On Saturday afternoon Hull City were briefly 3rd in the Premiership. I posted a picture when we were 8th (pre-season) but here we are, one game in, and we’ve exceeded the pre-season position. Even after the weekend games, we’re still 5th.
Author: jane
Software on Palms vs Software on iPod Touch/iPhone
In days gone by both Richard and I had various PDAs – we both started off with PalmPilot Professionals in the late 1990s, moved on to Handspring Visors in around 2000, then Richard went the mobile phone route and I had a Handera 330 and finally a Sony Clie TH55 before also going the mobile phone route. Richard is now an iPhone user, and I have an iPod Touch and a Nokia 6110 Navigator.
In 2005 I blogged about what software was on my Sony Clie, and long before that Richard had listed what he had on his Handspring Visor. There is quite a lot of commonality between those lists:
- Email: I used Snappermail back then, now I use either the IMAP facilities on the Nokia Navigator 6610 or on the iPod Touch. Richard uses his iPhone but did at one stage used Top Gun Postman to send and receive mobile email. No additional software needed
- ToDos: I used to use WP+ to manage recurring ToDos. Now I use Remember The Milk and the web access from either my phone or my iPod Touch
- Security: in days gone by both of us used Secret!. Now I use HandySafe on my phone. With the advent of the iPhone/iPod Touch applications, I’m sure there will be an equivalent purchase coming soon
- Data storage: I used to use Pilot DB which allowed me to create basic databases and store data. I’ve not replaced this and haven’t missed it
- Timesheet: I used to use Timesheet, Richard used to use PunchClock. I don’t currently do timesheeting, so don’t have an application installed on either device.
- Backup: I used to use Flyzip to back up to the external memory card. Now I rely on the syncing between my mac and the device
- Games and entertainment: I still miss RocketMania – and excellent game which worked really nicely on a handheld device. I’ve installed some of the new iPod Touch game apps and am enjoying Hangman, Sudoko and Sol Free. Obviously having mobile internet access takes away quite a lot of the need for offline document readers, for all but airline travel. I’m currently trialing the great instapaper as an iPod Touch app to see how it behaves
Over the years, the pre-installed software has improved a lot, I remember having a hard time trying to find a Palm OS application which could handle both IMAP and HTML emails. I recall paying quite a lot of money for Snappermail at the time. I’m sure that there will be more and more iPhone/iPod Touch applications available as time progresses, and it’ll be interesting to revisit this list again sometime.
A Town called Panic
A week or so ago, iTunes offered an episode of “A Town called Panic” as a free download. I downloaded, watched, laughed and then bought the series (Note: it can be watched for free here). It is bizarre, and amusing and I love that horse sounds like Bernard Manning.
Brighton Earthship
I attended a talk several years ago about the Earthship concept, and have been meaning to join one of the regular tours to the Brighton Earthship but just never got around to it. When I spotted the tour as part of the eco Open Houses it just seemed too good an opportunity to miss.
I found it hard to justify driving to Stanmer Park to go and visit an eco property, so we got the bikes out and pedalled off to Stanmer House where the group assembled. There were probably around 80 people so we split into two groups and walked off through the Stanmer Organics plots towards the Earthship.
As John, the tour guide, was telling us all about the building process, and how the earthship works, I got to wondering if there were any you could stay in anywhere. My question was answered inside as there was a leaflet – “Eco Home Holiday Rental – the house that runs itself” – in Ger, Normandy, France. Sounds like a great way to experience “off the grid” living without committing to it for the long-term.
Isle of Wight
Last weekend Richard and I headed over to the Isle of Wight for the weekend. I’d never been before, and Richard doesn’t think he has been either.
We based ourselves at the Godshill Park Farm B&B, a lovely, relaxing place a short (10 minutes or so) walk from the pretty village of Godshill and its many eateries.
We spent Saturday mainly along the South Coast – concentrating on the New and Old Batteries at the Needles, as well as various bays along the way. We spent Sunday around the West Coast up to Cowes, ending up at Sandown, and then spent Monday on the East Coast up to Ryde and ending up on the ferry.
A really lovely weekend, and a feeling of England in the 1970s. We’re hoping to head off over again, maybe without the car next time, as the Island line train service combined with a plentiful bus service and the myriad of public footpaths make the island very accessible.
There are plenty more photos
Hull City Fixtures 2008/09
So the fixtures are out for Hull’s first season in the Premiership and it starts with a home game against Fulham. As Richard pointed out, I should take a screen shot of the table now, as we’re currently 8th, so here we are, recorded for posterity 🙂
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Being the geek that I am, I’ve used the BBC fixtures link, some TextMate macro generation, a bit of Excel date manipulation and some hand crafted code to generate a Hull City Fixtures iCalendar file.
