Geoff Jones

Inveterate dabbler in business, travel, gadgets & life

Author: Geoff

Glasnost

Geoff & Danilka

In the best spirit of Anglo / Russian co-operation. Here I am holding Colin and Maria’s one month old baby ДАНИЛКА. (that’s Danilka or Daniel in English). Maria is a Russian born tennis coach who teaches at the David Lloyd tennis centre and was one of my lodgers a few years ago. Colin was one of my first employees straight from the local technical college and now runs his own business fitting out operating theatres with A/V kit..

We had a great evening with them and Maria’s mother plus Svetlana (my latest Russian lodger). Fascinating to hear of the Russian approach to education – you pick a sport,then you just do that and no other sport 6 days a week. Maria started her tennis at 7 years old!

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Chance or Fate

Having attended many talks about chance and randomness it is still amazing when certain chance events occur.

Michael & Manuel near Torremegia

When Sally and I were walking the Camino Via de la Plata from Seville a few weeks ago we bumped into two German lads, Manuel & Michael. Manuel was walking all the way to Santiago and in fact when Sally left in Los Santos, I walked with them from Villafranca to Merida. However, due to the office sale in Cambridge we parted company in Merida.

In the meantime Em and Mark were walking from Roncesvalle to Santiago…

Mark & Em at Stansted

Now get this when Em and Mark were collecting their Compostellas in Santiago who should they meet  at the office? Yep Manuel. Now what is the chances of that happening?

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Computing the future

Computingfor the future - Andy Hopper

Interesting talk by Andy Hopper tonight on Computing the future.

I especially liked his comments on setting projects for his PhD students. they have to be more advanced than what Google or Microsoft are doing but not totally science fiction stuff – A hard job these days I reckon.

Other interesting points was that 2-3% of the worlds energy is consumed by server farms. So the proposal is to put the server farms by the windmills and solar plants since data is so cheap to transmit.  Servers need to get more intelligent so that they run closer to 100% utilisation (rather than current 30%) by switching themselves off etc.

He forsees the world running on simple low power terminals. Yep. bring back  the Wyse50’s 🙂  But more likely to be mobile phones! Especially after his trip to Soweto to see how they are using phones there.

Also discussed the idea that every moving object would have a sensor hooked into a vast database so your phone could be measuring CO2 etc.

Digital Alternatives

A revealing chart showing global hectares available per person and current usage levels with the USA standing out as usual.

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Ascent and Everytrail

After my post bemoaning the fact that the only way I had of importing trails from the Garmin Legend HCx on the iMac was through using Parallels and the Garmin software (PC only!).

Euan pointed me in the direction of Ascent for the iMac which can take in data from the Garmin and is Mac based software. Works beautifully and very fast! However, for some weird reason Everytrail wouldn’t display the track, even though it was visible in Google Earth.

Great news from Chris at Everytrail is that he has found and fixed the bug (VRM in action) so now Ascent will display the trail in Everytrail with the photos, geotagged by Houdah, and downloaded from Flickr.

Here is an example of a walk that  Sally, Ellee and I did with the Cambridge Ramblers C for codgers group last Wednesday a far cry from pounding the camino in Spain doing 25mile days in temperatures of 30 degrees. But an interesting day anyway 🙂


Stretham walk take2

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