Geoff Jones

Inveterate dabbler in business, travel, gadgets & life

Author: Geoff

The Kentmere Horseshoe

 On Saturday George and I did the Kentmere Horseshoe in The Lake District. The weather was foul with a couple of very heavy showers and low visibility virtually all the day. Still it was very enjoyable.

  The image  is the memory-map route that we fed into the GPS. For those of you who want to see where we actually walked (:-)) a Google earth file is here for you to download. Unfortunately, as off this post the Google images are not of the highest quality, However, it still gives you a feel of the walk. We did about 1000 metres of ascent in 14 miles. Walking time of 4 hours and total time out of 5 hours.   George was struggling a bit onthe  last ascent but I’m sure it won’t take him long before the boot is on the other foot!

 

Here is George towards the end of the day when we suddenly saw some bright light in the sky – Yes it was the sun about 5 hours to late!

A day on the beach..

On Sunday George works on Southport pier so I thought it would be a good excuse to do a bit more of the round Britain barefoot coastal walk. George dropped me off at Crosby so that I could walk the 15miles on the beach back to Southport.  

 I was lucky enough to see some of Antony Gormley’s (Caution: Flash site) “Another Place” sculptures gazing out across the muddy sea. Very eyrie and splendid. The icecream man was raising a petition to prevent their removal in November to the USA. Previously they have been at Cuxhaven in Germany, Stavanger in Norway and De Panne in Belgium. More close up photo’s off the figures on the  Blueshawk website.

The beach became more deserted as you approach Southport and in fact Southport had the muddiest sand complete with embedded  oil on the whole stretch of the walk, coupled with the rain starting up meant the last stretch of the 15mile walk was not the best. Made me realise why  they needed a pier!

 

 

 

However there are great views (weather permitting) across to Wales from the pier.

You Tube powering ahead

Great analysis of the youtube phenomeme by Jay Meattle who has posted the graph below. (Thanks to Techmeme and ZDnet for the link). It makes Myspace look really pedestrian. My guess is that Murdoch must be getting a bit rattled. Hence the reason for yesterday scare stories in The Times (also owned by Murdoch) about the  TV Without Frontiers Directive. For what the directive is really about see this page and you can see its that old chesnut “aimed primarily at protecting children” because parents are singularly incapable of doing that as how can you expect oldies to understand technology! The directive also seeks to encourage diversity and basically making it a right that everone in the EU can access the same material (stopping censorship by individual governments).

Palm datebook record cleanup.

Today I bit the bullet and finally cleaned up the date book on my Treo 650. I’ve been hotsyncing the calendar data for the past 6 years and had accumulated 25,509 records. I got this dire warning in my HotSync log:- “Some handheld records were not copied to your PC. Your computer may be full or you may have reached the maximum allowed records on the desktop. To correct this situation, delete some records and perform a HotSync operation again.
Desktop = 25509, Handheld = 25508″

The question was how to archive the old records and clean them up. I discovered the Dimex application by LinkeSOFT this takes the Palm .dba file and converts it into a .csv so that all the records can be read by Excel and Google desktop. After cleaning you can re-import the .csv back into a .dba file. The DIMEX application sits in the Palm Desktop under Tools/Addins.

Worked brilliantly well (cost $22 USD), my 25,509 records are now down to 385 for the past year. So HotSync errors should be a thing of the past  and when I do desktop searches Google will pull in calendar data too. Also if I do succumb to the Treo750v (although I’m tempted to wait for the Treo680) I can import all the records into Outlook from the .csv file.