Monthly Archives: July 2009

Birthday and social media…

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Romeo & Juliet curtain call

Romeo & Juliet curtain call

Many thanks to Sally, Em, Sarah, Caroline, Ray, Liz, Chester, Karen, Roberto, Ellee, Tony & Lorraine for coming to my little birthday party organised by Sally to see Romeo & Juliet tonight at Downing College. It was a great performance and had the big audience totally spell bound. All 13 of us enjoyed Emily’s freshly baked carrot cake in the interval :-)

For someone interested by social media this is how folks said Happy Birthday to me:-
Twitter: 6
Cards by hand: 5
Cards in post: 3
Facebook: 4
Text message: 2
Skype chat: 2
Telephone call: 1
Skype call: 1
Email: 5 All from mailing lists of companies it has to be said :-(

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Plotting the way to Les Gets

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My cycling trip to Les Gets is getting closer, the bike is getting its handlebars changed with new gear shifts and brake handles, so hopefully my back won’t be crippled like what was happening with the previous dropped bars, now purchased the same saddlebag as I had as a kid, unbelievably the design hasn’t changed in 50 years!

Calais to Les Gets

Just discovered the bikely website where vigusmao has kindly uploaded a gpx file of the London to Dover section. Now furiously plotting the Calais to Les Gets section using memory map so I can have that route in the GPS as well. The route looks great taking in The Champagne region :-) and The Somme river. Still trying to find a way over The Jura to get into Geneva without hitting any busy roads

Thinking about setting off on Saturday so Sally can do the Cambridge to London bit with me, which then means I can navigate my way through London early on Sunday morning.

Now the question is should I take my tent?

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Live audio interviewing on the web….

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A newish UK based service is Ipadio which enables you to record messages from your phone (it has a free iPhone app as well) direct to an embeddable file or a downloadable mp3 . It works well although I cocked up the membership by registering on the iPhone and on the iMac :-)

I received a welcome email from Giles Bryan a director at Nemisys who obviously run Ipadio. Interestingly each item created is called a Phlog which is the name of a cool blogging photo blogging service created by Alan Bradburne that I used to use.

Here is a tiny interview with Sally of sallyinnorfolk fame,

Be interesting to see how it gets on. I wonder if Fred was an early stage investor….

Many thanks to athinkingman for his twitter:-

athinkingman – The ipadio iPhone app rocks! http://www.ipadio.com about 5 hours ago from web

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London to Cambridge bike ride

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Today was the annual London to Cambridge bike ride. (For some reason they have removed the web page with the actual ride on it!) Which I’ve been doing on and off for the past 20 years or so, today was the first time for perhaps 5 years…..

Unfortunately, for Sally and I, the ride has become very popular and so all the buses carrying folks to the start at Picketts Lock were full :-(   We were thinking of going up last night on the train and staying over at a B&B, but this is England and B&Bs think that £70 a night is fine and oh minimum stay two nights at the weekend….

So we created our own variant which meant leaving home at 6am, cycling down to the halfway point until we met el speed merchants who had left Picketts Lock at 7am then turning around and coming back with the  crowd. Here is the ride on Everytrail:-

Partial London-Cambridge bike ride

Widget powered by EveryTrail: Share and Plan your Trips

We did over 841 metre of ascent as we obviously did it both ways! and about 58miles of cycling by the time we arrived home.

Can I do this every day for 12 days or so to do the 600miles to Les Gets. Today has made by back really ache which is probably the drop handlebars on my Falcon. Otherwise I felt fighting fit..

Here is the elevation and speed data:-

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Rats force Domino’s closure

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Sat update

Domino's Pizza, Hills Road, Cambridge

Cambridge, Hills Road,  Domino’s Pizza place has just been forced to close because of a complaint from Rebecca Jane B? which the council inspectors upheld:-

“An infestation of rats in the premises resulting in a significant risk of contamination to foodstuffs and a risk to public health. In addition, there is an accumulation of dirt and extraneous matter in the kitchen”

Not very good publicity for DPGS Ltd T/as Domino’s Pizza, 27 Hills Road, CB2 1NW

As you can see from the photos the upper two floors of the takeaway are derelict and in urgent need of renovation.

Many thanks to Richard’s excellent CamCityCouncil Twitter feed for alerting me ;-)

Sat update: Apparently three rats were found stuck to the glue mats put down by the rat catcher – apparently the rats were in the derelict flats upstairs. They are hoping to reopen on Wednesday!

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Wisdom of crowds – not

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Oh dear another great idea poorly executed.

AVC posts

Visiting Freds blog I noticed he had a cunning map in his sidebar showing his posts. Clicking on it takes you to outside.in. Of cause I signed up added the widget then tried adding my locations. Total failure its only UScentric :-( (even though it has an Indian domain!).

I emailed them but they don’t understand the fundamental problem of folks who travel and want to geotag their posts.

“Chrysanthe Tenentes

show details 19:57 (26 minutes ago)
Reply
Follow up message

We currently only cover the US, though we do plan to expand internationally (the UK is top on the list!) soon. Keep up to date with our blog:”

Why oh why cannot I edit my own map anywhere in the world?

Its like that other application with promise Brightkite which suffers the same problem, total inabilty to edit the underlying data. How frustrating

Add a place - USA only!

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s106 agreements in Cambridge

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I recently visited Cambridge City Council offices with Richard Taylor to inspect their accounts for 2008.

One of the interesting things we obtained was a list of all the unapplied s106 money the council had at its disposal. The total as at 31st March 2009 was £8,723,895.62p comprised of over 650 individual agreements. The actual contents of the individual contracts are secret, so we didn’t know how much the council extracted from Tesco at Newmarket road, only that over £465K remained unspent. For comparison,Cambridge City Council General Fund net spending was set at £18,772,400 for 2009/10.

Meanwhile I’ve been looking at plots of land here in Cambridge and happened upon a piece with permission for 6 tiny flats. With the agents particulars came the s106 agreement. Here is the breakdown:-


Formal open space contribution £3,240
Informal open space contribution £2,754
Community facilities £6,510
Southern corridor area transport plan £18,819
Lifelong learning facilities £960
£32,283
6 flats per flat £5,380.50

So before you plant your spade in the ground the council is demanding over £5k per flat. With most of it going on transport :-(

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