For Euro 2008 I tracked the odds of any of the teams winning over time. It makes a kind of fun graph:
The y-axis shows the odds (screen scraped from a betting web site… not doing that again), converted into a probability, and multiplied by 16. Why multiplied? To give a kind of “value” to each team: if you’d purchased a team for £1 in a sweepstake, then you can plot a kind of value for it over time by multiplying the odds of winning by the size of the pot (£16). Kind of.
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 🙂
”
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
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.
In 2006 we visited Bletchly Park, and I really recommend you head out there sometime. In fact, go soon, because we found out at the Cafe Sci talk that they have three years left of funding. Then… it’s gone.
Yesterday I received a press release which contained some worrying images of building decay. But there’s something you can do…
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
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.
So, the final week of the Brighton Festival saw us at four events:
On 6th February 1999 Hull City were at the bottom of the football league, with little to shout about – the club was going nowhere, the owner wasn’t contributing and it looked like Hull City didn’t have much of a future. We were living in Ealing at the time, and when I spotted the Brentford v Hull match I decided that we should go and offer my team some of the support it needed. That started my adult attendance of Hull City games and we won 2 – 0 starting what became known as the Great Escape led by Warren Joyce. Over the next few seasons we attended quite a few of the Southern games including trips to Southend, Cheltenham, Leyton Orient (including for the play offs in 2001), Barnet, Hayes (for an FA cup match), Brighton (at Gillingham) and at the Withdean, as well as some games at Boothferry Park (vs Barnet Feb 2001) and later in the KC Stadium (vs Bournemouth Easter 2003).
I hadn’t managed any games this season – when we were in Hull, the Tigers weren’t, and when they were down here, we weren’t – but both Richard and I had been carefully checking the scores, and were keeping a very close eye on the end of the season.
When Hull made it through the playoff semi-finals and into the final at Wembley I knew that I had to do whatever I could to go (along with every other Hull fan). I was up checking the website at 8am last Monday morning, when the remaining 3800 tickets went on sale (to non-season ticket holders) but failed to get any – I kept selecting them and getting to an error on the website. Aagghh!!
I found some (very expensive) tickets via 1st4FootballTickets and decided that I really wanted to be at the match – the first trip to Wembley for Hull City after 104 years, I couldn’t afford to wait another 104 for an opportunity to see my team on what might be the biggest stage in Europe. I bought the tickets, they turned up without problem and got me access to the ground. Hurrah!
On Saturday we arrived at Wembley at around midday, leaving ourselves plenty of time to soak up the atmosphere and enjoy the experience. I have been to Wembley for a football match only once before, a rather poor 0 – 0 friendly between England and Norway in 1994, and so was keen to experience the “new Wembley”. The walk down Wembley Way towards the stadium was impressive, looking towards the stadium and the arc and seeing the familiar colours of black and amber lining the street along with the red and white of Bristol City.
We made our way into the ground, found our seats and then took a wander around to find a beer. I’ve never seen a Champagne and Seafood bar at a football ground before, but we were in the Club Wembley section which I guess explains it.
The atmosphere was great, and the noise was fantastic – the sounds of the supporters singing just echoed around the ground. We watched some of the warm up, the pre-match fireworks and presentation of the teams before the match started.
I’ve nothing to add about the quality of the football that hasn’t been said elsewhere – Dean Windass’s wonder goal – lots and lots and lots of attempts by Bristol City, but nothing really of power. Boaz Myhill and the defence did a great job and kept another clean sheet.
The final whistle blew, and the Hull supporters (and team) celebrated for all we were worth (I know I had little voice left yesterday). And so, Hull City are in the Premiership and Plymouth get the title of “Biggest town in Britain never to have seen top flight football” – Hull City still holds the title of “Only football club in Britain that has no letters you can colour in” though 🙂
Richard is keen to point out that we’re still on track to meet his prediction of being winners of the Premiership in 2017.
More to come about this later, but in the meantime, take a look at my photos and Richard’s photos
Libby asked this question last November at the Brighton Bloggers meetup. It’s taken me a while to get around to actually answering this question properly, and in fact it might be a better starting point to ask:
Why did I start blogging?
Richard and I started this blog back in March 2001 and back then it was to save bookmarks centrally, to leave ourselves reminders and to keep our friends, overseas or local, up to date with what we were up to. Since then, I’ve started 2 other blogs – Jane’s Technical Stuff and Jane’s Photography blog.
Why separate blogs rather than just one?
Originally, the technical and photographic blogs shared a home with the joint blog with Richard, but it seemed a bit weird to have no separation between work and home. If I documented some feature on my technical blog during the working day, then I might want colleagues to read it, without them necessarily having to search through photos of my garden. The photography blog is the least active of the three, and is a place for reviewing lenses, equipment and for sharing good podcast/vodcasts I’ve come across.
Has the reason for blogging changed?
Sort of, I still blog technically on things I’ve found out, especially if I’ve had problems finding an answer using good old google. I still use them a little bit for bookmarking, but only when I’ve got some extended comments to make about it – otherwise I use del.icio.us. In 2003 I did an interview with the Mirror about being a blogger, reading the extract I took of it shows that actually my reasons haven’t really changed over the past 5 years.
