I was designated the back marker, which was interesting for me. I realised for the first time that the back marker actually sets the pace whereas the leader sets the direction. Also, a good lesson learnt is how crucial it is that the leader makes sure they can always see the back marker!

The pace was at 2.6mph compared to the A teams 3mph+ the other difference is the B team spend substanially longer in the pub at lunchtime. The overall result is that in the same time we did 18miles last week we did 10miles this week.

Given the leisurely pace and been on my own at the rear, I was able to play with the latest 3.1 release of Everytrail for the iPhone. It has to be said its a real corker! works exceptionally well, even handling incoming phone calls without crashing. Plus talking pictures and annotating them is a breeze. A really cool feature is that it continues to work with the screen off and in the breast pocket of my jacket. The uploaded trail is here:-

Snowdrop Walk

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I also plotted the trip using my conventional GPS and camera. These are up on Everytrail too. The morning walk around Meldreth is here . The afternoon walk with the twitchers at Fowlmere nature reserve is here.

We have mare for the sea eg Weston-super mare
We have mere for Lake eg Windermere
We have mire for water mixed with soil.
We have more (moor) for just earth
and OK
We have mure for bricking in a doorway according to OED……

Advantages

• The £10 a month unlimited internet and texts for life is a great deal for anyone, like me, who doesn’t make many voice calls.
• Since its pay as you go when you travel abroad you are no longer faced with a horrendous bill on your return. You can get one of their £5 roaming bundles easily by text whilst you are away.
• Topping up is a delight, they send a message when you are running low you can send a free text back with the last 4 digits of your previously registered credit card  the amount and three security digits, and away you go.
• The itemised billing is excellent, totally itemised bills to the last K of data transferred and instantly available on the web.
• 3G Coverage so far is awesome!

Disadvantages

• If your phone breaks and Apple replace it then according to the local Apple store it will be locked. Will O2 unlock a phone if you have no contract? When I asked at Apple they just said speak to O2 and yes O2 say speak to Apple. Maybe this issue will clear up as more iPhones get legally unlocked and Orange etc come to the market.
• At the moment  if I put the iPhone in Airplane mode the iPhone asks to be unlocked again by iTunes (to do this you have to remove the SIM, take it out of flight mode, reinsert SIM and then iTunes will unlock it).
• You get the silly Content Lock screen (in picture) if you access blogs
• The iPhone seems to eat the battery in 3G mode. I guess with O2 it never found a 3G mast!

Conclusion
Its great to have an always on internet, even in the depths of cafes and lecture theatres, so I’m sticking with T-Mobile until either I buy a Nexus or the latest toy from Apple.

With the excellent iPhone app Sleep Cycle I can now publish my sleep status:-

Which takes in 1/3 of my day
The other third can usually be found at Everytrail:

La Grande Odyssee in Les gets

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The other third I guess you need to pop over to Sally’s place

For the first time in a few days it was a gorgeous sunlit morning, so once Sally was fully equipped at Thierry’s Nevada Sports here in Les Gets we set of to explore the slopes and their fresh dusting of snow. Sally did well on her first outing of the new season looking the part with all her new kit. I felt a lot more confident on the board and so I was practising squatting down and then up at speed in anticipation of trying to do some jumps – scary thought

After our lunch in the apartment, conveniently in the centre of Les Gets, we ventured up Mont Chery. Unfortunately by the time we had reached the top the clouds had moved in, reducing the visibilty, so we had no alternative but to have a couple of Vin Chaud,s with Gary and Theresa at the La Grande Ourse mountain restaurant

Here’s an Everytrail of the day:-

Sally Skiing in Les Gets

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If I’m lucky I might get one of Sally’s Indian head massages before bed!

All went well until….
I’ve now discovered that putting the iPhone into flight mode  locks me out of the iPhone totally, insisting that it has to be connected to iTunes to be unlocked as the SIM card has been changed

To make it worse plugging it into iTunes  says the iPhone is ‘damaged’ and needs to be taken to an Apple store

I’ve now discovered a work around. To get access to the iPhone menu’s, Remove the SIM card. You can then access the General menu and take it out of Flight mode. Replace the SIM and unlock with iTunes if you have remembered to bring a laptop with iTunes on it.

Oh, and iTunes is total bloatware – installing it on my little Eee with its 4GB drive consumed 500MB of space. Windows XP pro by comparison fits in 3GB.

Another annoyance is, away from home,  I cannot do a full iPhone sync. As on any other computer I use it will lose all the music, contacts and applications if I sync.

Now if only I could order that Nexus…..

Obviously they only take in the fact that my computer is sitting on a French network rather than my Google account which shows my address/bank details etc are in the UK. All stupid really when I could easily spoof the network address with a VPN.

So much for local intelligence.

Unfortunately the GPS ran out of battery just before lunch so the overall length should be longer than the 13.4miles indicated! (Sally’s GPS said 14.3 miles)

A gorgeous cold and crisp sunny day.

Here are the pictures and trail:-

Orwell to Wimpole circular walk

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On the way I had an interesting talk with Paul who I discovered was another map geek plus we shared mutual friends from my Cavendish days.

Here is the walk and today’s pictures:-

Shelford – Haslingfileld walk

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What if Cambridge based Plastic Logic’s new screen is going to be the display for the often rumoured Apple Tablet?

With investors pumping 250 million dollars or so it would seem to me that they might have a big company ready to start taking their production and the display is certainly sexy enough:-

Here is a youtube video of the display in action!

It would certainly kill all other Netbook devices on the market!