After last night’s epic (by Cambridge standards) 4″ of snow. The Cambridge Rambling Club A group walk around Histon was cancelled so Sally & I met up with Jill at the usual starting place in Harvey Road and concocted our own walk up to Coton (where we bumped into the B group) then across to Grantchester for a scone and cuppa at The Orchard with a ramble back along the river to Cambridge.

A very pretty walk in the snow, although my legs found it quite tiring like walking along the beach. The most surprising part was that the Coton Footpath had been largely cleared of snow so was easy walking.

My Fitbit said I covered 15.4 miles burning 2700 calories the Etrex GPS made it 14.7 miles (3mph) so pretty close. I took quite a few pictures and also made a Everytrail of the walk here.

Snowman on a wall

It was interesting to see the different types of snowmen that students had been making especially the latest trend of creating them sat down on park benches etc My favourite was this one on Elizabeth Way.

The day ended with one of Sally’s wonderfully relaxing hot stone massage I tried to use my Zeo sleep measuring device to see how deep a sleep I go into, but it insisted I needed to plug the iPhone in and lets face it when you are so relaxed can you be bothered….

Having just read or skimmed Mark Zuckerberg’s letter in the regulatory filing to make Facebook a public company. I thought it would be fun to do a Wordle on his public letter about Facebook. here it is.

Wordle - Mark Zuckerberg S1 filing letter

Just love our the word People (41 mentions) stands out!

In fact the words in numerical order, from Textalayser,  are people(41) our (30) facebook (17) build (16) building (15) make (15) world (14) want (11) better (11) best (11)

Frequency and top words :

Word Length :

Syllable count :

2 word phrases frequency :

That’s a very clear company mission, now if only I can find Google’s equivalent letter..

Here’s a bit of a review of Sleepcycle, Fitbit & Zeo as ways of monitoring your sleep activity. It has to be said at the outset that I have never suffered from a problem with falling asleep or staying asleep My only problems are my nocturnal ramblings to take a pee due to my enlarged prostate and folks (but not Sally!) complaining about my snoring.

I started with the SleepCycle iPhone app which gave lots of pretty graphs like these and allowed you to set an alarm which woke you when you are in the lightest sleep mode near to the alarm time. However, it became unreliable with the iPhone falling out of the bed in the night. Plus it’s very inconvenient having your phone buried under the sheets also there is a slight risk of it overheating when it’s charging during the night.

My next trial is using the Fitbit Ultra, the sleep monitoring with this is more of a by-product of the monitoring of your energy usage in 5 minute increments throughout the day. So there is no capability of setting alarms etc. You fit the Fitbit into a cuff around your wrist and then set it’s timer going, remembering to press stop when you awake. I find it a bit tedious & inconvenient especially when sleeping with Sally However, it is excellent at picking up my nocturnal rambles. Here is last night:-

Fitbit sleep chart

Whilst messing about with my Withings dashboard (another story) I discovered the Zeo sleep monitor, which rather amazingly could be purchased from Amazon, and even better arrived just before I returned home from Les Gets. Sally refused to allow me to use it over the weekend (even though I know she will be eager to use it). So last night was its inauguration.

After answering endless questions I finally got my Zeo account setup. I finally worked out how to to connect the headband. When it’s on it looks more like a headtorch than a sleep device! But I’m never one to be worried about aesthetics and it’s very comfortable

The Zeo transmits data to the iPhone app via bluetooth which is one of my pet hates as a communication means. After 30 minutes (Yep Fitbit recorded it) of fiddling I finally got it to pair with the iPhone, on my head and ready to press start! It was still in the same place on my forehead when I awoke, pressing stop then produced this rather colourful chart of my sleep:-

First night with the Zeo Headset

Pretty impressive I thought. Although it didn’t really detect my toilet break at 3.30am like the Fitbit did. So obviously I was still very sleepy (obviously why I fell down the stairs 6 weeks ago). It will be interesting to see if my deep sleep goes above 17% in future nights or if Les Gets death by cheese raclettes & fondues really does affect your sleep. The Zeo comes with pretty comprehensive guide to how to sleep better etc. and can even be programmed to silently awake you near your alarm time All to be tried in the future! Maybe Zeo can measure sound levels and add them to the chart as well

More to follow as I get more data…

Nope, I’m not talking about borrowing money to pay of credit card debts.

I’m talking about The Fitbit and balancing the amount of calories you eat against the calories you burn through exercise.

The Fitbit rates your exercise levels into 4 levels, sedentary, lightly, fairly & very active. Very active is shown as red and is typically (for me) above 7 cals/min.

You can also log a daily food diary, when you eat more calories than you have burnt the calorie zone changes from green to red.

Hence to get out of the red eating zone you need to exercise more in the red zone.

Here is an example from today. (I fear the lunch time chips rather clashed with Sally’s delicious vegetable crumble).

As you can see a brisk walk around Les Gets corrected today’s gluttony

Here is the guy clearing the entrance to my apartment in Les Gets this morning. Oh how I would love to have such a machine

Heavy Snow in Les Gets

High winds prevented access to the Northern  slopes of Mont Chéry today, so hopefully lots of new runs there tomorrow.

Here is the scene at the mid station today:

The day after a night of snow

Finally managed to get the new Air working as well today with its illuminated keyboard, after making the mistake of transferring all the old files locked with snow leopard requiring me to reinstall Lion (over the slow internet here). Just have to get used to the QWERTZ keyboard now

Oh dear it has been officially noted that I’m been very lazy. Just received this from Amazon:-

We noticed your blog (listed below) has not updated for more than 30 days. Kindle customers expect to receive frequent updates for blogs and news feeds to which they subscribe. Because blogs should update at least once per month, we are cancelling blogs that have not updated in more than 60 days.

