Nokia 6110 GPS Accuracy

I took Jane’s phone on a short cycle ride this morning to see how the Nokia Sports Tracker works when combined with the 6110‘s built in GPS. You can dig around the route on Google Maps.

It’s looking like the accuracy is OK (good enough) when away from buildings; and pretty wonky when in town. It doesn’t have the accuracy of our Bluetooth GPS unit, but it does have the considerable advantage of being a nice all in one unit.

We’ll give it a go on a snowy mountain: it should be great for tracking a run down a mountain.

Dosas


Dosa at Waves
Originally uploaded by Jane Dallaway

Many thanks to Andy for telling us about Waves in Hove. They are a Dosa Diner, and carry dosas as well as idli, pooris and other indian “street food”.

We headed out there this evening and gave them a try, and we’ll be back having had a most satisfying eat on dhai poori, masala dosa for me and a spring dosa for Richard. All washed down with a glass of red for Richard, and a couple of sweet lassis for me.

More snowboarding news

Further to my blog after our Performance course, I’ve since learnt about The Snowboard Show being held at the Tamworth snowdome in September. Amongst the demos and talks there are also some free coaching sessions, 2 of which are Freeride technique with the instructor from the Performance course, Ash Newnes. All you have to do to get on one of the sessions is to register by sending an email to the address at the bottom of this page. We’ve booked on to the Rail Technique session to see what we can learn.

In other news we’re looking at places to go for snowboarding over New Year. In recent years we’ve been to Avoriaz, Meribel and Utah. Ideally we want somewhere reasonably high up to make sure that there is some chance of snow, somewhere an hour or two from the airport, and most importantly somewhere that hasn’t got a minimum stay of less than 4 nights. Any suggestions? Or do you know of someone with an appartment to rent? Leave us a comment

Planning our big trip

We’ve also started planning our big trip for next year – a month long snowboarding adventure. At the moment it is looking like being based around Montana, Idaho and Portland, and making use of the Alaska Airlines schedule to get around, but all that could change. I’m hoping that the Off the Beaten Path USA trip report will offer some more insights as the guy who wrote that had some good suggestions for our Utah trip. Again, any suggestions? leave us a comment.

Performance Snowboard course

We spent the weekend taking the excellent SnowboardCoach.co.uk 2 day Performance Course at Xscape in Milton Keynes. We were a group of 8, and Ash managed to keep an eye on all of us giving feedback and advice – my main area to keep an eye on is not to use my upper body/shoulders to initiate turns. We did lots of drills, some designed to get us to understand the physics behind snowboarding, others to emphasise a point. An excellent course, which has really given me a desire to head off back to Milton Keynes soon and continue my practice.

Moo’s Hot and Sticky Party


Suits for stickering
Originally uploaded by Jane Dallaway

On Thursday Richard and I headed off into London with a load of other Brighton geeks to Moo’s Hot and Sticky Party. Richard managed to attend another moo party earlier in the year in San Francisco and after hearing about that there was no way I was missing out on this one. This party was to launch another new product – sticker books and we got to take away samples (as well as stick them on each other, moo employees etc etc).

We met some new faces, put faces to names (especially Will and Tom who I’ve known of for years but weirdly never met) as well as catching up with someone I haven’t seen in over 5 years.

A great party put on by a company who obviously know how to celebrate! I even got 2 photos included in the moo blog post about the evening. More photos.

Tour de France

Our weekend revolved around the Tour de France. On Saturday we headed into London for the Prologue. We arrived at Victoria and wandered along to Hyde Park with the intention of soaking up the atmosphere, watching some of the time trials and investigating the People’s village.

Prologue - Warm up in front of a large audience

Our first observation was just how busy it was. The cyclists were out warming up around the route, and so as we walked along South Carriage Drive we watched the cyclists whoosh past. The last cycle race I saw was when I was a child and the milk race came to Hull. My memories from that day were just how fast the cyclists were, but I imagined I’d overestimated this in my memory. Not so, admittedly this was a time trial, but it was amazingly fast. We spent 2 or 3 hours in the park before heading back to Brighton, just in time to watch Fabian Cancellara’s winning ride.

On Sunday we headed off with friends into Kent to Iden Green and found ourselves a spot near the road by The Peacock. We arrived really early and watched more and more people arrive to watch both the caravane and the race later. The riders were amazing to watch (albeit briefly). The breakway group of 5 were followed by at least 10 vehicles, possibly more like 15. The main group came along 4 or 5 minutes later.

Stage One - Caravane

A great couple of days, and quite a spectacle. Looking forward to it coming back to the UK again soon but in the meantime I’ll have to make do with the ITV4 coverage and the ITV and BikeRadar podcasts. More photos

SpaceNavigator PE


SpaceNavigator PE
Originally uploaded by d6y

A month or so back I was given a SpaceNavigator (let’s not go into the details, but let it be known that sometimes just turning up means people give you things). My initial plan was to eBay it, but it turns out these things are too cheap to eBay, so I decided to open it up and plug it in.

I’ve used with Google Earth (which is the only supported application I have), and I like it a lot. You don’t hold it in your hand (as my picture might suggest), but plonk it on the table and use twist, push, pull and turn the device to control Google Earth. It’s a much nicer experience than using the mouse and onscreen navigation.

Now if only they’d add support for Final Cut: it’d be great for scrubbing through video and marking in and out points.

Family trees

I did quite a bit of work on my family tree years ago and bought a copy of Family Tree Maker at the time. Since then I’ve installed it on machine after machine until now, when I have a mac and don’t want to install parallels just to run a very old version of FTW. Instead I downloaded a copy of MacFamilyTree which is quite a pleasant application, and works well with the GED file exported from FTW, but seems to be short on a couple of useful features whilst still in demo mode, and until I know what those features are like I don’t particularly want to spend $50.

Yesterday Aral twittered about Geni and Richard quickly sent me the link. It looks like quite a nice way to get a quick visualisation of your family tree, and is very usable, allowing you to invite other members of your family to contribute. Unfortunately for me there is no way to import GEDCOM files yet and until then it won’t become a usable solution as I’m not about to retype 150 or so peoples data in. Sigh!

Recipe book index rant

I was looking in a recipe book for the recipe for moussaka. I knew I’d made moussaka before, and I was convinced that this was the correct book. I looked in the index and couldn’t find it listed, I flicked through the book and didn’t find it. Then I remembered, the recipe was called “red bean moussaka”. I looked in the index under red and there it was.

This isn’t the only recipe book to have this problem, in my experience recipe book indexes are often hopeless, in fact at least one recipe book doesn’t have one (preferring instead to list every recipe in the table of contents).

So, what should the index contain? I’m happy for the index not to divide food into sections – i.e. starters, main, vegetable etc as long as they do that in chapters or something. For me, the index should contain a list of food stuffs, and every recipe in which it is a major ingredient, so:

lamb
– moussaka
– rogan josh
– roast
etc
thus allowing me to find recipes based on what I have to hand.