into a warehouse and told the clerk that he wanted "half a hundred weight of sheathing nails", but didn't have the paperwork. The clerk gave him the goods, and thus a fraud was committed. Geroge was "respited to go for a sailor or soldier" which we take to mean he was given the opportunity to fight, but a few months later he's in the proceedings as having a year in jail and a public whipping.
Matthew Dallaway stole 12 spoons in 1769 and was transported. Nice touch in that he took them while the victim's house was on fire. And he would have got away with it had it not been for the pesky pawnbroker grassing him up. His defense: "I was very much in liquor", a phrase I plan to use whenever the situation merits it.

It's worth having a dig around the site for some of the history to the publication. For example, the Proceedings were popular ("...in the opinion of many people one of the most diverting things a man can read in London") until the rise of newspapers, and even carried advertising for a while.

Science 'Open Notebook'

2008-04-24T22:18:00.001Z

One to file under "wish I'd thought of that", from Slashdot:

Under [the] radically transparent 'open notebook' approach, everything goes online: experimental protocols, successful outcomes, failed attempts, even discussions of papers being prepared for publication... The time stamps on every entry not only establish priority but allow anyone to track the contributions of every person, even in a large collaboration.

Lunch Atop a Skyscraper

2008-04-22T20:36:00.006Z

Lunch Atop a Skyscraper
Originally uploaded by Balakov

One of a whole series of reconstructions of classic photos using Lego

Lovely!

Found via photojojo

A history of snowboarding in 2 minutes

2008-04-21T12:53:00.005Z

Warning: This moves pretty quickly. Hang on to your hats!

Found via Nollie.

That looks about right

2008-04-16T05:07:00.003Z

Is it meme o'clock already? Well, if you really must know...


toto:~ richard$  history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s\n",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head
  130 cd
  110 ls
   50 ssh
   20 exit
   15 scp
   14 cp
   11 svn
   11 sudo
   11 openssl
   11 java

I'm surprised there's not some find, grep and mate in there.

Glenn on the history of his company

2008-04-10T08:46:00.004Z

Tuesday, at £5 App, Glenn gave his personal view of the history of his company: The idea, name, table football, money, cake and the culture. The most interesting parts for me were his description of using scale to escape the for hire rollercoster (if you're working as an agency), the importance of having a shared set of values, and using money as a tool.

Interesting stuff. It'll take a while for it to sink in for me, but as Ribot caught the talk on video (part 1) (and part 2) you can judge for yourself.

[Disclaimer: Glenn is Jane's employer]

i360

2008-03-30T14:10:00.002Z

The BBC say "work will start on the i360 tower during the summer". Of course, they said it'd start last June, so who knows...

Mr Ouch

2008-03-26T06:54:00.002Z

Evil electricity could shoot a small child
Originally uploaded by Jane Dallaway

I took this photo in the grounds of the Morning Star Lodge near the Silver Mountain Gondola station in Kellogg, Idaho with the sole intention of posting it to the Stick Figures in Peril group. This I duly did and someone added a tag of Mr Ouch. I was curious about this and so looked at all photos tagged with Mr Ouch and discovered that they are all the same peril picture but with different text, instructions and warnings - a sub domain of stick figures in peril.

I will now be on the lookout for other Mr Ouch warning signs to add to the collection.

TED iTunes Feed

2008-03-24T21:42:00.003Z

We all love TED, and have all probably lost days digging through the video archive. So hurrah for the feed they set up a while back allowing me to just get a constant update of TED videos.

I was going to write a quick pipe to filter out the old stuff and just take 2007 onwards. But I first thought I'd have a look at some of the olders stuff and...oh my gosh, its wonderful.

For example, take a look at Nicholas Negroponte talking about input devices (amongst other things) in 1984. The striking thing, aside from the use of laser discs, is how he describes touch input, including the rolling behaviour for fine input which we now see in the iPhone. And remember the talk was given 23 years before the iPhone was in stores.

(Perhaps I shouldn't be so surprised, as that's what the kind of thing he was paid to think about, and the kind of thinking that a year later lead to the opening of the Media lab.)

So I won't be filtering out the older TED talks. I'll watch it all, which, now I think about it, is what I knew I'd end up doing anyway.

A month at The Werks

2008-02-15T17:55:00.003Z

I've mentioned I've been working out of the Werks. Well... it's been a month now [over a month, but this blog post has been sitting around whilst I was away] and in that time I've visited the Werks ten times or so. I'm not sure exactly how often, but long enough and frequently enough for the coffee shop to know what my order is.

Unexpectedly I've ended up having about three times the number of meetings I'd normally have—the good kind of meeting, mind you. That's down to being able to say "just drop by" rather than having to actually arrange anything. An example: Danny popping round the other day and we had the space to spread out his Post-Its® and discuss a bunch of ideas.

I get the sense that there's a good chance of chance happenings happening—especially once more of the space is used. I'd expect more people to be showing up once we're out of the dismal months.

A few times I find it better to work from the home office, for instance if I need the printer, make tricky phone calls, or just absolutely need guaranteed quiet. But mostly I've noticed that I may be getting more done when I do go to the Werks. As odd as it might seem, having to plan the day around what you need (that file? that external drive?) and then having to head out, seems to set the tone for the day. Prevents thrashing. Create focus. Something like that.