Inveterate dabbler in business, travel, gadgets & life

Cambridge -UK – Open Coffee

Jed at OpenCoffee

Just back from the inaugural OpenCoffee meet up in Cambridge, UK. Organised by Jed. The event was in Cafe Nero on Kings Parade in Cambridge. A total of about 20 folks (Only two from the fairer sex, Juliette and ? Laura where did you get too!)  turned up. I was, of cause, easily the oldest there!

It was a good turn out of VC’s, Angels and entrepreneurs with a lot of new faces to prove that the Cambridge scene is still as vibrant as ever. I met Chris from audioanalytic, Adriano? of Hotprints, Peter from Broadersheet plus Laurence & Alex.

Pretty ideal for a first event and actually worked very well in the regular coffee shop environment (apart from getting told to sit down once by the baristas). I quite like the slightly anarchic nature of the event compared to the regular structured evenings that are the norm around here, and it works better than in a pub type environment in my opinion. I can see why the coffee places were so popular in the 1700s

Will be interesting to see where it goes from here. Apparently there is another newish event, CamCreative next week at The Arts so will go and compare and contrast.

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Icicles at home & away

Whilst in Les Gets I learnt from Thierry that icicles are a sign of a poor roof or defective guttering. Today, Sally spotted this on MY house here in Cambridge.

Oh dear, really don’t fancy clambering up a three extension ladder 40 feet and fixing this 🙁

I guess it’s not in the same league as this though:-

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Cambridge -Anglesey abbey circular walk

Today’s walk was a 17 or so mile circular tour from Cambridge along the tow path to Baits Bite lock and then across to Horningsea. We then ventured across Quy Fen to Anglesey Abbey to see the Himalayan Siver Birch trees resplendent with their jet washed bark 🙂 We returned alongside the lovely mill stream to Quy had a pint & cuppa at the Quy Mill Hotel before going under the A14 to return home via Teversham and Cherry Hinton.

I was experimenting with the new iPhone GPS application called Trail, this worked very well even with the iPhone stuffed in the breast pocket of my jacket! Once completed you can email the gpx file or send it directly to Everytrail.

Missing track

Problems are battery life – my estimate is 4 hours – although apparently you can trick it into shutting the screen down by having the music playing 🙂

The second problem is that you can lose significant bits of trail by the software automatically connecting broken tracks together. See the purple trail I’ve added in the image.

Definitely worth having the capability as my Garmin Etrex batteries ran out during the walk! Trail also allows you to view your Everytrail tracks. Overall pretty neat and impressive that it works with the iPhone in my pocket. Thanks Euan for the tip

Here is the completed trail with photographs :-

Cambridge to Anglesey abbey circular walk

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Happy New Year and our first walk

A Happy New Year to all my readers 🙂 Good to see that you are a person of excellent taste and recognise a real quality blog!

After spending the first 12 hours of the new year in bed with Sally we decided a walk was in order. Neither of us could face the annual new year swim in the river.

So we decided to walk the opposite way and go to Baits Bite Lock via Chesterton and then return via Fen Ditton.

Here is the route with photographs. The GPS is a bit wonky in places,  as I kept it in my pocket so reception was poor under the willow trees 🙁

Baits Bite Lock walk

Widget powered by EveryTrail: GPS Geotagging

In the process of trying to tidy up the GPS traces I stumbled across TrailRunner which looks quite interesting and may replace the rather expensive Ascent package that I currently use. Here is a screenshot of it with today’s walk:-

TrailRunner screenshot
TrailRunner screenshot

Another bit of software than Euan suggested was Trails for the iPhone, it certainly pulled in my Everytrail walks pretty neatly 🙂