Road to Gold!

Slightly off topic but it’s my blog

Even though the London Olympics wont be here until 2012 did you know British athletes are competing in an Olympic event at the moment? Even better they actually stand a chance of bringing some gold medals home!

Athletes from 60+ countries from around the world are currently in Taipei participating in the 21st summer Deaflympics with the British team being managed by UK Deaf Sport (who are also on twitter as @deafsport and are giving updates on the games)

The British Sign Language Broadcasting Trust are covering the progress of the British team

The site has all the results as well as pictures and video (fully subtitled of course)

We have friends who are competing so hoping they bring back the gold!

There is also a series of short videos following the experiences of some of the participants

Our friend Beth who throws the hammer features in programme one (8 minutes in)

It’s a shame the event isn’t getting a little bit more publicity. That said the England Women’s Football team reached the finals of the European Championships and you wouldn’t really know unless you were looking for it!

Fingers crossed our team do well

Bletchley Park Funding

I’ve blogged a couple of times about Bletchley Park

It’s no secret in the UK that funding for the site is hard to come by

For some reason it’s not eligible for lottery funding or any of the government funding that goes into museums and galleries so relies on admissions fees and donations(IBM and PGP were some of the big names who recently donated)

So a while back I saw a petition on the governments e-petitions site 

“We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to save Bletchley Park.”

Details of Petition:

“As has been reported elsewhere, Bletchley Park “have two to three more years of survival”. The Bletchley Park Trust receives no external funding. It has been deemed ineligible for funding by the National Lottery, and turned down by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Please do not allow this crucial piece of both British and World culture to disappear. If ever an example were needed of Britain leading the world, this surely would be it. To allow it to fall into the hands of developers would be simply unconscionable.”

You can see the full petition here: (do a search for “Andy Parkes”   )

I’ll be honest I’d forgotten I’d signed up for this (the deadline was in May) but I got an email today to let me know that the government had responded

 

Thank you for your e-petition.

The Government agrees that the buildings on the Bletchley Park site are of significant historic importance and, although recognising the excellent work being carried out there, at present it has no plans, nor the resources, to extend its sponsorship of museums and galleries beyond the present number.

A number of things are being done to help Bletchley Park.
English Heritage, Milton Keynes Council and English Partnerships have worked jointly with the Trust that runs the Park to prepare a Conservation Management Plan for the site.   English Partnerships has acquired some parts of the site and will ensure that any development of these areas is planned and delivered in a way that reflects the important historical nature of the Park.  English Partnerships has also invested in the core site and contributed funds towards an emergency repair programme on Block D, the largest derelict wartime building in Britain, and is planning to undertake further substantial works to sensitively refurbish this important listed building. 
The Heritage Lottery Fund’s regional development team, along with the DCMS sponsored  Museums, Libraries and Archives Council in the South East have been in regular contact with the Bletchley Park Trust, offering advice and guidance on how best to put together a robust application for funding.   In addition, the Trust has now made a further application to the Heritage Lottery Fund.

In November 2008 English Heritage announced the award of a grant of £330,000 to Bletchley Park to cover urgently needed repairs to the roof, and in March of this year it was announced that Milton Keynes Council, in partnership with English Heritage, will provide a further £600,000 for critical restoration work.

I’m not sure if this good or bad??

As far as I can see the government recognises it’s an important part of British heritage but don’t want to specifically put any money into it. Most of the funding has become the responsibility of Milton Keynes council (if it’s a site of national importance shouldn’t we all be paying for it?) and that everyone else will “advise” on how to apply for more funding!

If you interpret this differently to me please do comment below

It really would be a massive shame if the site disappeared. The grounds are amazing and the story of the place is fantastic, especially if you’re a geek –they have a working version of the worlds first programmable computer!!

If your like to spare a few pounds you can donate from the home page www.bletchleypark.org.uk

Humax PVR Restarting

I got home from the office a few days ago to be informed by my eldest daughter

“Dad, the telly is broke”

The Humax PVR-9150T we have replaced an Argos re-badged box which we had no end of problems with

Apart from the fact it’s a bit loud and you can’t turn the subtitles on and off after you’ve paused live TV I’ve been pretty happy with it. Even if we do have 100GB worth of CBeebies!

The problem was that the box would start up, a message would flash on screen (something about loading or scanning, but too fast for me to read) and the picture would finally appear. After a few minutes the box would restart and go through the whole thing again

With the last PVR we had any problems were generally resolved by returning it to factory defaults though it was massive pain as we’d lose all our recordings

The fix turned out to be pretty simple

I unplugged the aerial and switched the box on. It come on this time but didn’t restart and the message I saw earlier was no-where to be found

On a hunch I went into the channel list and deleted ALL the channels and restarted the box again

It started up again quite happily and once I rescanned for channels it’s been fine ever since

I can only speculate that there was a problem with the data the box had for one of the channels

Sunday Sillyness

I was just checking out next weeks fixtures for the Sunday football league i play in

The name at the end of the fixture is the referee for the game. Seen who is in charge of the last game?

