Geoff Jones

Wow, if only the rest of the movie/music business would follow where Monty Python leads!

The Monty Python Channel on YouTube

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Tags: EricIdle, MichaelPalin, MontyPython, YouTube

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Impressive image both for the accuracy of the Etrex/Ascent/HoudahGeo photo placement software and also showing the rate of coastal erosion over the past few years on the North Norfolk coast. Seems to be about 3feet from when the Google satellite images where taken!

Coastal Erosion near Sheringham

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Tags: Coastal, Coastal erosion, Erosion, North Norfolk

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Today’s little walk was from Cley to Sheringham. A bit of a late start due to us taking the long way from Kings Lynn However it was a lovely clear day with the tide in, the pebble beach makes the walking a bit harder but very rewarding with the sea sounds.

The big surprise of the day is that you can buy a cottage in the centre of Sheringham for £99,000 my first glimpse of a sub £100K property in these parts and of cause Sheringham does have a rail connection

Norfolk Coastal Walk

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Sally has done a post with more photos over on her blog

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Tags: england, Kings Lynn, Norfolk, Sheringham

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Having sold my old offices to Studio24 on Monday. I’m now looking at places to invest my gains ( Pretty low by the way , the property has roughly doubled in price over 20 years) although when fully let it was yielding 9%.

I called up the Kings Street Housing Association. They offer a private sector leasing scheme that guarantees you a rent for a period of 2 years on houses offered to them. The rent offered is based on the local housing allowance which, apparently, is £450/500 per month for a 2 bedroom property rising to £550/600 for a 3 bedroom house.

So, to even get a 6% return the house can only cost £120,000. Certainly impossible to buy a three bedroom house for that in Cambridge and for that matter even in places like St. Ives, Soham, Ely and St. Neot’s maybe.

The houses have to have the 3 C’s as well - carpets, curtains & cooker.

So back to the drawing board I think! All ideas welcome

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Geoff & Danilka

In the best spirit of Anglo / Russian co-operation. Here I am holding Colin and Maria’s one month old baby ДАНИЛКА. (that’s Danilka or Daniel in English). Maria is a Russian born tennis coach who teaches at the David Lloyd tennis centre and was one of my lodgers a few years ago. Colin was one of my first employees straight from the local technical college and now runs his own business fitting out operating theatres with A/V kit..

We had a great evening with them and Maria’s mother plus Svetlana (my latest Russian lodger). Fascinating to hear of the Russian approach to education - you pick a sport,then you just do that and no other sport 6 days a week. Maria started her tennis at 7 years old!

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Tags: David Lloyd

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Having attended many talks about chance and randomness it is still amazing when certain chance events occur.

Michael & Manuel near Torremegia

When Sally and I were walking the Camino Via de la Plata from Seville a few weeks ago we bumped into two German lads, Manuel & Michael. Manuel was walking all the way to Santiago and in fact when Sally left in Los Santos, I walked with them from Villafranca to Merida. However, due to the office sale in Cambridge we parted company in Merida.

In the meantime Em and Mark were walking from Roncesvalle to Santiago…

Mark & Em at Stansted

Now get this when Em and Mark were collecting their Compostellas in Santiago who should they meet  at the office? Yep Manuel. Now what is the chances of that happening?

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Tags: camino, chance, fate

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Computingfor the future - Andy Hopper

Interesting talk by Andy Hopper tonight on Computing the future.

I especially liked his comments on setting projects for his PhD students. they have to be more advanced than what Google or Microsoft are doing but not totally science fiction stuff - A hard job these days I reckon.

Other interesting points was that 2-3% of the worlds energy is consumed by server farms. So the proposal is to put the server farms by the windmills and solar plants since data is so cheap to transmit.  Servers need to get more intelligent so that they run closer to 100% utilisation (rather than current 30%) by switching themselves off etc.

