London to Brighton

Ok, so on Sunday June 20th I’ll be getting up at the ridiculously early time of 4am to get a coach into London and then cycle the 57ish miles from there to Brighton. It’s going to be a long, hard day and all I’m asking form you (the people sat at home doing nothing that day) is to sponsor me a teeny tiny amount of cash which will go towards the British Heart Foundation.
 
http://original.justgiving.com/bennoble
 
Go on. It’ll be the most exercise I’ve had all year!

Blog Entry

I wanted to write a longer blog entry, but this will have to do…

 

I just found ("re-discovered") a small supply (quite a large cache) of chocolate in my wardrobe. It seems to include a few things from Christmas 2008 and Easter 2009. All of which went off in either April or June 2009. turns out I don’t eat as much chocolate as I used to.

 

Still, I’ve got a box of chocolate eclairs, a tube of smarties and 3 toblerones that need eating up before the end of February. I’ll see what I can do…

Random Update

So I’m clearly back form my weekend holiday in Barcelona which was pretty good, but several months later it’ll be a little hard to remember all the details. Plus, since this is the last time I’ll be properly on the web this side of Christmas, I thought I’d do a quick update (the iPhone is very good, but writing blog entries on it takes a lot of perseverance).

I’ve now worked for The AA for about 2 months, having made the decision it was time to move on. I’m having fun again, working on a large B2B project with some good people, and I’m particularly loving working in a building that has it’s own restaurant *and* café. However, being stuck in the snow the other night wasn’t particularly fun.

I’m also off the singles market at the moment, dating the wonderful Beth, who probably won’t appreciate her Christmas present as much as I’ll appreciate mine. I’ll make it up to her at some point.

And I suppose that’s about it. If I’d have been blogging properly over the last few months, then someone could probably have made a feature film out of it.

Have a good Christmas, and in case I’m not back to write it before 2010, have a good New Year as well.

Longest. Bike Ride. Ever.

So yesterday (for the first time this year) I dusted off my bike, pumped up the tires and went for a short ride towards town. Nothing too demanding, just a mile or two to the barbers for a haircut. I was a little tired by the time I got to the end of my road (it does involve a fairly long uphill moment) but I did eventually make it. Total distance: 3, maybe 4 miles. I can’t be exact because the battery in the bike computer ran out and I had to cycle back past Asdas to get a new one.

 

That was all a build up to today, where my housemates and I had planned to ride about 6 miles into Sonning, eat lunch and cycle back again. We set off and had a fairly gentle ride down to the Thames, with only minor debates about the route. All fairly easy going and, being a nice day, quite enjoyable so we found ourselves in Sonning in no time at all. It seemed far too early for lunch, so we carried on riding along the river, unwittingly following National Cycle Route 4, which stretches from Fishguard to London, without at any point going through our new intended destination, Henley. This became clear once we’d left the river, passed through Wargrave and gone up several hills, so we stopped and asked for a little help with directions. Continuing on, there were more hills, and another moment of clarity struck when we realised we hadn’t really listened to the directions very well. We ask for more directions from another random walker and we eventually (through sheer luck more than anything else) end up in a pub they’d recommended in Aston (the Flower Pot, if anyone’s interested). Not a great pub, but we still had lunch and drinks before moving onwards and this time downwards, back toward the Thames, arriving at Mill End.

 

Mill End turns out to be further down the river than Henley, which was a great "I told you so" moment for me. Not that it makes a large amount of difference, as we still have to carry on riding. As we get closer to Henley there are gradually more and more people and it turns out that we’re riding alongside the Oxford boat racing team as they thrash Cambridge. It’s an almighty coincidence that we’re cycling through Henley on a Race Day, but at least now I can say I’ve seen one. Didn’t make it any less annoying that we had to get off our bikes to walk through the people that were there.

 

From Henley, it’s simply a matter of following the river back to Reading. There are a few places with "No Cycling" signs, but we only really make a token effort to walk the bikes for a few minutes before starting to ride again. It’s not as if there were going to be "Cycling OK" signs coming up.

 

So, our original planned journey would have been about 12 miles. Our new, random route across Berkshire and Oxfordshire totalled 31.7 miles making it the longest bike ride I think I’ve ever done. Before now, the longest I remember was about 24 miles across Devon, and my longest ride in recent years has merely been to Pangbourne (with a train ride back to Reading and a cycle home from the station) which is about 14 miles. It’s safe to say I am now completely shattered, but at least my body and muscles only hurt when I’m awake.

 

Happy Mother’s Day!

Delivery estimates…

"Your order is estimated to arrive between Monday, December 8th – Wednesday, December 17th."