Foul! Foul! Foul! Foul!

Ok i know the spelling is slightly out but it made me look twice

Unreasonable?

Isn’t amazing how demanding some people can be, even when they are getting something for nothing

Google have introduced a channel system for releases of Chrome

You can subscribe to one of our update channels:

• Stable channel. Everyone is on the Stable channel when they first install Google Chrome. The Stable channel is updated with features and fixes once they have been throughly tested in the Beta channel. If you want a rock solid browser but don’t need the latest features, the Stable channel is for you.
• Beta channel. People who like to use and help refine the latest features subscribe to the Beta channel. Every month or so, we promote stable and complete features from the Dev channel to the Beta channel. The Beta channel is more stable than Dev, but may lack the polish one expects from a finished product.
• Developer preview channel. The Dev channel is where ideas get tested (and sometimes fail). The Dev channel can be very unstable at times, and new features usually require some manual configuration to be enabled. Still, simply using Dev channel releases is an easy (practically zero-effort) way for anyone to help improve Google Chrome.

 

Sounds like a pretty cool idea.

They also mentioned some of the new features available for people in the dev channel (release notes here) with one of them being a move away from the WinHTTP library so they can become more platform independent (Linux/Mac)

I finished reading the blog post and thought it was good post that communicated where they are at the moment

As always the comments on blogs can sometimes be better than the article and a couple jumped out at me

Blah blah blah. When’re ya gonna release a Linux version is all I care about.

and

This Article lacks a Linux version. You can help by releasing one, asap.
Cheers,
Torrid

I actually laughed out loud at that last one

It conjured an image in my head of someone writing a letter to customer services

Dear Sir

I’m writing with regard to your latest blog post about your Chrome browser

It’s not enough that you are giving us the capability to preview upcoming features via you beta and dev channels. Nor will I accept that developing your own implementation of the HTTP network protocol shows that you have plans to make the software available on other operating systems

The article is severely missing a Linux version!!

I demand that you release a Linux version immediately

I pay good money for this software……..

Regards

Can’t you tell it’s the weekend!

Happy New Year

First post of 2009!

Whatever you did last night I hope you had a great time!

2009 is certainly going to be an interesting year one way or the other so enjoy the ride

Today also seems like a good point to stop cross posting between here and the wordpress.com blog

If i know you could you leave me a comment (or send me an email please?) just to make sure everything is working ok?!

Mandatory Christmas Eve Post

You know the drill

Happy Christmas!!

Thanks to anyone who has cast their eyes over this blog during 2008

Whatever your doing over the next couple of days have a great time

This week I have been mostly……

(Sorry if you don’t get this…I loved the Fast Show)

Ok not quite..I’ve been mostly busy

After my week off I dived straight into an Exchange migration, I’m doing a mass Office 2007 deployment tomorrow and then I’m off to London on Wednesday for SBS 2008 training

If you read this blog and your going to London on the course later this week drop me an email or leave a comment here

Wired Magazine

If you have even a slight interest in Steve Clayton’s blog you’ll know that he’s a big fan of Wired magazine

There is supposed to be a brand new UK version due out early next year(reported by Steve here and his source here)

I try to follow the magazine on the Wired website but it’s not quite the same experience as actually having the magazine

So when I was out an about at the weekend I was quite surprised to see a copy of the US version on a market stall in town. It was a couple of months old but that didn’t really matter so I paid for it took and it home.

Obviously it’s very US-centric but I’ve definitely enjoyed what I’ve read so far and if they can give it the correct UK “style” and keep the content quality as high then I’ll certainly be subscribing when it appears over here!

Back From My Hols

I got back from a short break to Center Parcs yesterday. It’s interesting how technology becomes more and more a part of our relaxation time

Obviously Center Parcs has it’s own web and you can book your stay there online, this isn’t particularly new i know.

I noticed a couple of new things since we’d last been though

Wi-Fi access – Throughout the whole of the main complex you got free wi-fi. Great if you had your laptop with you or your phone has the capability. Why send post cards when you can email a picture?

Booking points – Dotted all over the village are small computer terminals. These allow you access to the internal booking system for planning activities and restaurant reservations

Wii Lounge – One the new activities is the Wii Lounge. You can book the Wii out for an hour and you and your family can jump around in front of a screen with a piece of plastic strapped to your hand    

(and they have a Starbucks there too…..is there anywhere it doesn’t reach?)

All this coupled with the digital cameras, camcorders, and MP3 players many of us take on holiday

What happened to a deck chair and a newspaper?