Owls Count

Yesterday was my last orienteering event for the year - the traditional Boxing Day event that my orienteering club organises, which is a score event with a novelty twist. The weather was good, which meant a good turnout - including the newest member of my club.

I went out of the start well - possibly running a little too quickly from the mass start. I went south, with a group, but after a few controls Sunday’s run caught up with me and I was forced to stop. I did find Father Christmas on my walk back to the finish, but failed to find the other two bonus controls.

On arriving back at the finish I downloaded, right before the computer system decided to stop working - network, printer, and BSOD problems. This meant there was a bit of delay and no proper split results for everyone, but the competitors were understanding about the troubles.

Today has involved sorting out some of the plans for next year. I seem to now have a reasonable idea of my orienteering and running plans for the first part of the year.

About a month or so ago I was feeling rather keen and decided to enter this event. In the end I ran the medium bike course, which was a course of about 16km. Though I managed to add quite a bit of distance to that.

The event used Longmoor, Woolmer, and Bordon, with the maps being joined together with a couple of segments of OS map. I started well, finding it easier to get quickly into the map than a lot of the cyclists. However, at five I, like many others, struggled with the OS map. In the end I lost at least 15 minutes on this one control. Going to 13 I picked a poor route and got bogged down in a marsh, which I had intended to skirt round and lost a few minutes.

Apart from those two mistakes there were a couple of poor route choices, but they did not cost me much time. Overall I finished in 2:41:07, but should have made it round in 2:15.

I have been using Flickr to host my orienteering photos for a couple of years. Every now and then the Flickr team rolls out a new feature - collections and maps being two past examples. This month they have added two great features: stats and photo editing.

You need to be a pro member to be able to see the photos stats. The stats show hits, refers, and other useful information. A most welcome addition.

The photo editing is in conjunction with Picnik. I had a little play with this service and it seems to offer a good simple interface, while allowing a reasonable selection of changes to be made.

I have been using Minefield for a while. This will be released as Firefox 3 at some stage next year and there have been some good improvements. Recently I switched to using this runscript to solve the problems of using the non-default Firefox. Through the -no-remote switch I can also use Firefox 2 at the same time, which is useful for testing and allows me to have a profile setup with web developer extensions.

How-To Geek recently posted instructions on setting GMail as the default mail client in Ubuntu. In the comments are equivalent instructions for Kubuntu users and there is an altered script that also deals with cc/bcc/subject/body.