Geoff Jones

Here’s a new test of your internet connection that measures things like packet loss, ping times and jitter.

My BT connection gets a B grade, a bit like me at secondary modern school!

Comments

Today’s weather was as beautiful as it was foul on our last ramble with the Cambridge Rambling Club. Carolin ably led us on a beautiful 14mile walk around the undulating countryside of Barley. Still some fruit on the trees although well past its sell by date, but showing just how rich we are that we can afford to leave whole apple trees unpicked!  plus we saw the delightful spindle tree fruits, the name came from when the tree was used for making the spindles used when spinning wool.

A wonderful day in very pleasant company and fine weather. Many thanks to Sally of Swedish massage fame for the fine vegetable chilli which we had with Anthony & Kay last night and for our lunch today!

Here is the walk on Everytrail:-

Barley walk with Cambridge Rambling Club

Map your trip with EveryTrail

The new boots worked well in the long wet grass at the start of the day.

Now to decide about selling and buying houses in Cambridge……

Comments

Not good news at all from the W3C mobile checker:-

Better news on the house front, A famous poet & author is really interested, better get her autograph as apparently she translated Isla’s favourite Moomin book.

Comments

To celebrate three years of @geoffjones on Twitter here is a Wordle of my Tweets:-

and here are my statistics from Tweetstats:-

So I have been twittering about 5 times a day, mainly from their website although lately I’ve taken to reading mostly on Tweetie.

Its good to see that companies like BT are using Twitter in such a constructive fashion that folks like Doc Searls advocated all those years ago in the Cluetrain manifesto.

PS According to When did I join Twitter,  I created my account on 20th November 2006

Comments

After the recent walk where my Scarpa ZG65 XCR boots let me down by leaking, after a morning walking in heavy rain. I returned them to Open Air who agreed they were faulty and supplied me free of charge with a new pair.

I thought I would be smart and test the new boots before walking in them. I quickly made a test rig to hold the boots down in the sink to a depth of 120mm. Before immersion I weighed the insoles (about 28gm apiece), then repeated weighing after various immersion times. Here’s the results:-

As you can see the boots were pretty water tight for around 8 hours or so, after this the right boot leaked noticeably more than the left. Obviously this was a static test, in practice when walking you will get a pumping action so it will be interesting to see how they fare in the next rain walk.

Comments

The Cambridge Primark opens tomorrow in Burleigh Street (the revamped John Lewis building ). To promote the opening of Primark they used today ten walking billboards as part of a targeted marketing campaign from Look Media UK. I thought it was highly effective and looked rather cool.

From Primark in Cambridge

Here is a little slideshow:-

Primark is the first major (Over 50,000 sq ft) new store in Cambridge since the opening of the Grafton Centre. There website for a job is here

Comments

Yesterdays walk with the Cambridge Rambling Club was a good test for our foul weather gear, mine failed abysmally

We 11 started from St Mary’s Church car park at Rougham, in very wet and windy conditions, so it was heads down for the first 9 miles to Bradfield St Clare and a spot of lunch in the shelter of the church porch, followed by a drink at the Fox & Hounds in Bradfield St. George. The afternoon cleared up a little so we started to dry out.

From Rougham Walk

Very disappointing for me in that the left boot of my brand new Scarpa ZG65 XCR boots sprang a leak. So it’s back to Open Air with them today! My RAB Bergen jacket (QWA-05-RDB) was as useless as ever with little streams inside the arms and the pockets filling with water. It’s time has now come – I will return it to RAB. A quick survey of the other 10 people in our party  showed the Karrimor & Berghaus as highly effective, the Paramo did OK too but they are really heavy to lug around on extended walks.

Here is the walk and photographs:-

Rougham circular walk

Widget powered by EveryTrail: Share GPS Tracks

Update 021109 – Open Air agree boots are faulty , should have new pair by Friday

Tags: Cambridge Rambling Club, travel blog

Comments

Here is Emily’s essay that has been causing her a bit of stress, I will leave the reader to guess what it is on:-)

Comments

Geoff having Swedish Massage

What better after an invigorating walk than a relaxing Swedish Massage in the comfort of your own home, here in Cambridge, so many thanks to Sally for mine tonight. If you want to book a Swedish or Indian Head Massage then head over to Sally’s webpage and give her a call – she is in Cambridge most weekends.

Tags: cambridge, swedish massage

Comments

Whilst on our walk today we came across this farm with the name The Pightle, Larry and I were fascinated by the origin of the name so out came the iPhone and a quick search on wiktionary revealed:-
“Odd-shaped fields now caused problems which had not been encountered in the days before mechanization. Thus, over several years, fields were reorganized to be acceptably rectangular.This was cleverly and thoughtfully arranged but,inevitably, there were remnants, leftovers,off-cuts or tailings. In most cases, these were small pieces of land,which were essentially triangular in shape. The locals probably referred to these pieces as “pigtails”. In Norfolk dialect,this would quickly become pronounced as “pightle”. In the 1920’s through the 1940’s,the word pightle was in fairly common usage but has fallen into disuse in recent years.”

Once at home I was able to consult my 1909 first edition of the complete English Dictionary. this had the following entry:-
So there we have it an old East Anglian word dating from 1200 meaning a small piece of enclosed land.

Tags: wordof the day

Comments