There are no guarantees I’ll keep it up to date, but to the best of my knowledge it is correct today
Wakehurst Place and Nymans Gardens
Last weekend we headed off to Wakehurst Place, a botanic garden and conservation area managed by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Wakehurst Place was added to my to-visit list earlier this year when it was mentioned at a Cafe Scientifique talk about The Flower Hunters. It wasn’t the sunniest day, but it was warm and dry and we spent a good few hours walking around the gardens. We didn’t manage to get around all of it, and in fact missed almost all of the Woodland zone – a good reason to return.
I really enjoyed the Conservation zone and walking along the raised walkway above the water. At the end of the day, and after reading a few leaflets, and finding out that we’d get our admission fee back, we decided to join the National Trust for the year – we have a weekend in the Isle of Wight and a week in Cornwall later in the year and so hope we will be able to make a lot of use of it.
This weekend we took advantage of our new National Trust membership and visited Nyman’s – the closest National Trust property to our house (I think!) and had a very pleasant afternoon. Nymans has gardens, woodland and amazing views over Sussex and it seems to be a really great space – people were picnicking, playing hide and seek, sitting on the plentiful benches reading the Sunday paper – a really, really welcoming area. We had a short walk around and I’m looking forward to an opportunity to return and do some of the woodland walks and possibly even a visit to the house to take a look at the family rooms.
Mountain bike ride
Every few weeks or so during summer one of the Madgex guys, Steve, organises mountain bike rides after work. They’ve always sounded a bit hard-core but this weeks was accessible for us lesser mortals (or maybe just me :-)). The hard core bunch left the office and headed over the downs via Devil’s Dyke (I think) and down to Shoreham. I got on the train and arrived at Shoreham station all refreshed and ready to pedal.
I switched on the GPS unit to start recording where we were and we headed off along the River Adur for 40 minutes or so until we got to the Bridge Inn at Upper Beeding. Here we stopped, refueled on beer, soft drinks and crisps for 20 minutes before heading back on the other side of the river and back to Shoreham. We waved goodbye to 2 of our party when they decided to head off back via Devil’s Dyke – nutters!
On getting back to Shoreham someone pointed out that actually it was only another 15 – 20 minutes to cycle back to Brighton, and would probably wind up being quicker than the train – so that is what we did.
Total (according to Sports tracker): 15.4 miles
Time (not counting the break at the pub when I paused the unit): 1 hour 48 minutes
Route: See the map
Gnar Wars
I caught up with the latest episode of shralp! yesterday and amongst other stuff they showed a teaser for a 4 minute snowboarding film “Gnar Wars“. A brilliant bit of filming, editing and riding.
Here it is in full:
Gnar Wars by Mike Benson from Mike Benson on Vimeo.
Final Festival update
So, the final week of the Brighton Festival saw us at four events:
- Double Header: Hattie Hayridge & Norman Lovett at a very chilly Udder Belly. This was the first night on their tour, and it was an entertaining hour or so
- The death and life of Sherlock Holmes at the Nightingale Theatre. This only starred Roger Llewellyn and he worked immensely hard for both 45 minute halves – especially given the heat in the theatre. It was a great play – with Roger playing Sherlock, Watson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Moriarty and a number of smaller, lesser characters. Excellent and real good entertainment
- Brain Drain – a locally produced play at the Sanctuary Cafe. We missed the first half as we were still travelling back from the Hull City game at Wembley so despite Jeremy and Kirsty’s best efforts I never did quite work out what was going on
- The return of the Ornate Johnsons at the Udder place – the most noisy venue I may have ever been to – with the traffic on the roundabout, the generator to keep the structure inflated and general people noise from both the Udderbelly and people milling around. It was quite memorable, however, first of all one of the microphones wasn’t working so quite a few scenes were played out with one of the cast shouting whilst the others were conversing normally – it broke things up a bit, but the level of professionalism was immensely high and they incorporated this handicap into the sketches. The background noise quietened down, and then the roof started coming down, until it was so low we had to be evacuated. After 5 or 10 minutes they got it sorted out (apparently a carrier bag blew into the fan – which was why it suddenly went quiet) and we started again. This was probably one of the best shows I’ve seen during the fringe – the level of professionalism that the cast showed throughout a troubled performance was incredible. I’ll look out for them again.