Feeling it

On Saturday, Lynne and I went to watch The Feeling in Delamere Forest. Someone in work had a pair of spare tickets, and sold me them for somewhat less than the face value - bargainaceous! So I surprised Lynne with it on Friday evening - she was really excited.

The band were brilliant - very theatrical, some would even say a little cheesy. They did basically the same crowd-pleasing set as last time (Lynne & Anna saw them at Manchester Apollo); basically the whole of Twelve Stops and Home, with a couple of brilliant covers (The Buggles' Video Killed The Radio Star, and Queen's Fat Bottomed Girls - yes!). They played one new song - I thought there might be more, but apparently they're only just recording the new album, so maybe it's not been practiced much yet.

They really got the crowd going, and the atmosphere was brilliant - a real mix of people. I'd definitely go to see a band at Delamere again, it was a fantastic experience. We even stayed dry!

The support band, Ghosts, were rather good too. Pretty similar to The Feeling, really - more cheesy rock. I'd looked on their website on Friday, thinking I could download some songs to listen to in the car on the way down to the gig. But they only had a crappy Flash player. Luckily, armed with a copy of Firefox's Live HTTP Headers extension, I was able to find the links to the tracks and download the MP3s. W00t! (Their album, The World Is Outside, is out today by the way.)

Orienteering

On Friday, the Deeside Orienteering Club put on an orienteering event at the lab at lunchtime. I thought I'd go along to see what it was like. It was really good fun! At the start, we got a little plastic finger tag thing, and we were given maps just before starting. We had to find thirteen waypoints in order, each of which had a post to put your tag in. At the end, we got printouts showing how long it had taken to find each one. I came sixth out of nine, which I don't think was too bad considering it was all the hardcore runners from the lab - people that win the Daresbury Dash every year. It was really good for my micro-navigation skills - evaluating contours and terrain, and trying to do it as fast as possible. The course took us through the forest at the back of the lab, running up and down the hill and through trees and brambles. I scratched my leg to bits at one point. It was really good fun though - I'd definitely do it again. The DOC apparently put on some evening events in Delamere Forest, which would be really good fun.

Blog visualisations

This is rather pretty: Blog Map.

I will post something more at some point; just working through my weekly/daily stuff.

Cycling in Europe

I was in Grenoble, France* last week, at the FFAG 2007 workshop with a load of other accelerator physicists, many of them Japanese (apparently they have quite a few FFAG machines). On the first day, I got the bus to the conference and walked back. But after nearly being mown down by several cyclists, I had a flash of inspiration and hired a bike from the train station. It was brilliant! The weather was just right for it - not too hot. And Grenoble, despite having huge mountains all around, is a very very flat city. It took me about five minutes and almost no effort whatsoever to cycle from my hotel to the workshop venue. Counteracted some of the weight-gain effects of free food and cheap booze too. One of my better ideas, I think. And hopefully one I'll be using again - though I have a feeling it will work less well in US cities (I'm in Albuquerque in June for PAC 2007).

On a very similar note, this is brilliant.

*Argh! How American does that make me sound? I'm only trying to save you a minute looking it up on Wikipedia...

Tony Blair and Satan

So Tony has responded in person to everyone that signed the anti-road pricing petition, including me. (Well, sent out a mass email, anyway - I don't count that as a personal response.) It's good to see him interacting with the public like this. Maybe now we can have a proper debate about the whole ridiculous scheme. [If you want to price people off the roads, just put petrol up. People don't want to travel when it's busy and will avoid it where possible; you don't have to punish them financially for it as well. And the 'petrol tax' takes into account fuel efficiency.]

His email in my inbox arrived next to another one, creating an interesting juxtaposition.



So now we know.

Simian antics

At the weekend, we went to Go Ape! in Delamere Forest, for Chris & Mike's 21st birthday. It's a big assault course in the trees. We got a fantastic clear sunny day for it, and I think it's fair to say everyone had a brilliant time. I thought my arms and legs would be really sore this morning (those nets are a killer), but I don't actually feel too bad. Photos will be posted on my Flickr account (and videos on YouTube) as soon as we've sorted through them. (I took rather a lot.)

Nice pipes

I had a look at Yahoo! Pipes (via Lifehacker). It all looks jolly impressive and web2.0ish; and it does pretty much everything it claims to do. But (as someone who likes to mess around with things) it soon became obvious that it's very beta, and doesn't have a lot of the features a developer would expect. For example, how do I merge two feeds together when they don't both have the same date parameter? I would expect to be able to create a parameter in one feed, but I can't find anything that does that. The interface is really really nice though - kind of like LabVIEW.

POP3 access in Gmail has now been rolled out for most of their accounts (well, it works in mine anyway). I've been waiting for this to be activated in my account since I heard about it last November. It seems to work pretty well - it fetches my work mail just fine, via a secure connection. It's slower than forwarding, which was my previous solution. But I get all the 'to' and 'cc' email addresses shown up in every mail, and I can take full advantage of labels and threading for my work email. Brilliant! It just makes me love Gmail even more.

One feature I want to see in Gmail is some kind of Bayesian filtering for labels. I typically assign labels by category, and most of the emails I receive for each label have many of the same words in. It would be great if I could 'train' the system to automatically filter my emails into those labels, instead of having to guess at keywords. If it worked as well as the spam filter, it would be just about perfect. A 'mark as read' button next to each email in the list view would be great too. (Richard is working on a Greasemonkey script for this.)

Holiday

Lynne, the Beast and I went to North Wales at the weekend, staying in a very cosy cottage near Caernarfon. Surprisingly, we managed to get some walking done - and in fact probably got more exercise than usual, what with having to push a pram round and all. Pictures, as usual can be found at my Flickr page.

We did a walk around Beddgelert Forest; we thought it would be a good one to do since it would be good forest tracks all the way round. We had done a good few miles and got almost back to the car park, hitting no bigger obstacles than the odd sticky-out stone. However, the path suddenly seemed to peter out - what was a 4x4-sized track quickly descended into something navigable only by foot. A bit of a problem with a pram. So we scouted ahead, and it became clear that our problems were only just beginning. The path continued for a couple of hundred yards and abruptly stopped at a barbed-wire fence, with a steeply-banked ditch and a stream at the other side! We were far too stubborn to go back at this point, so we dismantled the pram, and somehow between us managed to transport it over the fence, across the stream and down a short section of railway line on the other side. (Remembering to stop, look and listen, kids!) Of course, the Beast slept through the whole rain-soaked affair.

When the track resumed, of course, there was a large sign indicating that the footpath was closed. Well, thanks a lot.

An excellent holiday in any case - and there was actually a lot more room in the boot of the car than I expected, what with the pram wheels taking up a ridiculous amount of room. For such a small creature, the Beast doesn't half bring a lot of stuff. I'd recommend the RSPB reserve at Conwy - even if it is a little close to the A55. And despite a dismal failure one night, we managed to get a roaring fire lit the next night, due to (even if I do say so myself) superb caveman skills on my part.

Frist Psot

OK, well here's my first post on my blog. Yay!