I’ve previously mentioned the blog that Steve Carter wrote whilst building his house in the Scottish Highlands. Whilst the blog finished along with the building, he is now in the midst of a project to publish a photo a day, running from the clock change back in October. Given the natural beauty of the surroundings, and his skill with a camera, there are some pretty stunning shots, and its well worth checking out.
Back before IBM bought and populated the Hursley Park site, it was a temporary wartime home to staff from Supermarine (and then Vickers) who were bombed out of their original location on the Itchen river in Southampton. As such, Hursley played its part in the development of one of the most effective and loved planes of the Second World War.
On 28th November 2006, Harry Grifiths, the last remaining member of the original design team so famously led by R J Mitchell, passed away. In memory of him, and on the day of his funeral, 8th December, Hursley Park witnessed a flypast and display by a Spitfire. It spent about five minutes performing above the house and south lawn with the unmistakable noise of the Rolls Royce Merlin engine reverberating around.
With the sky being drab and grey, it was difficult to get any decent pictures, but what ones I did get are up on my flickr site.
RIP Harry.
This blog netted a new record views/day figure yesterday. The post responsible was this one on Watford goalkeeper Richard Lee, who appeared on the BBC TV show Dragons’ Den earlier this year.
Richard has been second in line to the first team ‘keeper spot behind the on-loan Ben Foster of Manchester United and England. However recently with Ben’s injury Richard has had his chance, and taken it with some excellent performances. Last night saw us play Manchester City away, and Richard put in a man of the match performance with some astounding saves, earning himself a clean sheet and Watford a valuable away point with a 0-0 draw. Seen as the game was live on Sky Sports, it is perhaps unsurprising that he seems to have gained a few admirers, as my search engine stats show:
We’ve had SOA the movie, now you can play SOA the game, courtesy of some folks over in IBM Australia.
I’ve had a quick go and got to #12 on the leaderboard with 302190 points. It’s not the greatest flash game ever, but worth a look.
A colleague told me today about a new web site at www.zamzar.com which provides an online file conversion service for document, image, audio and video file formats. It seems to cover a wide array of popular and not so popular file formats, and has particularly good support for audio and video formats.
So, another new business in the web 2.0 world that’s causing a bit of a buzz on places like digg.
The difference with this one is that one of the two brothers who have set this up is a colleague, and football team-mate of mine, Chris Whyley. Chris is a lovely guy and seems to have hit on a nice sideline outside of the day job with this venture. The site looks great and I’ll definitely be trying it out. Coming as he does from one of our test teams, Chris’ colleagues have been having fun finding the odd little bug, as any new site will tend to have, but from the comments I’ve read out on the ‘net it seems to be going down very well.
There’s an interview with Chris and his brother/business partner over at Folksonomy, and they are keeping a blog as well. Good luck guys (but don’t get too successful Chris, we need you around for our assault on the Hursley 4-a-side football league!)
Whilst in general I’m not the greatest fan of all things American, I do like the way their book stores work. At first glance an out-of-town retail park might not seem to be the most suitable place for a book store, but it works really well. When I found myself in San Jose for six weeks a few years ago (writing an IBM redbook) I spent quite a lot of time in the Borders store down the road from my apartment. The combination of browsing, drinking coffee and reading, with no time pressures, meant you could really relax and enjoy the book/magazine/music buying process.
More recently, when travelling up to Watford on a midweek evening for football, I often pop into the Watford branch of Borders if I have some time to kill. Especially so with my new found photography hobby as I just pick up a book from that section that catches the eye and grab a coffee. I guess Borders kind of becomes a contemporary type of library except you end up buying the book if you like it.
All this means I was particularly happy when I drove past the West Quay retail park in Southampton on Friday to find that a new branch of Borders had opened (by chance that same day.) This had slipped under my radar completely, and actually caused more excitement than the more obvious Apple Store that’s soon due to open in the West Quay shopping centre. Lana and I popped in on Saturday to have a look at the store, and it is huge. Set over two floors it has the usual comprehensive magazine section along with music and books. The photography section was less impressive than the Watford one, as it was split across two sets of shelves and didn’t seem to carry as many titles. Nevertheless I grabbed a copy of The Photographers Guide to Filters by Lee Frost to browse over whilst taking a coffee in the obligatory Starbucks. Lana was happy to find the magazine section included a number of US imports including one she discovered and liked during our trip to New York at the start of the year.
One obvious advantage of being located in the retail park as opposed to town is the availability of parking (though not at this time of year on a Saturday afternoon) and the opening hours (9am – 10pm Mon to Saturday and 11am-5pm Sundays) I can envisage spending the odd couple of hours in there every now and then!