Owls Count

This past weekend I travelled down to near Brighton for the SE Sprint and Relay Championships. We stayed at Blacklands Farm Campsite, which had basic toilet and shower facilities and a large camping field. The weather over the weekend was reasonable, except on Sunday morning there was a thunderstorm that started just after we had finished packing the tents up!

The orienteering was based on the University of Sussex. A big benefit to this was that we had access to the university sports centre. This meant I could have a shower before travelling home - much nicer for me and the other train passengers.

A couple of weeks ago I travelled to Chicago for Terminus. The Narrate Conferences team put on a terrific event - combining an extensive academic program with wizard rock, Quidditch, and fan exploration.

I was out to meet with friends and also was one of the volunteers - registration and information were my main areas, but I also spent my usual Saturday out on the Quidditch pitch. This year we drew amazingly straight pitches, which impressed those who could see them from the higher floors of the hotel. While out in Grant Park we also watched the people setting up for the Chicago Distance Classic Half Marathon. I did not present this year and, due to a combination of factors, got to see very little of the academic programming.

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.

The Rugby World Cup started with a ’shock for the French’. I do not understand why it is being labelled as a shock. Yes, the French have been playing well recently, but Argentina have been steadily improving for years now and have now beaten France in five of the last six games. It was always going to be a close game.

There were three games yesterday. New Zealand started impressively against a reasonable Italian side. Australia ground down Japan in the early part of the game, before running away with it in the second half. England played poorly against a highly motivated USA. Playing as they did yesterday England have no hope of retaining their title.

Today sees Wales and Scotland play, against Canada and Portugal respectively, and also Samoa against South Africa. For those in the UK wishing to watch: ITV is covering the games.

In the best traditions of the ‘rest’ day I kept fairly busy. I did not, however, take part in mountain bike orienteering - which sounds to have been fairly epic!

Tomintoul

My day started with a trip over to Tomintoul to visit the Whisky Castle. There I tasted a few, before picking up a bottle from the Blackadder group.

Sprint Race - Kinguisse

More photos from the sprint race.

This was my worst orienteering of the week. Both my running and navigating were poor. The photo in the middle shows me walking away from four - I took quite a few seconds to actually spot any route to five. For the second long leg, going to thirteen, I noticed several other people on the long course going in a direction I could not see a route for - totally missing a gate back onto the roads. Worse than just not noticing the gate, and better route, was then running off on the wrong road.