He forsees the world running on simple low power terminals. Yep. bring back  the Wyse50’s :-)  But more likely to be mobile phones! Especially after his trip to Soweto to see how they are using phones there.

Also discussed the idea that every moving object would have a sensor hooked into a vast database so your phone could be measuring CO2 etc.

Digital Alternatives

A revealing chart showing global hectares available per person and current usage levels with the USA standing out as usual.

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Tags: Google, Microsoft, Server

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After my post bemoaning the fact that the only way I had of importing trails from the Garmin Legend HCx on the iMac was through using Parallels and the Garmin software (PC only!).

Euan pointed me in the direction of Ascent for the iMac which can take in data from the Garmin and is Mac based software. Works beautifully and very fast! However, for some weird reason Everytrail wouldn’t display the track, even though it was visible in Google Earth.

Great news from Chris at Everytrail is that he has found and fixed the bug (VRM in action) so now Ascent will display the trail in Everytrail with the photos, geotagged by Houdah, and downloaded from Flickr.

Here is an example of a walk that  Sally, Ellee and I did with the Cambridge Ramblers C for codgers group last Wednesday a far cry from pounding the camino in Spain doing 25mile days in temperatures of 30 degrees. But an interesting day anyway

Stretham walk take2

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Tags: Flickr, Geotagging, gps, iMac, Stretham

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Today’s 13.3mile walk was with the Southern Norfolk walkers group. The 61st event led by Paul! Twenty of us joined him on this event. The weather stayed dry but overcast.



Santon Downham Walk

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To import the trail I tried using the Ascent software as suggested by Euan, However, I can’t get it to display the imported trail in Everytrail - The folks at Everytrail are working on it - maybe Todays pictures are all taken with the iPhone as the Olympus’s rechargeable batteries have gone all dodgy on me. NB: Chris from Everytrail reports the bug has been  squashed so it should work now

Ascent does produce activity charts like this though:-

Tags: Everytrail, Walks

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What’s the point of Economics was tonight’s talk in the new Cambridge University Festival of Ideas series,   a trioka of economists pontificated on the subject.

Michael Kitson, Evan Davis, Willy Brown

Evan Davis was first on, causing a  small cry of dissent from the packed lecture theatre  when he suggested that somehow economists should be treated like seismologists that is seismologists are not blamed for causing volcanoes - worryingly I think he thought it was a reasonable comparison (Maybe he should have gone to Ben Goldman’s talk on How the media promote public misunderstanding in science), then he suggested that economists are life’s reasonable people so perhaps he was joking after all.

Moving on he suggested that we all familarise ourselves with the wikipedia entries for:-

• Paradox of thrift
• Efficient Market hypothesis
• Prisoners dilemma
• Cost benefit analysis
• Behavioural Economics

Then moving on to suggest that economics is studying the world through a prism of simplicity with currently to much emphasis on precision and forecasting & comparing economics to the stylised London Underground map simple but not geographically accurate. An excellent speaker with no powerpoint back up!

Next up was Michael Kitson who started up with the quote on economics by Thomas Carlyle -Dismal Science. He  then moved into audience participation with the  The Ultimatum Game, the most popular figure chosen was £50 whereas  apparently economists would predict 1p. Then he moved onto protectionism arguing that it is needed quoting from Kicking away the ladder by Chang then an interesting slide showing that Wal-mart was the biggest engine for growth in the USA (not the hi-tech industry). A good speaker with good use of powerpoint.

Finishing with Willy Brown outlining the effects of the National minimum wage in the 10 years of its operation in the UK. The most amazing for me was that the gender wage gap in low paid workers has been eliminated and that two million employees have benefited directly without any measurable impact on employment levels (contrary to the doom mongers on its introduction). A nice observation in his work at the minimum wage commission is just how badly managed most workers are.

In question time Evan Davis replied to one questioner with the rather good expression “The government should be a referee not a player”

A good evening the theatre was 100% full with a good mixture of people.

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Tags: Economics, Minimum wage

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