Please update your blog regularly. If it is a seasonal blog, please let us know the publication frequency

I should be writing about my exciting new toy The Fitbit You can see my daily stats on my wordpress.com blog

Or the bad time I had when The Russians broke into all my blogs and wreacked havoc. Only resolved when Quentin came to my rescue  writing UNIX command lines such as:-

& cleaning out every php file in 30 websites. For which I’m eternally grateful.

Or my experiences with my new Xmas present from Sally , the  Oregon weather station up to Wunderground (sorry it’s down at the moment as it needs a PC between it and the net).

Roc d'Enfer from Mont Chery

Hopefully my writers block will be freed up and folks will have less to complain about my tweets always been from scripts!

In the mean time I will enjoy my apartment in Les Gets & the great snow conditions!

and also a Happy New Year to all!!

Tonight the annual Silicon Valley comes to Cambridge event kicked of with a session on the Future of Education.

Six panelists outlined their vision of educations future in ten minutes or so each, I captured the audio and made rough notes using my LiveScribe pen. The full commentary is now live here. My take on the speakers is:-

First up was the Cambridge Vice Chancellor, Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz who mentioned the Catch22 the University was in regarding the so called Grand Challenge funding method the Government is proposing with such funding being at the expense of many small grants. I was also surprised that they are not increasing undergraduate numbers only PhD’s and Post Docs.

Next up was Greg Joswiak Apple’s iPod and iPhone marketing czar, who surprisingly wasn’t happy about giving a talk without slides, he at to use his iPad instead. Main fact is that in 18months more iPad’s are now in education in the USA than regular computers. Another fact was the huge number of educational apps and their volumes . The Open university app has had about 40 million downloads.

Next was the impressive Raj Kapoor an excellent speaker who left you feeling energised and that things have already changed with companies like LiveMocha in language (over 1 billion folks want or need to learn English). Voxy offering contextural English learning (In a Doctors will teach medical terms, at a station travel terms). and ClassDojo to help with motivating kids in the classroom (1/2 million downloads in first 6 weeks!). Also spoke about the degree mills in the USA and boundless learning. Plus the amazing celebrity professors in Korea who have become brands in their own right! All very exciting and vibrant.

Reid Hoffman of linkedIn fame was next mentioning that education was currently in a bubble with a poor return on investment and that people should be asking what is the taget of education. Interesting analogy was between teaching sports and entrepreneurship. You can learn the rules but it won’t make you a great player. He also mentioned the great success of the Khan Academy in reaching out to students in a non orthodox way. Another insight was that with online learning spending $5-30million dollars can help to educate tens of millions of people.

Joi Ito then started saying he was a double college drop out! and in his new role as Director at the MIT media lab he has students asking him why should they continue His reply is that if it was there he would have stayed. They have emphasis on Construction not Instruction and the importance on learning to think in an era of abundance of information.

Finally we had Rohan Silva emphasising just how geeky our latest government is  and how they intend to digitise our public services. Apparently in the next few weeks a major new government Initiative is going to be launched on teaching coding in schools. (I wonder if it will use the new £15 Rasberry Pi computer )

Ironically I’m afraid I had to dash off before the questions to attend to grand parent duties as the parents were due for a parents evening.

As an experiment here are my notes and audio stream (clicking on the text will take you to that section of the audio):

Sally and I dedicated October to walking The Lycian Way in Turkey. In 23 walking days we managed to do 262 miles of the 318 , so we walked around 82% of the route including both ends.

Section’s we missed are:-

• The day from Akmel to Gelemis. Although we did walk most of it the other way! (Section 8 )
• We walked a different route from Demre (Myra) to Andriake taking in the remains at Sura. Many thanks to Salih for rescuing us from Andriake and helping us with the walk to Alakilise. (End of Section 18 and start of Section 19)
• Alakilise to Mavikent – mainly to save time plus it gets problematic to cross the high ground without a tent & the beach walking along a busy road didn’t appeal. (Parts of Sections 19 & 20)
• A short section from the Roman Bridge to the junction with the high route. Due to no accommodation at the bridge plus the section can be treacherous due to landslips. (Part of section 25b)

It is a great walk fantastic scenery with many beautiful bays most of which are deserted, lots of hill walking, very rocky (I totally wrecked my Scarpa boots). The trail is pretty well marked, although The Gaia iPhone app previously loaded with the GPS trail from Amy & Jim was invaluable most days

We met many great folks particularly the two lanky German boys carrying huge bags with a tent that never got used! plus Keith & Irma from South Africa.

The trail is very well used in many parts although some sections are getting overgrown.

I can really recommend the walk to anyone.

Starting to get concerned about walking 300miles in temperatures above 30 degrees centigrade!

There is a good write up from some who did The Lycian Way earlier this year here http://bit.ly/qWhrOV I’ve ‘borrowed’ their GPS trail and put it in the Gaia GPS iPhone app and also on my etrex unit! Let’s see ho often we wander off the trail

@GeoffJones @JesusGreenPool

Yesterday was the final day of the Jesus Green pool swimming season with my use of  the iPhone Daily Data Tracker application I know that I swam 69 times since the opening day on the 14th May.

In the 69 visits I swam a grand total of 35.78 miles ( 630 lengths), I didn’t time myself but my daily 10 lengths usually worked out at about 32mins. I only managed to swim the mile (18lengths) twice this year, mainly due to my fingers turning very white and for the first time this year my left little toe.

Real shame it has to close so early in the year given that the water temperature was still at 18degrees, perhaps we regulars could run it as a private club

So where do I go for my swim now? Maybe join Nikki & Liz in the river at NRC before 7am every day? Perhaps not as there are no hot showers to revive my circulation. The river in Chesterton is way to busy with racing eights at that time……