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 [...]

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 [...]

WordPress 2.6.1 has been released. Upgrade went smoothly and everything seems fine - if you do notice a problem with the site then let me know.
I got back from nine days in Chicago on Wednesday. While there there was an impressive thunderstorm. I’ll post more about my Chicago trip at some stage.

As I live in Reading I usually fly out of Heathrow or Gatwick airports. Both of these are busy airports and, often, flights are delayed and the queues long. To go to the British Orienteering Championships we were flying Bristol to Inverness. Both are small airports and it was so much easier and peaceful. I [...]

Terry Pratchett is one of the best selling UK authors. During my teenage years his books were some of the few I read. Recently he announced that he is suffering from Alzheimer’s. Recently he pledged $1 million to the Alzheimer’s Research Trust.
In response to this pledge a group of fans have created the site Match [...]

In a poor start to the year I went down with flu on the second day. I had arranged to run a 10k road race with a colleague, but had to give it a miss. Also the 10 mile race I had pencilled in for next month has had to be cancelled. Combined the means [...]

As the year draws to an end I looked through the lists of books read and orienteering event attended this year. While looking through the lists thoughts turned to favourites.
Books
Mad Dogs by Robert Muchamore - the latest book from a very good teenage spy series.
The Financial Times Guide to Investing by Glen Arnold - if [...]

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 [...]

Over the past week I have been following the Rugby World Cup and the Twenty20. Some good games, some good performances, and some bad. Certainly England fall into the bad category after a fairly dismal performance yesterday - a comment that can apply equally to both the rugby and cricket team yesterday.
Overall the Six Nations [...]

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 [...]

I know that some in the orienteering world are also into hashing. Well it seems that the authorities in New Haven, Connecticut, did not like the flour trail that two hashers had put out.
This link from Schneier on Security, where there is discussion of this incident and other ‘terror scares’.

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 [...]

While browsing the blog world I saw some links to the Web Trend Map 2007 Version 2.0. This is a rather cool tube-system like map of the ‘200 most successful websites on the web, ordered by category, proximity, success, popularity and perspective.‘
I did a quick check through the map and found only a few sites [...]

… for a few days.
Sweden was good and I will write about it at some stage. Also found time to read the new Harry Potter, along with many others at the campsite!

For the past week I have been near Beijing, China. The primary purpose of the trip was to attend the International Conference on Computational Science 2007 (ICCS 2007). At the conference I presented, on behalf of Professor Ivan Dimov and Rayna Georgieva, Complexity of Monte Carlo Algorithms for a Class of Integral Equations. This is [...]

The plan, mentioned in my last post, was to update from New Orleans. However, a combination of poor hotel internet and lack of time meant that I completely failed to do this.
My main reason for going to New Orleans was to attend Phoenix Rising, though meeting lots of friends came a close second. During the [...]

Today starts a month of travels and conferences. The first, is in New Orleans. Plans are to do some updates while I am away, but that, as usual, depends on free time and computer access.

This past weekend I was in Wales for the 2007 British Orienteering Championships and British Relay Championships. However, the early May Bank Holiday weekend also means the Reading Beer Festival.

On Saturday I went up to Malvern to meet up with a group of friends from my undergraduate days. Due to complicated scheduling this was our 2006 Christmas meetup! A rather good day
On Sunday I was at Inside Park for an a local orienteering event. The photos from the event are here. [...]

On Saturday I went with friends to the theatre to see Terry Pratchett’s Feet of Clay: A Discworld Murder Mystery dramatised by Stephen Briggs. Rather good it was.