That’s great, but just tell me you don’t know when it’ll arrive except that it will probably be before Christmas. That’s all I need to know.

MoD Grand Challenge

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7560300.stm

 

It’s not featured in the video, but any pictures of yellow buggys (known as the Moon Buggys) are from the Silicon Valley MoD Grand Challenge team – the team I was a part off back when I worked at Reading University. Here’s hoping they get some success!

Imagine Cup 2008

"Imagine a world where technology enables a sustainable environment"

So, the Imagine Cup this year is about the Environment and the UK Finals are in London tomorrow. Matt and I have used our contacts and previous Imagine Cup experience to gain entry to this year’s UK Final to see what this year’s entrants have come up with. We’ve also been told we’ll have wifi access so we can blog-as-we-go. I think Matt’s plan is to try and do some live video streaming via uStream, whilst I’ll take some photos to upload here. Obviously I’m not the most reliable blogger in the world (once a month isn’t *that* bad), but since Mark Johnston‘s gone through the effort for us, we’ll do our best to give some good content.

Till tomorrow…

Had a dream…

I just woke up from a dream which, since I remember it, I’ll blog it…

The dream was that I was back working in the Co-op in Ruthin, with all of its original staff (original from my point of view – they were there when I started). Tom (the manager, who became regional manager), Mike (the deputy manager, who became manager of Co-op Rhyl), Ben (floor staff), all of the till girls, everyone…
For whatever reason, in the dream I’d gone back there and was doing a part time job (16 hours a week, evenings and weekends) stacking the shelves again. It had to be part time in order to fit around my current work at Cogenta.
So, I’m back, really happy to see everyone again and it’s the end of the evening. There’s a new guy (who looks suspiciously like someone from Denbigh High School) and I’ve discovered that noone bothers to tidy the shelves up any more (I never really worked out whether it was called facing-up or facing-off). I start to tidy an isle, but I’ve only really just started when it hits 10 o’clock and it’s time to go home. But instead of going home, all the staff go outside and start playing basketball, which I’m crap at. At one point, I do this really nice slow-mo slamdunk and the ball still doesn’t go in. We laugh about it and the dream ends.

I’ll work out what it all means later.

Cogenta

I seem to have stopped blogging, so I’ll spend the next 24 hours making up for that. First of all, an update on my work status…

 

Just before Christmas, I threw my CV online with Monster, which resulted in a number of phone calls from various recruiting agencies and three interviews lined up within the first week. By the end of my first week I’d been offered 2 of the three positions (and I’ve since been offered the third but have had to turn it down), so I’ve ended up feeling pretty good about my interview skills. The offer I accepted was with a company in Windsor, known as Cogenta.

 

Cogenta are involved in producing reports for large retailers that quickly show them the competitiveness of their prices. Companies provide feeds containing the list of products they are interested in, specify which sources they are interested in being compared to (for instance Amazon or Woolworths) and then the Cogenta NetPrice Collection Service crawls the web for the pricing and product information. Further software then uses this information to produce the reports for the clients, or the information is used in NetPrice Online to allow a client to more easily search and analyse the data.

 

My involvement is obviously with the software development side of things. It is my task to not only maintain and develop the current version of the software, but also to make sure that we are collecting the information from the sources correctly, kick off the processes that match the information so that we know a product from a source is the same one listed in the feed from the client, kick off the processes that do the reporting, and help to develop the newer version of the software that will hopefully do all of these tasks better. There are also other development considerations that I might be able to write about in the future, but are under-wraps for now.

 

I hope to still maintain contact with members of my previous IMSS projects, especially the MoD Grand Challenge team who are entering an exciting stage of development in terms of both hardware and software. And despite working in Windsor, I will continue to live in Reading. I like it there.

Untitled.

A slightly crazy post, but I’ve told a few people this story and I’m sure it’s a little entertaining. And while I had plenty of ordinary fears growing up, like the dark and spiders, the one that I find the strangest was a slight fear of lampposts that still haunts me today…

 

You see, I waas very young when I was first introduced to War of the Worlds. My parents had the audio version on record/LP/whatever-those-large-black-disks-that-are-read-by-a-needle-are-called, and I don’t know which I heard/saw first, but I also watched the film. And in the film version the martian machines are introduced brilliantly.

 

A meteor strikes the Earth and people all around go and visit the landing site. They can’t get near it though because the meteor remains so hot. After a short while and once a small crowd has built up, a noise can be heard from the meteor – it’s unscrewing. A small hatch can be seen in the top of the meteor that is slowly turning and eventuallly falls to the ground. When it does…

 

…a lamppost comes up and starts to vapourise people. And ever since then I’ve had a distrust of similar-looking lampposts. Especially the ones that haven’t lit up properly and are glowing red…