Owls Count

I noted in the tech press last week that Automattic had acquired Gravatar. Matt has posted the code to enable gravatars on his blog. I rather like the idea behind gravatars and have enabled them on this blog.

This past weekend saw the final of the Compass Sport Cup and Trophy competitions. The final took place in the East Midlands forest of Blidworth. In the final details for the event was the information:

Significant areas of forest mapped as runnable have bramble and bracken growth at this time of year making the runnability slower than in areas mapped as slow run. Courses have been planned to avoid the worst areas. We strongly advise robust full leg cover.

The warning proved to be well deserved. The routes taken by many people show that sticking to the path network was the order of the day, unless you got to a section of denser forest (the darker the shade of green the more impenetrable the forest) where it was reasonably runnable.

I have not bothered to plot my route, but it is like many others drawn - path running most of the time. I made a few mistakes - at 4 I overshot the earth wall, hit the path beyond, and had to come back. Coming out of 5 I navigated as if at 6, losing about a minute working out where I was and running a bit further. I went a bit off direction in the rough open between 14 and 15 meaning I ran a bit too far circling back into the control. At 18 I came into the forest too in the wrong place and hit the control further north of the one aimed for. I did not get caught out, at 21, by the other control on the next parallel earth wall. Like many others I arrived quite a bit below 23 and had to go up the hill to it. Overall I was a long way down the results, but under double the time of GG.

A while back I posted about the Web Trend Map 2007 Version 2.0. Since then I have seen a few more interesting web/internet maps:

e.maps - This site has a selection of web maps. I particularly like the World Web Map, which is a world map based but with the countries replaced with internet sites.

Map of The Internet - This shows how cities are connected.

Map of the Internet: The IPv4 Space, 2006 - Noticed this linked in the comments to the previous link. This is a map showing the allocation of /8 subnets.

I have been helping to finalise a map, for an upcoming orienteering event, and this morning I fired up OCAD (for the first time in quite a while, to add some logos to the map. It took me a couple of hours to add a handful of logos to the map. For reasons I do not fully understand the process just seemed to be more complex than it needed to be - particularly I found the whole way that colours and symbols are handled confusing. Of course this could just be an indicator that I need to spend some time learning how to use the program!

I order regularly from a number of online shops. Today I decided to order some items from Lush, as I will not be going near one of their stores for a while. I’ve ordered from Lush online before, but it seems that they have a new online store. This new store required me to register for an account. Simple enough. As part of the registration I, obviously, had to set up delivery and billing addresses. For me these addresses are different. I live in Reading, a large enough town that I will commonly not bother to fill in the county. This was fine on the Lush site - it was not a required field for the address form.

I then chucked a few products in my basket and proceeded to the checkout. I selected the type of postage. Then the next option on the page was ‘Complete Addresses’. I took this, looked at the addresses - both were correct and I ended up back at the checkout page with no ‘Complete Order’ option. Confused, I tried out a few other web browsers to see if this was where the problem lay. Nope - still no luck.

Eventually I realised that the ‘Complete Addresses’ was an instruction and that the non-compulsory ‘county’ field was required to be able to actually place the order. Oh, how much easier this could have been with either a more detailed message or a form that made all required field compulsory.