Tag Archives: cambridge

Autumnal Observations

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A few notes from my walk around Cambridge today. The guy I know who runs a tiling warehouse store (I was his first customer 15 years ago) said the bottom just fell out of his market 3 weeks ago. He is a loyal Barclays customer with a 40K overdraft, without warning or for any reason they suddenly decided they want him to pay 11% for his overdraft! Impossible for him to change banks, the other banks are not taking on new business customers!

The gym I joined , to get a decent clean swimming pool, gave me 15months membership for the price of 11 plus I got loads of visitor passes for Sally to use. The gym seemed very busy.

The queues at the tills in White Stuff for their midseason sale where humungous and the shop was heaving.

The outdoor shop Open Air was totally deserted…

The Apple store was packed, as usual.

The streets were busy with the new students and it is a glorious autumnal day.

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Apple screws it up.

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MacBook Oct 2008

MacBook Oct 2008

In the beautifully illustrated tear down of the new MacBook at iFixit there is the discovery that the new MacBook contains an astounding 96 screws of which 56 hold down the keyboard. It must be an assemblers / BOM nightmare with 13 different types of screw mentioned in the break down. Plus it must add to the machining costs all those blind tapped holes in the casing. Lets hope the poor Chinese women don’t strike for better wages :-(

Just had a play with one in the Apple store here in Cambridge. I found the new mouse pad quite hard to use as the downwards force to activate the switch seems quite hard, obviously designed that way to stop inadverent pressing when using the glide pad.

The machine does look beautiful though. :-)

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A day in the country…

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Vera from the Cambridge Rambling Club organised an excellent ‘A’ rated walk on Sunday for 13 of us keen ramblers, A 15 mile circular trip from Grantchester to Toft. Sally and I added on a 5mile trip to get there from Cambridge!

Here is the route with photos:-

Cambridge Ramblers – Toft Walk

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An unexpected bonus is that Vera had discovered a load of permissive paths from Comberton to Grantchester which are ideal to incorporate in my Scholars Way walk, thus replacing a tedious footpath walk from Barton to Comberton with a delightful meadow walk alongside Barton Brook. Many thanks to Lark Rise Farm and The Countryside Restoration Trust for opening up this area.

A great day thanks to Vera and a splendidly organised ramble and providing an excellent home made tea in her beautiful cottage garden – excelled The Orchard in every way :-) Also thanks to Ellee for suggesting that we went and unfortunately couldn’t make it herself.

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Cambridge property going South….

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Cheffins held a property auction in Cambridge yesterday (which i missed :-( ). This fine 3 bed semi in Lovell Road CB4 2QW was predicted, prior to the auction,  to make £180K to £200K in fact it didn’t reach £118K . Oops it made £179,500

Only 8 of the 15 lots were sold at the auction. So it looks as though the property crash has finally hit Cambridge (again). I wonder if it will take 15 years to recover this time.

Update:

From the excellent Estate angels website I found some historic prices for Lovell Road:

Lovell Road House Prices 2000 - 2007

Lovell Road House Prices 2000 - 2007

Yesterdays price of £118K £179,500 takes as back in time to 2000!  Eight two years of Cambridge property inflation wiped out in one month or so…

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Making a splash..

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Today at Noon was the official start to my swimming season here in Cambridge with the Jesus Green pool opening. The water was at a balmy 51°F a couple of degrees warmer than last year.

Geoff making a splash

I managed 2 lengths (Sally did 4). Jordan, the reporter was there from the Cambridge News and he reckons our pictures should hit the presses this Friday.

The cost for the season is £52.50 with my residents leisure card! Full set of pictures are on Flickr

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Daylight bats..

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Whilst walking in Mill Road Cemetery today with Tony we spied this bat flying around in broad daylight.

Hope this doesn’t mean that UK bats have got the dreaded lurgy that is killing all the bats in the USA one of the symptoms being reported was “Within a month, people in the area were calling in with reports of bats flying outside in the middle of the day.”

Many thanks to Sally for buying me the super zoom Olympus SP-560UZ for Christmas :-)

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My Local MP in action…

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So this is what we pay our MP’s to do:-

David Howarth (Cambridge, Liberal Democrat) | Hansard source

On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. I am having some difficulty understanding how motion No. 1 on today’s Order Paper can be in order. It appears to have been made under Standing Order 15(2)(b), in so far as it is a motion to be moved by a Minister of the Crown

“to the effect that any specified business may be proceeded with at this day’s sitting…until a specified hour”—

namely 10 o’clock. Since motion No. 1 is such a motion, whether it says so or not, it should be taken not now, but at 10 o’clock. However, if it were taken at 10 o’clock, it would have no effect, because it would be too late. Therefore, in my view the motion seems to be out of order.

Taken from the excellent site They Work for You.

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Leaping Lineouts..

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Philip kindly invited Sally, Doug, Adrian and myself to the pre-match lunch at CRUFC. Todays match was towards the EDF National Trophy , Cambridge played Rotherham (Top of National League 1). A very exciting game with Cambridge only losing by one point :-(

It was the first outing for my Olympus SP-560UZ with its new 2GB memory card. I ended up taking well over 60 pictures, most at its maximum X16 optical zoom – with no tripod. My match favourite was this throw in:-

Throw In

Number 15Although number 15 (Charlie Spon-Smith) didn’t seem to be striking a stereotypical rugby pose…

I uploaded all the pictures to my new favourite upload site, Picasa (well 1GB space for free!) although the cool flash player seems to have disappeared. So you will have to click on the CRUFC picture below to see all the match shots.

CRUFC

[piflasa]http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/base/user/geofones/albumid/5032635320706411089?kind=photo&alt=rss&hl=en_GB|400[/piflasa]
A great day out the place was packed – over 200 for lunch yet again. So many thanks Philip!

Addendum: From Rotherhams site – I found 4 of their players it was their first outing, 5 of the  players had played in more than 12 of their 18 games this year, remainder had played in 4 to 7 games.

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