Geoff Jones

Inveterate dabbler in business, travel, gadgets & life

Author: Geoff

Route Planning

Here is the summary of the first two days walk that I propose starting on Saturday. I intend to follow the GR5 from St. Gingolph on Lake Geneva to Nice.

I’m using , for the first time the memory-map software [Important the Alpes version MMV5/IGN/PE/MB388/CI is faulty call 01189062600  to get a version that has Geneva and St. Gingolph on it]

This enables me to send waypoints (each verical blue line below) to my Garmin Legend. Unfortunately the Garmin can only hack 20 days, so I’m having to merge two days together and at the same time keeping the waypoints below 50. (The Garmin is primitive, computer wise a bit like Palms were 5 years ago!) If only the Treo700 was available in the UK.

The Memory Map software prouces lots of pretties like this below:-

Summary

Route Distance: 30.5 km
Estimated Time: 11:35 Total Ascent: 3654 m
Total Descent: 2091 m

Elevation Profile (St.Gingolph on left, La Chappelle D’Abondance at 15km and Refuge de Chesery at 30.5km.)

Weather wise, I see the zero isotherme in Chamonix is at 2000 -> 2600 m. Which is the elevation of most of the walk.  Although this is promising:-

“High 1025 hpa east of Azores, extending gradually towards Southwestern France. Northwesterly stream over the Northern Alps becoming gradually more stable and dryer. High pressure condition expected to prevail thereafter and at least until the middle of next week.”

Now i must get back to clicking away on my maps.

Result Day

Here is Em really jubilant at her excellent GCSE results. She managed 7 A* and 4 A’s. I’m a really proud dad today. All of her friends also did well, interestingly her friends who went to Parkside did exactly as well as her friends at The Perse, and apparently  Joe from Parkside received a letter of commendation, been in the top 5 scorers in the country.

The only difference being that, I think, The Perseans did separate sciences .

So now they will all be reunited for the next two years at Hills Road. 

[Here is Craig’s blog from Parkside]

River of News Revisited ..

Just under a year ago I organised the Our Social World conference here in Cambridge, UK. One of the cool things that Adrian kindly did for us was a river of news feeds that was displayed on the projector. This displayed all mentions of the conference, including all the delegates, and also since we are English the latest Test Match scores.

Today whilst reading Robert Scoble’s blog I noticed he was swooning about the river of news that his big friend and creator of RSS Dave Winer has just released. This is a river of news feed stripped to its bare essentials for displaying feeds from The New York Times and later The BBC on a blackberry or other mobile device.

Since we are in a WEB2.0 world and Adrian was on MSN at 9.30pm I suggested maybe we should knock about with the series of feeds that the BBC has for football (Soccer to the Americans). So by 2am we had created 20 URL’s one for each football team in the premier division. Each URL is the initials of the club plus FC plus river.com so Arsenal is http://afcriver.com nice and short for the mobile phone text entry (although it redirects to afc.newsrivers.com) and West Ham United is http://whufcriver.com Manchester United is http://mufcriver.com Adrian has written a script to display the stuff on your phone like this:-

All rather cool I think. Maybe we could offer a service to other bloggers such as Jeff Jarvis.

Medion MD5909 DECT telephone

For any of you out there who might be struggling, like I was, to locate the instruction book/manual for the MD5909 DECT phone that Aldi sells. It can be found here. In fact the problem was a duff base station that rang with incoming calls but non of the remote phones could answer 🙁 I know its a bit humiliating to have to declare that I do read instructions some times…