Monthly Archives: February 2009

Gun to Guns on Gun Green

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Boer War Gun at Gun Green

Originally uploaded by geofones

A lovely bit of local history detail that Alan Brigham dug up from Mike Petty after Alan visited my flickr set of Old Cambridge postcards. (The Boer war ended in 1902)

Its such a great pity that all the newspapers archives are not online and fully indexed as Google offered to do for free.

Many thanks also to  Charles Challess of Tenison Avenue for his  letter to the editor, now published for all the world to see.

I’m sure Alan will be incorporating Tenison Road into one of his local walks on local history in the near future.

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Gmail and Twitter?

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Twitter is just so useful. I noticed that my gmail wasn’t working online at all. In these cases its usual for me to start kicking the computer/firefox/router :-(
But now with Twitscoop in my sidebar all is revealed:-

and looking at the time line of twitters mentioning ‘gmail’ is quite cool:-

This Twitter just made me laugh:-
20-gmail-twitscoop-search-twitter-see-what_s-hot-right-now-1

Phew panic over :-)

gmail-had-friends-in-london-shanghai-and-sf-all

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Cambridge Rambling Club – Audley End ramble

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Today’s ramble with the Cambridge Rambling Club A team started further afield :-)

The start was at Audley End, Vera led 13 of us, at a cracking pace, across the rolling Essex countryside to The Langleys were we stopped for our sandwiches outside the The Bull. Tea was taken alongside the stream in the very pretty village of Arkesdon.

The countryside was still very wintry & bleak looking with only an occasional burst of snowdrops to brighten the day a little.


Audley End to Langley walk

Widget powered by EveryTrail: GPS Geotagging

We did just over 16miles in 5hr 11min of moving time with 1hr 35min of stops. Surprisingly for us flat landers we did 0ver 1900ft of ascent!

Graph of elevation and speed, from HoudahGeo

Walk elevation & speed

Walk elevation & speed

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Cambridge -UK – Open Coffee

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Jed at OpenCoffee

Just back from the inaugural OpenCoffee meet up in Cambridge, UK. Organised by Jed. The event was in Cafe Nero on Kings Parade in Cambridge. A total of about 20 folks (Only two from the fairer sex, Juliette and ? Laura where did you get too!)  turned up. I was, of cause, easily the oldest there!

It was a good turn out of VC’s, Angels and entrepreneurs with a lot of new faces to prove that the Cambridge scene is still as vibrant as ever. I met Chris from audioanalytic, Adriano? of Hotprints, Peter from Broadersheet plus Laurence & Alex.

Pretty ideal for a first event and actually worked very well in the regular coffee shop environment (apart from getting told to sit down once by the baristas). I quite like the slightly anarchic nature of the event compared to the regular structured evenings that are the norm around here, and it works better than in a pub type environment in my opinion. I can see why the coffee places were so popular in the 1700s

Will be interesting to see where it goes from here. Apparently there is another newish event, CamCreative next week at The Arts so will go and compare and contrast.

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Stephen Fry goes nuclear.

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Followcost is a great little application which works out the cost of following celebrities on Twitter. Here is the cost of following @stephenfry


It strikes me that celebrities are caught in a cleft stick, someone as popular as Stephen Fry has over 208,000 followers(The old Radio Luxenbourg radio frequency for us nerds :-) and is in turn following  over 54,000 folks. This means that he can only respond to a minuscule portion of tweets without seriously overloading everyone’s twitter timeline and yet folks moan at him for not responding!

Think I will stick to just following a few folks that I  know well :-) even with that I had to silence @scobleizer with his 22 updates a day!

Thanks to Gigaom for the link.

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Subsidies in action

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From blogoir I discovered this cool site trying to throw light on EU farm & agricultural subsidies.

For instance in the UK the average direct aid per farm worker is €9,236 and each hectare of farm land gets €210. Huge companies also have their snout in the trough e.g.  Tate & Lyle Europe receives an annual subsidy of over £120 million! Tate & Lyle is a company with annual turnover of over £3 billion and profits of £300m

I also see from the cabinet office that Tate & Lyle took Sir Brian Bender & his wife to Wimbledon too – must be to sample their sugar on the strawberries.

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School work

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Whilst in one of my attics, trying to sort out why the shower drain isn’t working.

I came across the ironing board that I made at school when I was 13 or 14. Since it was combined woodwork/metalwork  I had to make the bracket as well!  Interestingly my mum used it until she died, giving it well over 30 years of use!

Here’s the bracket that I so struggled with nearly 50 years ago :-

In those days we also had to make things like ashtrays and matchbox holders:-


alas, no longer polished to perfection :-)

The Pièce de résistance however was the bookcase I made. Still in use to this day in my bedroom.

An other memory of metalwork was in our final school leavers exam, we had to make a toilet roll holder. 

I was total clueless so the invigilator helped me and in fact just about made it! – Result a distinction in metalwork and a life lesson in always asking for help and getting other folks to do what you are not good at :-)

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